—by Carl Gitchel
I hate Facebook.
But I need Facebook.
Addictions are terrible things.
Facebook permeates our society whether you are an active user or not. Ever since it made My Space irrelevant we have made it as big a part of our everyday lives as the daily newspaper was thirty years ago.
Some businesses—including several venues we play at—use their Facebook pages as their sole online connection with the outside world. They don’t even have their own websites anymore!
I get it, websites are added work. Small business owners work 80+ hours a week just to keep their heads above water. A Facebook post is a lot easier to blast out to the world than adding similar information to a blog page. It will take me about two hours to write this article and upload it to the website. I can put up a Facebook post in about 45 seconds. Busy bar owners will obviously choose the latter when they want to tell their fans something.
When I was running the social media stuff for The Red Hot Horn Dawgs a decade ago I spent a lot of time establishing an email list I used to announce upcoming shows and to send a monthly newsletter. Once such emails started getting filtered to “Promotions” folders (or outright spam,) it became a much more efficient method to move our announcements over to the Facebook page.
And Facebook is a crucial connection for The Dawg Bones for both our followers and outside sources who are interested in hiring us at new venues. As I was starting this post I got contacted through Messenger for a potential show in 2023! So I gotta have Facebook.
But Facebook has its downside.
I don’t know much about “algorithms” outside of their basic definition. But I know our online existence is dominated by them. All the Big Tech giants use them to affect what we are exposed to online.
Apparently these algorithms have shifted away from us recently. People who saw our posts on Facebook and made plans to see our shows are no longer seeing these posts. We talked to several personal friends of ours over the weekend who had no idea we had just played at the Hop Haus on Friday.
Our guess is we are getting bumped down the chain in favor of groups who spend money on promoting themselves. I get notified all the time about how many hundreds or thousands of people we can reach if I only spend $9 here, $30 there…this nickel and dime stuff adds up over time.
I have on occasion dropped a few bucks on targeted advertising here and there. But I much prefer the old fashioned organic approach. By which I mean free! I don’t plan to change this strategy anytime soon.
However, I need to adjust to this new reality. A band who can’t reach its followers dies a quick and painful death. Whether it means putting together an old style email list, a text messaging campaign, smoke signals or signal flags—it is essential to let our fans and other interested parties know what we are up to.
Sure there are other social media options. But none of them has the reach of Facebook. Not even Twitter. Facebook has embedded itself so completely into our very social existence that reaching people without it is a challenging proposition.
This has been mostly a rant on my part, but I am also looking for suggestions as to how to proceed. Is there an avenue I have not considered? Am I missing something basic? Do I have to feed the beast (pony up the coin for Facebook advertising?)
If you have any brilliant ideas, send me a note…yes, on Facebook Messenger!