Facebook's 2 Billion Users: Why Musicians Can't Afford to Ignore the Platform
It's time artists stopped sleeping on the deep blue ocean of opportunity that Facebook is for them...
Carl Hitchborn
August 31, 2023
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.
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?
Yes, kids who want to go against the grain.
Kids who want to find things that other kids haven't yet found.
Kids who are excited about being in the game early and ahead of the curve before everyone else even knows how great the thing they have found is.
Kids who are at least 'early adopters', many of whom will also be 'tipping point special forces'.
When you understand not only that creating a 'tipping point ' is the prerequisite to breaking through (especially as an artist), but also understand the components that come together to create one, you start to see why Facebook is such an incredibly powerful platform when combined with the knowledge of how to fully leverage it.
I could write many books (and I have written one here) on how you can leverage Facebook as an artist, but my point of writing this article isn't to teach you that, but is instead to focus your attention on, and for you to be present to the incredibly huge opportunity that Facebook is for you as an artist.
I'll go into some numbers in a moment, but before I do, I want to share this graph with you so that what I say makes sense:
Another section of this same website highlights that as of right now there are around 240,000,000 people in the United States alone who use Facebook.
Yes, that is to say, more than 70% of people who live in the US are using Facebook.
I highlighted that insanely huge number of 2 billion in the title of this article, to show just how ludicrous the notion of Facebook is dying is.
2 billion people - this is not only 25% of the world's population, but it also represents 40% of everyone who has internet access on the planet.
This number is even more outrageous because it's not just 2 billion users, it's 2 billion daily active users on Facebook - a fact announced recently by Facebook's parent company Meta.
Let me get specific here and highlight for you an example, that I hope will help you to understand the power of Facebook in terms of being able to harness an army of 'tipping point special forces'.
There are currently approx. 330,000,000 people living in the United States.
According to Statista, as shown on the graph above there are 3.9% of US users on Facebook aged 13-18 - for ease of understanding, this is around 10,000,000 active Facebook users in this age group.
There are approx. 18,000,000 people who are living in the Greater Los Angeles area - approx. 5.5% of the US population.
Therefore, presuming that Facebook's user base is distributed across the US and even more heavily weighted into major markets like Los Angeles, it means that there are likely to be around 12,600,000 people in the Greater Los Angeles area who are using Facebook.
3.9% of whom are aged 13-18 - around 500,000 active users on Facebook all of whom are likely to be 'early adopters' and many who are likely to be 'tipping point special forces'
Imagine what it means to be able to find 500,000 people in a major market like Los Angeles who are likely to be people who can spread your art like wildfire.
These are people who also use other platforms extensively, as part of their overall social media consumption, meaning they'll also help to get your art moving on every other platform too.
This is just one of the so-many-reasons-why as an artist you should be doubling down on Facebook, not avoiding it like the plague.
Here are some other reasons why it's a good idea:
Facebook has an incredible array of placements on its platform - this is true for organic content and especially true when you're leveraging the Meta ads platform.
Facebook is the most 'social' platform of all platforms - you can connect with content, connect through comments, connect through DMs and your audience can share your content across multiple areas within the Facebook ecosystem.
Facebook is part of Meta - Instagram is also part of Meta, and as such, there is a deep connection between both platforms, this is incredibly powerful when it comes to leveraging the Meta ads platform to build what I like to call a Meta 'on-platform' ads funnel, allowing you to easily be omnipresent and in front of your audience in a way that is only possible through Meta.
Facebook has long-term retention of users - it might be true that not many kids are using Facebook, but users aged 18-34 make up 40% of the Facebook user base and once people start using it, they keep on using it long term. This means you can nurture your audience over the long term, allowing you to focus on key metrics such as lifetime value (LTV) of your fans.
Meta has the most advanced ads targeting - while other platforms are catching up, they're still not even close to providing the targeting capabilities that Meta has with their ads platform.
Meta is creating incredible opportunities for creators to monetize their content - through both the creator fund and in sharing ad revenue with creators. Meta has just announced a much lower entry point to get a share of ad revenue for creators, reducing the consumption time on content from 600,000 minutes to just 60,000 and requiring a creator to only have 5,000 page followers instead of 10,000.
Are you an artist who thought Facebook was dead? - what do you think now you’ve read this article?
Let me know in the comments below.
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