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Social Media For Musicians: 10 Key Tips For 2023
30
Dec
Dec
Social Media For Musicians: 10 Key Tips For 2023
If you are looking to grow your fanbase as a musician, social media is simply one of the best tools you can have for reaching a worldwide audience. We look at social media for musicians: 10 key tips for 2023!
You might think you can do without focusing on social media marketing in your music career, but in 2023 it’s pretty much non-negotiable.
If you want to reach a wider audience, you need to understand how social media for musicians works. The incredible positives of being able to reach out to anyone in the world, no matter how far away they are cannot be ignored.
Social media in the music industry is necessary for 2023 because you need the leverage. And it’s very rare that music alone builds that leverage anymore. Attention is everything. Building and maintaining a strong social media presence is how you can get your new music in front of more followers.
For me, it’s all about structuring the processes for creating content so you don’t burn out as easily and it’s manageable. When you start seeing growth on social media platforms, it becomes much easier to continue and promote your music online.
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So what are you actually supposed to do to grow on social media as a musician? Here are our top social media marketing tips for musicians in 2023!
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Social Media For Musicians: 10 Key Tips For 2023
1. Choose Your Social Media Channels
Choosing the right social media platform for musicians is critical to success.
A big mistake that solo artists and musicians make is spreading themselves too thin. They try and tackle ALL platforms at once when in reality it’s much better to tackle 1 or 2 platforms properly instead of 6 or 7 poorly.
It also helps if your audience is focused in one or two key locations instead of spread out. Using fewer platforms will give you much more breathing room, stop you from feeling burnt out, allow you to spend less time overall managing social media, and more time creating music.
The best social media platforms for musicians are the ones that you are the most comfortable with and where your ideal audience is hanging out.
Choose MAX one or two platforms. You don’t have the time to dedicate to more properly. Research Instagram for musicians, TikTok, and YouTube and work out what works best for you. Those are the three best social media platforms for musicians that I recommend you focus on in 2023. Facebook has a rapidly decreasing organic reach and Twitter isn’t really that great for musicians.
YouTube takes a lot of effort as a content creator and your content output is going to be lower, to begin with. It can be fruitful though as a video sharing platform if you can crack search engine optimization and the YouTube algorithm. If you are going to publish cover songs as part of your strategy, you can get great organic reach on YouTube.
The same goes for Instagram and TikTok. Be sure to use the right music hashtags when you upload videos!
*If you are looking to become a full-time musician, level up your social media following and monetise your music? Join the Collision BACKSTAGE community HERE!
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Grow a community online that supports your music and work as an artist and awesome human.
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Build credibility as a drummer in your space and genre so you can book more projects.
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Start monetizing your skills, gifts, and hard work so you can make music your main thing.
2. Know Your Demographic
One of the biggest mistakes that new artists make is trying to target everyone.
It’s a great idea in theory, but it’s actually impossible to do it effectively. You can’t make music for everyone. Most people don’t even listen to music like yours, so why would they buy it?
Instead, you should focus on knowing exactly who your target audience is and creating content specifically for them.
This may seem scary at first. It’s a lot easier to just say “everyone” than to narrow down who you want to reach—but once you get started, we promise it’ll be easier than you think.
3. Be Serious with Social Media Marketing
Another tip we had to include in social media for musicians: 10 key tips for 2023 is that you have to take this seriously. Yes, as seriously as your job.
If you don’t, you will get left behind whilst you see others getting the reach you want.
To be honest, 99% of musicians are aware that they need to adopt modern social media strategies if they want their music career to take off.
But there’s a difference between being aware of it and actually taking action.
One of the biggest reasons why musicians fail is because they don’t take music marketing seriously and see it as an afterthought.
The music business is way too competitive to operate this way.
4. Understand How Data & Algorithm Works On Social Media Sites
Okay, it’s time to talk about the algorithm on social media platforms. Social media for musicians not as complicated as you might think. But it’s really important that you really understand what a given social media platform looks for when deciding what content to show, and what content not to show.
In short: an algorithm chooses to show your content over other people’s down to historical data of previous posts and the retention and engagement of the current post. So what does this mean? It can sometimes help to play a little game. Load up Instagram now. Have a look at the top 3 posts on your feed, and maybe even what stories are showing up first. Why are you seeing them? Really analyze what it is about that content and your own behavior that has caused this content to be pushed in front of your own eyes. When you next post your content on social media, the platform will decide how far it will push this piece of content by how much engagement it is getting, as well as who has engaged with your previous content. Not only do you need great music—you need incredible content and consistency!
Social media is a game.
If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you. They collect as much data as possible about us and retain our attention as much as possible so they can sell more ads.
The more time people spend on the platform, the more valuable they are to the platform’s bottom line.
So yes we can talk about making good content, making content that gets engagement, encouraging comments, and loads of different things.
