A local band not so far away from me indulges in the practice of sock puppeting on Twitter.  They have created various fake fan accounts and use these made up identities to tweet sycophantic plaudits and praise back to themselves (“You guys are the best band ever” “your new single is the best thing I’ve ever heard” etc.).

Please don’t be a sock puppeter with your band.

The band then retweet this fake praise to give their real Twitter followers the illusion that they have a large committed fanbase.  In reality they have nothing of the sort.

All this is bad marketing practice.  Any form of deception whether it’s to your fans or the media is not a good thing and as we’ve seen on this blog before it can backfire on you.  For one you’ll get people like me (and all my musician friends) shaking their heads in disbelief ruining what little credibility you had. At worst, when you do play a gig and an influencer happens to turn up because of this (fake) buzz they’ve seen online, they’re only going to see that there is no buzz and it’s all BS.  Don’t do it!

Further reading:

https://fordhamcyberculture.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/sockpuppeting-the-ethics-and-who-does-it-harm/

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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