Thursday, August 29, 2013

A Big Picture Look at Radio Brands and Facebook

Facebook will be 10 years old early next year.   It's almost hard to imagine a product marketing without the familiar blue square "F" logo and the Blue Bird in it.  Social Media has clearly become an integral part of the fabric of the world.  In the U.S. around 60% of the 130 million people living here use it (most estimates are around 180 million U.S. users now in a population of  315 million).

So how are radio brands doing in reaching and working with a media that's clearly become integral to any brand out there.   Let's take a BIG PICTURE look.  We'll use the Page Rankings from Quintly.com where you can pull out various categories of Fan Pages and see how they stack up.

If we start with the whole world and look at the stats:

Eminem with 75 million is at the top (if you take out You Tube and Facebook itself) and it goes from there to more artists like Rihanna, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Linkin Park are all above 55 million.  Some big brands like Coke, Red Bull and Disney are in the top 50 with more than 40 million.

There are lots of TV shows, some movies, a couple of sports stars (soccer) and some video game sites.  It's a very interesting list that's updated by the minute, you can visit it here.

Now let's take a big picture look at the Radio Station segment of all these pages:

The On-Line radio brands I Heart at 6 million and Pandora at 5.6 million. After that we have lots of radio brands from Europe and other spots in the world.   France and Italy have brands here with some pretty strong numbers given that both countries are around 60 million.

You can play with the ranks here.

You have to go all the way to #38 in the ranks to find Z100 with around a 1/4 of a million fans.  KISS in Los Angeles, BLS in NYC, WILD in SF, KISW Seattle, Movin Seattle, KUBE Seattle and WXPN Philly all manage to crack the top 120 and have 50,000 to 250,000 fans.

When you stand back and see the other countries and radio brands there are some interesting stories.  Hungry only has 6 million people yet the have a radio brand in the top 100.  Toronto has 3 stations in the top 120 - more than NYC?

When you stand back and look at our performance on the BIG PICTURE it's really a bit concerning.   If we took a look at the Twitter numbers the picture wouldn't even be close to the Facebook showing.  Social Media is huge interaction vehicle.  Our brands will never be strong in the digital new world we are trying to build a presence in without Social Media.   We have plenty of opportunity to grow here.

While some of the growth comes from building the message on-air to your cume a lot more of it comes from creating engaging content.  Being the 10th one to post those pics of Miley Twerking probably isn't going to spread the word.   You also have to be consistent - posting randomly when the mood hits is also a way to fall off the News Feed.

Do you have a real strategy and plan for Social Media?  We are still novices, but even in elementary school there is a plan and a strategy.   

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