Whether you knew it or not, Stereophile is on Facebook! The Stereophile Facebook livefeed is updated regularly with links to articles posted on the Stereophile website, new product releases and announcements from within the hi-fi industry, and entertaining tidbits on music, sound, and the science of hearing.
Regular updates began in mid-November 2010. At this time, we had approximately 290 regular monthly users. After over two years of continuous updates, the number of regular monthly users leaped up to 2,684, well over a 900% increase, and of all those monthly users, 41% visit the Stereophile page daily.
When we first started posting, the Stereophile team was unsure of what would be the result. Would more people buy Attention Screen CDs? Would we get more members to our forums? Or would we just be totally ignored?
Over time, we developed a posting rhythm, highlighting all the new articles brought to our homepage as well as digging up old columns and equipment reviews, hoping to stimulate general conversation and passion for sound and gear.
The truth is, we are not really sure what positive or negative changes have occurred on our own website as a result of the increased traffic to our Facebook page. We tried a tracking schema where we measured the pageviews on each individual article posted on our website, before and after posting on our Facebook page. Tallies were taken both twenty-four hours after posting and one week later, but there was little discernible correlation between posting on our Facebook page and the number of page views on Stereophile.com. But these tracking figures become inconsequential when looking at our Facebook page as its own entity.
Within our own little corner of internet, the Stereophile Facebook page is now a burgeoning audio community, or as JA once put it, an audio club, where members meet to discuss the different articles posted on Stereophile and get to reap the benefits of the additional fun things we post, like this golden retriever rocking out to the guitar or this giant gong. Regular readers have become regular commenters, many hi-fi stores and distributors look at our updates as a news sources, and we are happy to inform of new product releases of gear we think is super cool. But what I like the most about our Facebook site is, as opposed to your typical audio forum where users can hide behind a username, posters now have their real name and image associated with the post. Hopefully this lessens deindividuation normally caused by the ability to hide behind one’s semi-anonymous username and creates a real-time face-to-face digital environment. One feels like he or she is actually communicating with real human beings when on the Stereophile Facebook page.
More than anything, and as it is intended, the Stereophile Facebook page is just pure fun: a totally brand new way for Stereophile to express being Stereophile, and giving our readers the open forum to respond in a familiar format. Members turn to our page for questions about Stereophile, where they can usually get direct answers from either JA, SM, or myself. We talk about music. We talk about food. And you get an inside look to many of the happenings in the Stereophile office.
If you are on Facebook, please take the time to “Like” us. It is another great way to connect to the larger audiophile community as guided by the content of our website and the exciting world of sound at large.
