That‘s why you plug your twitter and maybe other socials (mailing list as well I guess, though less usual) at every possible opportunity. It‘s incredibly important to cultivate the relationship with your audience.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.
The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band [1] In March of 2009, the band went from a blog-looking thing [2] that collected email addresses to putting every social channel front and center. [3]
By November 2010, they had iTunes Ping, Twitter, an iPhone app, Facebook, Myspace, the bassist's twitter feed all being pushed in huge tiles.
At the time this was extraordinary, since many artists did not have a handle on social at all and definitely were not pushing people "away" from direct connection like this.
I believe the idea was to allow many platforms to get between you and your fans/followers, but to allow the fans to choose which platform that would be.
As the OP suggests, this can be a lot of work.
[1] Coran Capshaw, the band's manager created an early dial-up ISP company in Charlottesville that went on to become MusicToday. was responsible for major tech advances in live entertainment
> The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band
Judged.
However, on a more serious note, I new people who were -very- attached to bands/musicians based on interactions they had on MySpace and LiveJournal.
One problem with any online exposure in the modern web is that the bar from 'unknown' to 'trolls flooding your inbox' is pretty low. I do wonder however whether small time performers wind up trapped by this: When they are first growing they probably can't pick the ideal "Social Media" person, which may limit certain exposure and opportunities.
You don’t know the half of it. I ran a DMB blog and large online community. It was where I did a lot of my first web programming. :|
Whatever you think of their music, DMB and their fans pioneered a bunch of areas.
One of the most forward decisions by the band was to allow online distribution of their live recordings.
Being mainstream at that point meant it pushed torrenting of the live shows into the workflows of many people who wouldn’t have otherwise have been exposed to the tech.
It also drew the hackers of sorts to their scene who would illicitly capture and record IEM streams, mix them with mic recordings then combine them with stealth monopod videos to release bootleg copies of entire shows.
Only the Radiohead fans came close to the amount of enthusiasm in the DMB scene back then.
That said—if I could go back I’d pick Radiohead to follow.
Twitter has the same problem as YouTube. Email is a federated open source protocol and far superior as way of securing your fan base. It's probably a great idea for content providers to self-host a website with their videos on it as well.
I agree generally, but most people I know barely ever check their personal emails, pretty much just enough to sign up for twitter/instagram/snapchat/whatever's popular now.
Ok, then it makes sense. That age group is still considered very young adults, and most are still studying and not even exposed to full time jobs yet. As soon as you receive important emails from banks etc you start checking your personal e-mail regularly.
That works for very niche streamers/creators. Maybe with an older audience as well. If your a streamer on twitch or YouTube chances are your audience isn‘t older than 30. I personally don‘t really use email for actual communication. Twitter is pretty much perfect to communicate to an audience. Yes it isn‘t federated but at least you‘re using a bunch of different platforms to diversify risk.
Generally I would advise new content creators to be present on every possible platform.
I don't use Twitter but I tried it a few years back. It's hard to follow relevant content if half of what you see are people's re-tweets. With e-mail I can easily sift through and find what is relevant to me.
In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.