Facebook's 2 Billion Users: Why Musicians Can't Afford to Ignore the Platform

I'd be lying if I told you that I've met many artists (or anyone in the music business) who understands the power of Facebook as a platform to build audiences.

There is a consensus that Facebook is long dead.

I recently posted on my Facebook page (of all places), asking the question: 'who thinks that Facebook is dying?'

Having personally spent time with over 5,000 artists 1-1 on Zoom in the past several years, I already knew that most artists were going to say it's dying, it's dead or it isn't worth using.

I was right, and ironically the post reached 3,000 people - I only have 10,000 followers on my page - and 68 people commented... a 30% organic reach on the platform that they all believe is 'dead'.

The idea that Facebook is dead is a isn't a new belief among artists, this has been their viewpoint for a long time.

This was also the case when in 2015 I leveraged the Facebook platform to build and scale an audience that saw my music company High Time take unknown and brand new artist The Hunna from zero to playing to 10,000 people in London in less than 2 years.

I've spoken about the strategy we executed publicly many times before, but to summarize, we didn't invest a single advertising dollar in any other social media platform or indeed any other advertising platform whatsoever.

Everything we did started on Facebook and our strategy dispelled many myths in an instant; one of the big ones was that 'kids don't use Facebook'.

As with every broad statement (and 'kids don't use Facebook' is one such example), it's simply a generalized idea designed to lean one way or another in a single sentence or just a few words as a way to summarize the vast majority.

It might have been (still is) true in a general sense that kids don't use Facebook, but the truth is that on every single platform in existence, there are groups of people who are going against the grain.

I wrote a long-form piece here on The Baker Says where I discussed in detail the notion of 'The Tipping Point' populated by the author Malcolm Gladwell via his book of the same name and while I'm not going to go into detail now (you can read it here), it's important to have a basic understanding of the idea to create context behind this entire article.

In 'The Tipping Point' Gladwell talks about the different types of people who need to come into play for a tipping to occur. They are:

• Mavens AKA as an 'early adopter' - early adopters love to discover things early, they love to go deep into the things they discover and they especially love to tell others about their discoveries. Further, if a Maven gets wind that the thing they discovered early doors is starting to blow up, it feeds into their desire to find more things that show them to be ahead of the curve.

• Connectors - these are people with an extensive and vast network, who at the right moment have the power to help things go viral.

• Salesman - people who can sell ice to an Eskimo and sand to an Arab, who have a natural ability to sell the things they've been told about or discovered to everyone they meet.

One final thing about this is that it's very possible that an individual has all three of these qualities in their personality and finding people like this is therefore incredibly powerful.

I referred to these people as 'tipping point special forces' in my previous article and I'll refer to them as such from here onward.

People who have all these traits will certainly be outliers, but they still exist in abundance and are very accessible or more they're not difficult to find if you know where to find them.

If the notion is that 'kids don't use Facebook' is mostly true - and let's group kids in this context as being aged 13-18 - what type of character do you think could be hanging out on the platform that no other kids want to use?