You might not need MySpace or FaceBook but you do need a mailing list

This is a great piece on HypeBot about how Robin Davey's band have given up on social networks as a way to reach fans.

Instead they've made their artist site and their email list the core of all their fan interaction. I'm not sure that I'd abandon social networks - I'd rather maintain a presence on all platforms and focus people back to a great and regularly updated website - but I can't fault the data.

Last week one of our artists made two posts to the blog on their site and then emailed their list. The traffic to their site jumped exponentially (1000% the day of the email, 500% the day after and 250% the third day). As you'd expect, it takes a few days for people to open and read email, but, also, over 40% of the people on the list clicked through and spent over a minute on the site.

You NEVER get that kind of traffic and conversion from social networks - it's just not possible across all the noise!

Read our posts on building a fan mailing list and start one now if you haven't already.

No matter how many fans you have on a social network, it is the platform itself that dictates how you can communicate with them, how you can post updates, how many words you can use – the connectivity with fans is limited.

When MySpace crashed, we lost that connectivity with 40,000 + legitimate fans and our 1 million or so plays became meaningless, it is nothing more than a number. When it comes to your next release, it means nothing unless you can reach those fans again. It quickly became apparent that we could not communicate with our fans the way we wanted through these means.

We have always maintained an email list and we realized that the majority of our traffic came from posting direct to our fans through this platform. We decided to stop updating our social networks and exclusively use our email list last year. The overwhelming response from fans was fantastic. To make it a successful two way tool, when we send emails we are not just plugging our latest release, we mainly communicate our feelings and thoughts on topics we feel our fan base would like to talk about. We openly encourage people to reply and we feature the best replies we get. It's not actually that groundbreaking an idea, and I have to credit Bob Lefsetz email list as an inspiration, but it works very well for us.

Read the HypeBot piece here.