Even if you have a video go viral, it doesn’t stop there. There are things you want to do to capitalize on this momentum and keep it going for as long as you can.

Whether you’re still trying to build traction for yourself on social media or you find yourself on the cusp of a viral moment on social media, here are some points to do and consider. It’s always good to keep these points in the back of your mind so you’re ready when it happens.

1. Like and respond to comments to keep engagement up.

 
It may be a chore but try and respond to as many comments as you can. You don’t need to sit there all day but be sure to check in periodically to engage with your fans. Just be warned that there will be negative comments sprinkled in. Also, review any flagged comments on TikTok or Instagram. I often find positive comments get trapped there too. Lastly, consider going live on the platform where your video is going viral to engage with new potential fans in real-time.

2. Put ad money behind videos that are taking off organically.

 
This is the best time to invest money in social media ads since the viral video is shown to be effective in gaining attention and hitting a chord with viewers. You don’t need to spend anything too crazy. If you have the funds, a couple hundred dollars would be more than enough fuel to add the fire.

3. Pin the viral video to the top of your profile.

 
You always want to make sure to keep your top-performing videos on the top of your profiles. Whether it’s Instagram or TikTok, pin the best ones as you go to make sure new potential fans can easily find them so they’re more likely to follow you.

4. Keep posting more videos!

 
Getting the algorithm to consistently push out your video to non-followers is like catching a wave in surfing. Post another video with the same song within a day or two. No need to overdo it and post multiple videos in a day. Try a different verse or the same verse in a different location.

5. Study the viral video and experiment.

 
See if there’s anything about the video that may have triggered something for the viewers. Was it the second verse of your song that was used? Was it something you wore or the location of the video? Get a feel for what viewers are responding to and be willing to switch things up.

6. Mix up the types of content.

 
With this video going viral, it’s going to attract new followers who are just learning about you for the first time. This is a great opportunity to get a bit deeper about who you are, show your personality and introduce other songs and videos. Focus on engagement/nurture type of content or “middle funnel content”.

If you read my campaign breakdown where we had a few viral videos, you can see that we tried different types of content, like an open verse challenge and created videos responding to funny comments. Also, the artist is big into fashion so we tried doing “fit check” videos that did well to entertain and deepen the fan relationships.

7. Need to be nimble and flexible with your plans.

 
Monitor the analytics and act quickly. Because the video for the first song went viral at the beginning of the campaign, I had to change and adapt to what was going on. Our entire marketing and release schedule changed so we could make the most of this new momentum.

8. Encourage UGC (User Generated Content).

 
Getting shares on your video will help spread virality, but the hope is it “infects” someone with a large following who will share it or be inspired to create their own video using your song. This could be things like a meme, dance challenge, remix, open verse challenge, reaction or review. A true sign of a video going full-on mega viral is if other people are creating content from your song and it grows exponentially as if it has a life of its own.

The best example that comes to mind to illustrate this is Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road where his memes eventually led to a dance challenge that exploded on TikTok in 2018. The song became a global hit that reached 15x platinum, won multiple Grammys and holds the record for being #1 the longest on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

You can potentially manufacture that next level of virality by paying top influencers, but that can be a pricey campaign. It’s also possible to have it happen organically.

9. Optimize your profile for the next step.

 
Getting views and engagement on your viral video is exciting. You’ll likely see a large influx of new followers and your other recent videos will get more love from the algorithm. But what’s next? You want to make sure you have a way for new followers to take the next step in this fan relationship. Your profile link should go to either your website or a “link in bio” site where they can follow you on their favorite streaming platform, sign up for your email list, shop for merch or see your upcoming shows.

When you attract new fans into your marketing funnel with your viral video, you want to have your marketing foundation set so they can easily continue down the fan journey with minimal friction.

Conclusion

 
Even though we have a better understanding of how and why things go viral, it doesn’t make it any easier to do. After all, there is a lot of luck and timing involved too.

However, I’m seeing more and more artists go viral by posting short-form performance videos on Instagram and TikTok. One of the artists I work with had a few videos go viral during an album release campaign I ran. To read about my breakdown on the campaign and see examples of the viral videos, check out this blog here.

The post Going Viral? Here’s How Musicians Can Capitalize on the Momentum appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Many independent artists struggle with social media marketing. It’s not easy to know what exactly to post to break through the noise, get your music heard and reach new potential fans.

