Is FanBridge fan-tastic?

Qustion: is gathering fans, maintaining a strong relationship and managing them proving a difficult and time consuming task? Fear not, FanBridge maybe able to help, it’s an application that aims to take the guess work out of communicating with fans.

The contact management system allows you to implement sign up forms to all your artists social networks and websites, letting more fans sign up for updates, tour dates, and new releases. The service appears to have a keen eye for usability and under closer inspection a couple of good features, there’s a mailing list widget that can be put onto the artists social networks which could be helpful for gathering new and interested fans and their information, it also offers nicely laid out and detailed insights.

However, there are one or two reasons we at Rising Digital have not jumped in with credit cards at the ready, the majority of the FanBridge features seem to be similar to that of free platforms that we are already using. For example for fans to be able to share information with friends via fan-2-fan invites, managing all social networks from one place, interacting with fans and collecting fan information from anywhere, especially from gigs. These particular features can be found through Ping.fm, Scribble and pretty much all social networks. They also say they can turn promotions into purchases (although I think that’s a fancy way of saying you can direct fans to iTunes by using a link!) For a small online, music marketing company like RD FanBridge’s best feature would be that it could save time, and sure, the combination of everything in one place, not having a million tabs open and different log-ins, thrown together with automatic contact updates would save time, but surely it’s nothing that a well organised, social media savvy account exec cant handle! To sum up, FanBrodge could be useful for companies that don’t have an online marketing team, have little social media knowledge or no time to manage their contacts and pointless to those that do!