Red Magnet Media

When creating your online presence, should you go where your audience is – Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks – or have your audience come to you – on your own website or social network – where you can control the conversation? This is a question we hear a lot.

Enter the Hub and Spoke Model, a digital strategy that balances reaching the most people and having the strongest interactions with and influence over those relationships. We strongly believe in this model and use it with many clients, because it helps brands and artists connect with and deepen relationships with their audience and reach the most potential fans.

Your Online Hub
At the center of the Hub and Spoke Model is an Artist or brand’s website or other online homebase, the hub of all of their communications with their audience. The goal is to get people to visit the website and return to it often, and once they’re there, to build relationships with them and deepen fan loyalty.

The online hubs we help our clients create have some form of two-way communication with their fans to deepen connections. Depending on the client’s goals and the makeup of their audience, this can range from a blog that invites reader comments up to a full-fledged social network around their brand.

Costs of Building Exclusively on 3rd Party Platforms
The other benefit of having your own online hub is that you often can control your membership data and your Terms of Service. When you build your web presence on another platform you are tied to both the administrative and popularity of a third party service. For example, recently Facebook upset many people with changes to their privacy policy. MySpace, a service that was wildly popular a few years ago, has experienced a major decrease in traffic. By creating your online hub you are much more in control of your own destiny. Also many third-party services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube do not provide the membership data (email addresses and zip codes of your fans and members). When you have your own site you can easily have access to your membership data.

Using Your Spokes
Profiles on other social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, are the spokes used to spread the word and send people to the hub. Updating these profiles and engaging with the community there broadens your fanbase and gets more people to visit your website. You should choose which spokes you’ll be active on based on the types of engagement that comes naturally to you and where your audience is. In our diagram above, we show several spokes to evaluate when making this decision.

Putting It All Together: How Linkin Park Uses the Hub & Spoke Model
We work with our clients to post regular updates to their social media profiles highlighting and linking to content on their website and sending people to that content. For example with Linkin Park, their hub is a social network that allows fans to engage with the band and each other and upload videos and photos, post blogs, and chat. The band also has fans on other sites like Facebook (over 5 million to be exact) where they also engage and post original content and links back to their hub. We’ll be posting more examples of driving your audience from spokes to your hub in the next few months.

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