I put together a case study based on a recent album campaign I did to show you that it’s not as complicated as it seems to gain traction on social media.

This album rollout campaign resulted in 3 videos I created to promote singles for an artist going viral. This led to Snoop Dogg reposting one of these videos to his 80 million Instagram followers and Erykah Badu sharing another video to her Instagram Stories.

The organic reach for these viral videos spread well outside our network where random, high-profile artists, comedians and celebrities even engaged with the videos. This was my first time experiencing something like this so it was quite interesting to see it unfold.

During the 3 month campaign that started with the first single release on 8/8/24:

• We accumulated over 10 million views for the videos promoting the singles across all platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube Shorts). The videos were shared over 120k times.
• Spotify monthly listeners increased by over 35,000 (25% increase)
• Instagram followers increased by over 4x
• TikTok followers increased by over 17x
• One song from the new album, What Dreams Are Made Of, was added to a Spotify editorial playlist with 241k followers and brought over 80k streams during this period.
• On Spotify, the songs on the new album accumulated over 288k streams, 90k listeners, 28k saves, and 15k playlist adds within these 3 months.

Although we didn’t go mega-viral, these numbers were still impactful for a middle-class, independent artist seeing success on social media for the first time, with numbers exceeding well beyond the norm of what we were used to seeing.

What can other artists learn from this experience to build traction on social media?

In this blog, I will share the full breakdown and timeline of this album campaign, how we tried to capitalize on these viral moments and key takeaways that you can apply to your next campaign.
 

Before The Viral Campaign

 
Before getting into the full details, I want to share some context on how things led up to this album campaign that I feel many musicians can relate to.

However, if you just want to dive into the next section, the key to our viral success was posting short-form performance videos on socials (Spoiler Alert). I wrote an entire blog on this that you can check out.

Like many artists, even those in the music industry for decades, we struggled to find organic success posting on social media and remain a victim to the all-mighty algorithm. We were stuck at around 20k followers on Instagram and 1.4k followers on TikTok.

For previous album rollouts, we kept things relatively traditional with long-form music videos and bits of behind-the-scenes content here and there. When it came to views and reach, our measure of success was reaching views over 10k on Instagram and 800 on TikTok. These are not high standards, but that was the struggle we faced.

As a millennial marketer, I’ll be honest and say I’ve been avoiding TikTok and short-form content for many years despite being aware of its impact. All the artists I work with are already established to some degree, so it took time to figure out a content angle that would make sense for them.

The inherent problem with our marketing efforts has been focusing more on activating/engaging current fans and hoping they would be the ones to lead new potential fans into our marketing funnel through word-of-mouth tactics (i.e. sharing traditional music videos on social media, using songs in their Instagram Stories or playing songs for friends). In other words, not being more intentional with how to market to new fans with how technology and consumer behavior have evolved.

Over the years, I have found this to be an extremely common problem for established and seasoned artists. The discovery potential with the algorithms on these platforms (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube) can be massive, but you have to create and format specific content that they want to push to their user base.

For the past year or so, I began noticing more and more artists finding organic success on social media by posting vertically one-shot performance clips with lyrics on the videos. This was my “ah-ha” or eureka moment.

I realized many musicians were taking elements of a traditional long-form music video and adapting it as short-form vertical videos specifically for social media.

However, even editing short clips from a traditional music video into a vertical format isn’t good enough. I touch more on this later.

For decades, traditional music videos have been the primary marketing tool for artists to reach new potential fans. The problem is no one watches full music videos on social media and the algorithms hate it.

I was able to one artist to buy into the idea so we decided to give it a shot in the summer of 2024 with an acoustic album of many of the artist’s popular songs.

We posted about 20 short-form performance videos and there was a good response on Instagram with a few of them. Overall, we did notice that posting these types of short-form Reels gave us more views and engagement than we typically saw by pushing it to non-followers. The cool thing about Instagram analytics is that you can see how a Reel performs with your followers versus non-followers and how many followers you gain from the video.

This allowed us to experiment further and get more familiar with TikTok, a platform I’ve avoided diving into for so many years. With this experience, we were able to do this campaign again, but with the new studio album.
 

