Re-Thinking Your Social Networking Strategy

I have been apart of numerous social networking discussions. Some had to do with building an online presence to gain new fans, while maintaining a close connection with your old fans as an up and coming artist, and some had to do with using social networking to build awareness for your website or product. The social networking site that gets praised the most in these discussions (other than Facebook): Twitter.

My twitter kingdom is built around independent hip hop artists, journalists, bloggers (notice how those two are separated), and like minded fans. What I've noticed over one year of using twitter is (in the independent hip hop realm), it serves best as a mass texting platform between the artist, their inner circle, and the handful of voyeurs (mostly bloggers) that wait for good posting content. Despite the obvious, I see a handful of artists relentlessly pushing their new album, news/updates, and tour dates on Twitter-- some to the point of exhaustion-- and I always wonder: are they really reaching their target fan base?

Below is a fantastic chart that shows age distribution on various social networking sites. While I haven't signed up or visited most of these, I felt that maybe this would help some re-think the platform that they spend most of their time on.

In my opinion, targeting age demographic is EXTREMELY important, especially in hip hop.