A lot of artists use only a couple of social networking websites to promote their music on, and they usually choose the ones with most users such as MySpace and Facebook. This kind of strategy can be very effective if you are targeting the whole world. However, by adjusting your online music promotion approach regionally you can reach much more potential fans than with MySpace and Facebook alone.

Alexa, a web information company, is a great tool for finding the most popular websites on the Internet. In addition to showing the most visited websites globally, Alexa provides also traffic rankings by country, by subject and by language. Although Alexa’s information is not 100% accurate, the service still provides an accurate enough overview of the most active websites. Using Alexa you can gather important information for optimizing your online visibility specifically in each country.

The popularity of different social networking websites and music promotion websites varies greatly by region. For example here in Finland the most popular social networking website is IRC-galleria, which is totally unknown in any other country, because the website is in Finnish. The most popular social networking websites that support English language are YouTube, Facebook and MySpace (according to Alexa). In my humble opinion it is very important to know which social networking websites are the most popular in the countries you are trying to market your music in.

For instance, if you want to create an active fan base in France it is good to know that Skyrock, which is the 25th most popular website globally, gets over 60% of its traffic from France, which makes the service the second most popular website in France. Another good example is Google owned Orkut, which is the 10th most popular website globally. Orkut gets over 60% of its traffic from Brazil and it is the most popular website in Brazil. This information is crucial if you want to market your music specifically in Brazil.

I can say for sure that this kind of regional marketing approach takes a lot of effort, but if you do have the time and energy I truly recommend it. It might be a good idea to first start with larger social networks and find out in which countries you have following and only after that start optimizing your music marketing approach in the potential regions.