The Death Of Tracking Pixels

I’ve been watching carefully the demise of social media marketing which heavily relies on third party cookies to track users everywhere they visit online and what they do. Well, third party cookies are being killed off at an astonishing rate and companies including Facebook and Google are feeling the heat as the fight between privacy and tracking rages on. This truly is the death of tracking pixels. Apple says that over 80% of FB users have opted out of tracking since they released their latest IOS update that asks users if they want to be tracked.

Tracking pixels (3rd party cookies) are doomed and this leaves big problems for companies that drop these cookies, as well as advertisers that buy targeted ads from them. It’s been true for a long time now that organic reach on social media has shrunk over time. The blocking of tracking pixels will make reaching active fans even more difficult and inevitably this will lead to worsening ROI.

How does this affect Music Artists’ social media pages?

The issue for artists on social media is this. Follower numbers on artist pages are far far higher than they would be for a normal business page. Take a look at Apple Music’s page on Facebook for example. They have 3.9 million followers yet Taylor Swift has 76 million followers.
Has Taylor Swift got 76 million fans? No! People follow her because she is a star and the posts are very different to sales posts on business pages.

So what’s the issue with followers?

When your audience is as diluted as Taylor Swift’s is, your ROI (return on investment) per user becomes tiny. With the algorithms social media use to get you to pay for sponsored posts it means your posts are probably not reaching the right people at the right time, and with such an inflated follower count this also means without FB users being profiled by tracking pixels the chances of hitting fans is being eroded every day.

Users want privacy – Don’t fight it.

Yes, it’s been a great few years for advertisers who rely on tracking pixels to profile fans but this is at an end. The people have spoken. They don’t want to be tracked.

Where does this leave social media pages for artists then?

Social media has never been the friend of an artist. At best it’s been useful. Social media tricked us all into giving them data (in this case your fan base). We all played along and did this and now they profit from it and give very little back.

The single most important thing to do is get your fans out of social media networks.

What other business doesn’t own their own customer list? I can’t think of any. So, first of all, never forget the importance of your own mailing list. Fans will sign up to mailing lists as long as you remind them to. But that’s not enough. You need to build a true community.

Enter Fan Club Apps: What exactly is required to build and maintain your own social media network?

Well, the biggest hurdle is giving the fans an experience that is on par with their current experience on social networks, something familiar and of the quality of the social channels they are used to. Most importantly something that you control with no ad costs, algos and any need for tracking pixels.

FanCircles does just that. We have spent over $3 million on building a fan experience platform that puts you in charge and provides a place for fans to be part of a community – A community of like minded fans.
But before you think this is yet another social network, it’s not. It’s a platform where you get your own app, branded for the artist and downloadable from app stores under the artist name. We sit behind the scenes running your platform and server and constantly adding extra features for both fans and artists.

So if you’re concerned about the direction social media is going you you can’t go wrong with your own FanCircles powered platform for each and every artist you work with.

by Kevin Brown – CEO