Perception of music marketing on social networking sites

Abstract

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) like MySpace, Bebo, and Facebook are getting more and more popular. In recent years, music promoters have discovered those sites as an effective marketing tool and a significant amount of books have been published giving advice to music promoters on how to best market music on SNS. Originally designed as pure communication sites to enable users of those sites to connect and stay in contact with one another, the question arises how promotional activities are perceived by users on SNS. Focus groups and online surveys were conducted-in order to find answers to this question. The results concluded that music fans perceived unsolicited promotion activities in the form of friend requests as more intrusive than solicited promotional activities in the form of profile comments. Music promoters regard mass targeted friend requests as less intrusive than music fans do. The findings suggest that music promotion activities would be more successful if they concentrated on existing fan bases instead of trying to acquiring new fans by sending out unsolicited friend requests. It is recommended that music artists should build out the number of fans on SNS sites by the help of pull marketing strategies, and concentrate on fans who actively seek the online friendship of a music artist. Once music fans are given the chance to request the friendship of a music artist on a SNS site themselves they will perceive promotion activities more positive and will be more open towards them.