Wikipedia For Band Searches
Interesting article by Reuters discussed the missed opportunity by the music industry to capitalize upon searches for bands & artists that result in a visit to Wikipedia.
A typical search result on any of the popular search engines for a band or musician will display the artist’s official Web site, Wikipedia entry and MySpace page — often in that order.
“The interest that people had to go to MySpace to find out more about their favorite band is waning in favor of going to Wikipedia,” Yahoo head of programming and label relations John Lenac says. “In the last six months, it’s surpassed it.”
So while artists devote a lot of their online attention to their web site and MySpace, their Wikipedia page is often overlooked.
Yahoo data shows that those searching for artist information are selecting the Wikipedia entry link over artists’ MySpace pages by a factor of more than 2-to-1. The Wikipedia entries are also more popular than artists’ Web sites.
MySpace has been long promoted as the social network for musicians, and many artists or managers are unaware about Wikipedia and the power that it has. John Lenac comments that:
“There’s been many people I’ve talked to that didn’t even know they could upload a Wikipedia page. There’s been some managers that didn’t even know what it was.”
While I do not anticipate that Wikipeida will start streaming songs anytime soon the fact that Wikipedia has been able to grab search share away from MySpace so quickly presents opportunities to marketers.
Internet searchers (and search engine) obviously view Wikipedia as one of the top 3-4 authoritative sources on the net. If your company or brand does not have a Wikipedia page, it should. If you already have a Wikipedia page, then you can use the Notes/References and External Links section of the page to keep visitors up to date with the latest news about your company.
Filed under Social Media Marketing, Social Media Optimization : Comments (0) : Apr 8th, 2008
