Focusing on quantity over quality of fans. This is a trap that many will fall into. DO NOT make the mistake of thinking that the more friends you have, and the more people you follow, the closer you are to success. Anyone can spend day after day in front of a computer clicking the ‘add friend’ or ‘follow’ button.
While a large fan-base is obviously the endgame, it is also a long-term goal to shoot for, not a short-term goal. There is a crucial piece of the puzzle that is missing from the term ‘large fan-base’- loyalty and dedication. This is truly what you are striving for. Dedication and loyalty to an artist or band or even just the music will be a stronger component in your overall success than a bigger, looser following will be.
When you are marketing yourself, your band, your music, and ultimately your brand, focus on creating a smaller group of loyal followers who will be willing to spread the word because they are dedicated to you and what you are doing. Instead of just shooting out updates to these people, work to create create real, lasting relationships and give them a legitimate reason to want to promote you. By building this kind of a following, it wont matter that you don’t have 2 million fans, because the 100,000 fans that you do have will be willing to buy everything you release, follow you on tour from city to city, and allow your career to last longer than those whose fans are just listening to you cause its something to do.
Essentially it draws back into the Pareto Principle which states that 80% of your income will come from 20% of your clients, or in this case, fans. We are a strong believer in this principle. For it is the super fans that bought the t-shirts as soon as you pull them out of the box, the same ones that pre-ordered the CD, the ones that bought advance tickets, and so on.
We see the same results with nearly every artist that we work with – the super fans, or “true fans” as based on the Long Tail graphic bekow. So the question now becomes, how do we determine and ultimately access these fans ?
We will have some solutions to this question in upcomings posts!
