By: Stacey Furtado
After celebrating the twelfth anniversary of the iPod being sold in stores on November 10th, we look into how Apple has fostered almost legendary advocacy among its customers, and delve into what seems like a surprising disconnect into whether that advocacy carries over into its Facebook community. Benchmarking iTunes against scrappy newcomer Spotify, there are definitely a few moves that the Goliath could learn from. As you’ll see in our infographic below, iTunes manages to hit the key marks in terms of messaging, with a strong focus on new releases and music artists in terms of the content they share. However, that content seems to fall on somewhat deaf ears.
The Crowdly platform lets us see what percent of a brand’s engaged Facebook fans interacts with it week over week. This is a core health metric on whether a community is capturing and fostering their core Superfans, or whether they’re falling out, a metric we term the Advocate Retention Score or ARS. iTunes, with it’s 30 million fans, has an ARS of a meager 1%, compared to an industry average of around 7%.
While iTunes may be the most popular kid in school, its ARS shows that it’s creating few meaningful, long-lasting relationships, despite being well liked. Today’s music consumer has a voracious appetite for discovery. This hunger has contributed to iTunes’ success (25 billion downloads and counting) as well as the fractured attention span of today’s music consumer. With top albums and songs changing guard weekly, fan conversations within the Facebook community are sifting through topics with equal speed. The new Pearl Jam release may bring engagement from a different set of fans than Eminem popular new album – leaving little chance at retaining those advocates week over week. While this partially contributes to the low Advocate Retention Score of the iTunes community, it is not entirely the cause. Spotify has seen success engaging and retaining their Superfans with a similar set of challenges, trending up at 9% in the past week. They’ve managed to keep their fans coming back to discuss a mutual interest — music – regardless of their preferred artist. We put the two music giants head-to-head in our infographic, detailing the nature of the relationship between each brand and their fans, who’s winning, what’s working, and what’s not.
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