If there is ONE thing that social media platforms want from you more than anything, it’s this:
KEEP PEOPLE ON THE PLATFORM.
That’s it. That’s how they make money.
This is why they reward posts, pages, and content that people engage with, life event posts, anything that will keep someone scrolling, consuming, scrolling, consuming, scrolling, consuming.
5. Demand Attention With Your Content
Musicians have a lot to contend with when it comes to social media. There’s the constant pressure to make sure your music gets heard, every time. You’ve got the three-second rule. It’s suggested people give you only three seconds before deciding whether or not they’re going to continue watching or listening—sometimes less than that! And then there’s the instant gratification factor: what can you do to demand attention? Instead of playing in your bedroom, go somewhere scenic and do something CRAZY.
We talk a lot about ‘scroll stopping’ when considering social media for musicians. Your job is to do something that is going to DEMAND that someone stops scrolling through their feed and consumes your visual content over someone else’s.
6. Focus On Short-Form Video Content
Social media for musicians is a necessity, but what content should you post?
Micro-content and short-form video content is a music industry trend that is here to stay. Look at the rise of TikTok. We can’t keep calling it a new platform. It’s been here for a while and it’s dominating for a reason—it’s no coincidence that Instagram has been pushing its reels feature so hard either.
You need to find ways of attaching your music to other content. It’s not enough to just post entire music videos and hope for the best—social media is about consumption, and when you utilise social media right, it’s the most powerful tool you have. Right now, visuals are king for music TikTok content—attach your music to video and break this down into smaller clips for your socials! These smaller short-form videos are how you build engagement. When you are just starting out, your follower’s consumptions habits aren’t quite there yet to want to consume an entire movie about you; get them interested enough to watch 10 seconds of you first! Once you’ve cracked that, you can start moving on to longer-form pieces of content (videos or photos).
7. Take Time To Interact With Your Fans And Spread Your Message
If there’s one thing you need to remember, it’s this: all of your fans are going to be strangers before they’re fans. We don’t just find fans; we create them.
If you want to grow your fan base on social media, give more than you take. It’s a two-way street—you can’t just share content over and over again, shouting into the endless void hoping that someone will take notice.
You need to create real connections with real people. That’s how you really grow on social media as a musician.
Don’t underestimate the power of 1-1 communication! It’s completely free and is still the best form of marketing. Start conversations with others, take a genuine interest in them, and develop relationships. I can’t stress how important this is! Audio and video messages are super personal and create a real connection with fans—go above and beyond and show that you actually care about your followers, not just music promotion.
This is one of the main mentality switches that most musicians need to make in order to be successful on social media: bands and musicians are often asking for way too much without offering anything.
8. Show Up Consistently
If you want to grow your fanbase on social media, you need to do two things:
1. Post consistently
2. Engage with your audience
If you post on day 1, day 5, and day 17 that is going to have nowhere near the same impact as day 1, day 2, and day 3. It’s a no-brainer. To get the most out of social media platforms for musicians it’s about little hits every day, not big swings. This is why we break down our big single releases into smaller content to make sure we’re giving it in a digestible way to cause the most momentum.
Here are some questions you need to ask yourself:
Are you posting on a daily basis? Are you replying to every comment on your posts with something meaningful? Do you share content on impulse or are you scheduling your music content ahead of time? Is your audience returning? Or just liking and leaving? If this wasn’t your post or your feed, would you like and engage? You need to be brutally honest with all of these questions. If you’re not putting in the time and effort.
9. Plan When You Create, Not When You Post Content
We’ve all been there.
You have a deadline to hit, so you start putting together content for your social media accounts. Then 4.55 pm comes around, and you’re scrolling through old photos and videos, trying to find something that will do for a post. You put it up and then sit back and wait for the likes to roll in…
But they don’t.
And so you do it again the next day, but with a different photo or video—and still nothing!
This is wrong. It’s not about the deadline, it’s about the parameters of the creative. If we stop saying “at 5 pm I post” and start saying “between 3 pm-5 pm I create,” then we can start making better content that reflects what we can actually do. And this will help us build our profiles over time instead of getting stuck in a cycle where we put in even less effort because we can’t see the return (or any return at all).
10. Use Analytics To Understand What Works and What Doesn’t
Posting content is the easy part, but it’s what you do afterward that makes all the difference.
When you’re posting content after a period of time, it’s important to take a look at what’s working and what isn’t.
I want you to take a look at your own analytics and see if your content has been hitting the mark with your fans.
We all want to grow faster, but when you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s like you’re working blind.
After this, it becomes simple. Look through your previous posts on your main platform and outline which have the most interaction. What is it about these videos and pictures that made people want to interact? If you are able to continually review your process, you can double down on what’s working and spend less time on what’s not working.