Why We Love ReverbNation (part 1)

Warning: This post is on the long side, and split into two parts.

I'd be willing to bet that most people who see us linking to our ReverbNation page have no idea what the hell it is or why they should bother going there. As far as social networking sites go, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube are obviously the most popular, and as you move down The Long Tail of social networks the rest are less well known to the general public. However, even though we've only had our page for a few months, ReverbNation has already done a ton for us, so we decided it's time to explain some of the reasons why ReverbNation is awesome and why you should really think about checking it out.

ReverbNation is a social networking site for people interested in music. Most people are probably saying "Isn't MySpace based on music too and like, 1000 times the size of ReverbNation?" True, MySpace is heavily involved in music, but it doesn't even come close to providing the kinds of services and opportunities for bands that ReverbNation does. MySpace does the basics, you can host a blog, post videos and pictures, put music on your page, and interact with people by adding them to your friends and messaging them. That's about it. ReverbNation does all of that, does most of it better than MySpace, and then does a shit load more on top of that.

Here's our list of the top ten reasons we love ReverbNation:

1. The Mailing List

ReverbNation's mailing list service, "Fan Reach," is incredible. You can sort your contacts by numerous categories, including gender, the date they joined your list, and most importantly geography. Let's say your band went and played a show in Virginia and it went over pretty well. You got a bunch of people to sign up for your mailing list and then the word spread and a few more people checked you out online and joined the mailing list that way. Now your band has a small following in Virginia, so any time you play there again you're going to want to let those people know about it. "Fan Reach" makes it easy to sort your contacts by location, just type in the zip code of the venue you're playing and then select a distance, say 50 miles, and any of your fans within 50 miles of the venue will get the e-mail about your show.

Being able to target your messages is really important because it makes the interactions you have with your fans feel more personal. It's much better than mass-messaging everyone on your mailing list just to say your playing a show in a certain area. It shows that you actually took the time to write down where each of your fans is located and care enough about them to make sure they're only getting the news that matters to them and not blindly shooting off message to your whole mailing list that only a select few will care about.

2. Widgets & Banners

ReverbNation automatically makes widgets and banners that you can add to your other web pages. If you look to the right of our blog you can see we have a music player widget, a mailing list sign-up widget they call a "Fan Collector," and we have a banner all the way at the bottom the page as well. The "Fan Collector" widget is actually another reason to have ReverbNation host your mailing list too, not only can you add e-mail addresses manually, but with these widgets you can turn any website you have into a mailing list recruitment location.

They also make it really easy for people to take your music and spread it across the web. If you look at the music player, there is a big "SHARE" button on it, and they also provide HTML so that you can link text to sign our mailing list, or get a music player widget.

3. Fan Exclusives

One of the keys to a successful marketing and promotional campaign is getting people involved and then rewarding them for their contribution. ReverbNation allows you to make certain songs available only to those people who sign your mailing list or become your fan on ReverbNation (which requires a ReverbNation profile). This allows you to create an incentive for people to give you their contact information and become a part of your fan base. In exchange for some free music you now have another person that you can reach on a regular basis. In a time where there are so many options for music out there it's very easy to be forgotten, so just being able to remind people about your band's existance is more valuable than you might think.

4. Blog Importing

If you're like us, you host your blog on a blogging site because it's designed to provide better services to bloggers than social networking sites do. However it becomes a real pain in the ass if you want your blog to show up on all of your profiles, because then you have to copy and paste everything again and again into each page. Not anymore, ReverbNation lets you link to an existing blog (so does Facebook, MySpace is the only profile where we have to manually go in and re-paste our blog entry...BOO MySpace).

All you have to do to make ReverbNation mirror your existing blog is type in the URL of your blog's RSS feed, then ReverbNation will automatically pick up your new posts and enter them into the blog in your profile on their site. Go check it out, I haven't typed a single thing into our blog on ReverbNation, but it still has all of these entries.

5. Stat Tracking & Charts

ReverbNation tracks a ton of stats for you, I would try to name them all but the list would get long fast. The point is that it gives you a very good picture of where you're making waves online, so you can tell which promotional strategies are working, which ones aren't, and then make adjustments accordingly. They also automatically rank you based on these stats among other bands in your genre, using what they call a "Band Equity Score." They say it's a measurement of your influence online, and it weighs in all of the stats they track for you to figure out how popular and influential your internet presence is.

Check back tomorrow for #6-10!