The announcement from the Specialist Media Show says:
“Who’s won: Rock Sound, an independent niche magazine for music fans, for their imaginative use of social media to communicate with their readers.
And Why? Rock Sound’s audience is 15-24 so social networks are the perfect way to reach and interact with them. As an independent publisher competing with IPC and Future, they have to seek out low-cost marketing channels.
Rock Sound have been on MySpace for years, but now the momentum has shifted to Twitter and Facebook. After a couple of years, the following for Rock Sound on both has grown to over 20,000. Even Obama follows them!
All the news from www.rocksound.tv is fed to Twitter, plus it is used for competitions, commenting on what the editorial team are playing and interacting with readers and bands.
Patrick Napier (pictured), Publisher of Rock Sound, comments “This activity has had a dramatic effect on our website traffic. Twitter and Facebook combined now account for almost as much traffic as Google - I expect social media to match Google in the next year. The social activity is a key part of our pitch to advertisers, and we’ve run a twitter-only campaign for Nokia.”
Patrick’s top tips for specialist publishers are:
• be prepared to invest a lot of time
• promote your social network pages everywhere you can
• engage your followers with compelling content: don’t spam
• interact don’t just broadcast.”
