I had a great lunch with a woman in one of the world’s most successful PR firms. We were discussing how PR is done in the new digital world. How people think that they will get everything just to hire a PR firm. She stopped her meal and looked on me and said.

–   Well you can’t get Pitchfork to write about you, if your social media looks like shit. Doesn’t matter how good song you have, or cool story. The social media shines through. Most of the times this is the part that the artists or mangers don’t understand.

And she would know. She has written several successful books about the topic. And when I look to myself it’s the same. A friend of mine signed an unknown band a couple a weeks ago. And what did I do. I didn’t listen to the music (mainly since my friend only work with bands in a special genre). No I went to their social media and looked on their figures and what they looked like. I guess several of us do the same.

And here is how I looked on it:

I went to their Facebook. Okey the band has the most awful logo there is. Has nothing to do with the name. Their head banner is a shoot clearly not done by a professional photographer. They surrounding is in a rehearsal room and they are standing there with their normal clothes. I guess the picture is taken just as a thing during a rehearsal. But it’s not good for representation for your Facebook.The funny part is some post down in the FB feed you find a post that they had taken professional photos with a photographer a month earlier. So why don’t use that? The updates on the page was kind of slow, they updated around once a week witch is really to slow for a facebookpage.

The problem was the posts also. All was about them rehearsing or recording. The things you really DON’T CARE about. Most it was “we are rehearsing the new cool song that comes next month. In the end of the timeline that song they talked about was pushed. Ok I looked how long the page been up they had been around four years. During these years they got up to 900 likes. Well the number is not that shows everything. You can have 200 000 likes but if no one interacts with your posts it’s no point. Rather have 100 followers and 1000 interaction to your posts. So I looked on the interaction, and here it showed a lot. Every post had around 4 likes. So that means the 900 fans doesn’t care about them.

Since it was so much just in the rehearsal room I thought about gigs. One was posted on Facebook but I wanted all gigs so I went to their homepage. The homepage was good made. But the gig past revealed a lot about the band. This year they only had done one show, last year just two shows. Not so active band. In total of these 4 years they had done eight shows.

So I went to their Spotify, okay it’s not part of the normal social media. But in this world it counts. They only had 41 listeners. 42 followers so their account was not secured. All songs under 1000 listening’s. But they had released 3 singles, 1 ep and 1 album. In comparison, they have released more songs they had gigs.

The Twittter was more active. They got over 2000 followers. Still they followed 2300 people. So a good rating they had done over 1400 tweets and was pretty active. But the same problem. Around 1 like on each tweet. But they tweeted every day. Still all tweets was about rehersing again.

Instagram, okay figure wise. Still it was less than a picture a week. The picture got good likes even though they were really boring just old live pictures and photos of recordings and sleeves for new songs.

Youtube well 9 videos, two official ones, 8 with songs and just pictures from the album. And one when recording (stop we don’t want to see you in the studio no more).

Youtube is usually the weakest channel for artists. It’s a pity since it’s the biggest search engine in the world.

So this is how I looked on their social media. And yes totally that Pitchfork would jump this even if it was a good song. Most of the time people think that it doesn’t matter what everything else looks like. But it tells a story. Here is that this band has been hiding the last years in the studio. Really doesn’t have and audience and well not so good of getting their pages to look good. But worst the pages was not social. It was about them in a studio. Nothing about the band what they like, eat, doing as a hobby, whatever would have been fine. Luckily my friend who took them is rather good on this so I think he will fix the problems.