False Metrics And Your Band
Okay, so here’s a big one — false metrics. A lot of people have really committed themselves to these bad boys but don’t understand that false metrics only hurt your band. For the uninitiated, false metrics are essentially fake followers. They are built up by doing things like buying Facebook followers or following a bunch of people on Instagram with the hopes that they will follow you back and then unfollowing all of the ones who don’t follow you. There are lots of other ways to do it, and it’s starting to get to a point where there are no numbers that promoters rely on, so they are returning to word of mouth which can be even harder to control than social media. This has been an issue for years, and it’s one that is quite literally ruining the way that Billboard charts work. Yeah. It’s that bad. We’re going to dig into it. Some, or all of this might not apply to you, and if that’s the case, awesome, but it’s important to keep your eyes open for it because it will turn around and fuck you over.
How do false metrics work though? Everyone wants more followers, likes or whatever, so how you make sure that you are getting real likes and followers and not things that artificially inflate your numbers? Well it’s hard, but you need to keep delivering quality content that actually matters to people. This is a big part of why I preach to boost for ‘awareness’ rather than sales when promoting posts on social media. This means that you are promoting your brand over the long term rather than your presence on an individual platform. This also radically reduces the number of false followers. I’m not saying everyone needs to be super engaged or a part of the whole shindig, but you do need people who are at least interested in your genre and who you didn’t trick into following. The same goes for begging people to follow or click ‘going’ to an event. At that point you’re just making groups and industry people think you are popping off when you’re not, you’re just hurting the cause.
Of course there are a lot of infuriating aspects of this, not the least of which is that Facebook really encouraged boosting of false metrics at different points in its life cycle. Remember when Facebook ads first came out and they told you that you needed to buy Facebook likes in order to maximize your fans? Yeah. About that. This is again why it’s much more important to invest in your brand. If you have a strong brand then you literally don’t need to worry because the people who follow your brand will follow you from platform to platform. If you want to look at a classic bands current clout and marketing ability just look at their Instagram presence relative to their Facebook. If they are posting regularly on Instagram but have few followers, that means the brand isn’t where it needs to be. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — you are day trading for attention, you need to play the social media game with that in mind.
Here’s the thing, social media platforms aren’t your friend. They are important to use and they are key for brand growth for your band, but they don’t have your best interests at heart. They want to give you a tool to grow not your brand, but your presence on their platform. They want to monetize your presence as much as possible. This is important to think about in every step of your bands career. It’s important to realize that bands with decent fanbases don’t always see that convert to actual likes and follows. It’s funny, but you can see a band with 20,000 likes draw no one to a show and then a band with half the online following bring dozens. This is a tale as old as time (And by time I mean, since like 2009) and a huge part of what makes live music such an interesting and crazy thing. That’s not only for live music though. Thee are also major bands who have small followings, or even bands with small followings who get signed. This always raises an eyebrow for me but there’s usually a reason behind it.
What a lot of it boils down to is one simple fact, what we are selling is not a brand. What we are selling is music. Social media presence and the brand and all that stuff is really just following through on that, it’s facilitating your ability to spread the music. The thing is though you can’t bank on it. You can’t expect to be like Thou, a band with no social media presence and a very retro looking website who manage to make a fair bit of money on tour and get cool opportunities and releases. That’s an exception , not the rule. If you are trying to concretely grow you need to embrace what the online presence can do for you and how it’s going to have a larger impact on your scene in the long term. But again, if you don’t have the music, and if you don’t appreciate that the music is what we are trying to sell here then you are pretty much finished before you even began. This is why people don’t come to your shows even if everything else is sick and why people will go see one local band with terrible online presence and not another.
So be careful with who you get to like your page and how. It’s never as straightforward as you would hope it would be. It’s not an easy game, it’s not a game everyone fully understands ,and the odds are that the social media gods are already plotting against us trying to avoid false metrics. Everything is about finances and cracking through the murk in order to maximize profit. This isn’t easy or fun, it’s just the way it is,. Yeah it’s nefarious, but you can either bitch about it or you can do your best to get some cool art shared with the world given the FREE tools that we have found ourselves lucky enough to be blessed with in 2018.