A Word About Social Media and Other Platforms

Thanks to everyone who participated in our recent Bluesky survey. Your responses were helpful, and they lead naturally to another question we're asking this week.

Over the years, we've taken a different approach to social media than many publishers. It's not that we don't see its value. Social media works especially well when the person is the destination—a musician, writer or other personality whose followers want to hear directly from them.

All About Jazz is a little different. We're the destination. We want you to come here to read an article, discover a musician, find a concert, listen to music, join a conversation, explore a Musician's Orbit or simply stumble across something you didn't know about five minutes ago.

Think about it this way: Facebook isn't spending its time and money creating content for All About Jazz in hopes that you'll leave our website and spend more time on Facebook. :-) Yet for years, publishers have done essentially the reverse—creating content and building audiences on platforms they don't own, hoping some of those people eventually find their way back.

That doesn't mean every outside platform has to drive traffic to be worthwhile. We post this newsletter to Substack every week, and while it hasn't sent many readers our way, we like having a second home for it beyond All About Jazz. Our newsletters document what we're building, changing and thinking about from week to week, and there's value in preserving that record in more than one place.

That's why we'd rather put most of our energy into building All About Jazz and Jazz Near You while using other platforms when they serve a useful purpose. If social media helps someone discover AAJ and brings them here, we're interested.

Which brings us to LinkedIn. We're considering whether it might be useful for reaching people in and around the jazz community, but first we'd like to hear from you, so...

Do you use LinkedIn to discover jazz news?

It's another one-question survey, so if you have a few seconds, please weigh in. We're deciding whether to become more active on LinkedIn with articles and posts, and your feedback will help us make that decision.

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Posted to Publisher's Desk IN THE All About Jazz GROUP
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