Viral Campaign Timeline

 
Now that we have that covered, here’s a breakdown of all the key moments during the campaign. I have included links to the exact video to give you a better idea of what was posted.

Thursday, August 8, 2024: The album campaign kicked off with the first single release of Take It 2 Far. The first short-form performance video was posted on all platforms on the same day. The video started with the chorus, and then led into the first verse. It performed poorly, initially getting only a couple hundred views the first day.

Tuesday, August 13, 2024: The next video to promote Take It 2 Far, starting on verse two, was posted and went viral on TikTok.

Views for the first 7 days of Take It 2 Far on TikTok

Even though it started to tail off a bit, the algorithm was still pushing the video steadily for over a month and brought in hundreds of new followers a day.

For comparison, this is what we typically would see as best case scenario on TikTok before this album campaign started:

The graph above is for a video promoting an acoustic version of his most popular song with over 10 million streams across all platforms.

After the first couple of days, we were getting noticeable bumps in views and engagement too. Once the algorithm favors your video, it’ll push all your other videos to non-followers.

Tuesday, August 20, 2024: After about a week of the song taking off on TikTok, the momentum carried over to Instagram. Up to this point, we gained about 5k followers on Instagram and 5.6k on TikTok.

To keep the momentum going, we shot another batch of videos for the song in a different location. However, none of the videos for this single would ever reach the same heights as the initial viral video.

Wednesday, August 21, 2024: I got a text from the artist showing that Snoop Dogg reacted to his Reel and followed him.

Shortly after, he reposted our Reel to his 89.2 million followers on Instagram.

The video Snoop Dogg reposted to this Instagram followers.

Side Note: We have no idea how Snoop Dogg came across the video as it seemed very random but we’re glad it came across his radar. Because the video was going viral on TikTok and did not have the same response on Instagram. By the time Snoop Dogg saw the video and reposted it, we had FB and IG ads running for about a week already. It’s possible he saw the ad or maybe someone who follows shared it and was connected with Snoop. Who knows.

Thursday, August 22, 2024: After about 24 hours, Snoops’s video hit about 1.3 million views, 30k likes and 1k comments on his Instagram. We wanted to make sure people knew about this so in the next video post for the song, we wanted to acknowledge that Snoop reposted it. We mentioned it in the caption.

Friday, August 23, 2024: Another type of content we introduced was responding to popular comments with videos. The goal was to engage the new fans and show some personality to build a deeper brand relationship with the artist outside of the music. Although these videos didn’t go viral, some of them performed extremely well because of their entertainment value.

We also used this opportunity to make sure people knew about Snoop Dogg reposting. There were already people commenting that either the song reminds them of Snoop Dogg or that Snoop should be on the remix. This was a great tie-in for one of these types of videos.

Wednesday, September 4, 2024: In order to take this momentum to the next level, I felt like we needed to spark more user-generated content (UGC). The hope was to figure out how to incorporate the song into a dance challenge. Instead, we tried launching an open verse challenge for the first time. It didn’t do too well, but we did have about 20 people participate across all platforms.

Thursday, September 12, 2024: The next single “What Dreams Are Made Of” drops. We shot a batch of videos on a rooftop from a space we rented. None of the 6 short-form videos we posted to promote this song went viral, but it still had a positive response.

Friday, September 13, 2024: The second single was added to a Spotify Editorial playlist with 241k followers.

This song was originally supposed to be the last single before the album dropped but we moved it up in response to the viral success we were having with the first single. Because of this, I submitted the song for Spotify editorial playlist consideration a week before the single release date and thankfully it still got added. However, it is still recommended to submit to Spotify at least 3 to 4 weeks in advance of the release date.

During the 3-month album campaign, this playlist brought in over 80k streams. It was great this happened because we can compare streaming numbers for a song that got playlisted but didn’t have the same social media success as the other singles.

Thursday, October 3, 2024: The third single Can We Still Be Friends officially drops and eventually became our most viral song. However, the first video flopped.

Due to scheduling issues, we had to shoot last minute at night the day before the single release. I was not prepared to shoot, but we just needed to improvise something to get a video out for release day.

Not a strong start, but the beauty of doing these short-form videos is it doesn’t matter. You can keep posting until something hits.

Thursday, October 10, 2024: We shot another batch of videos for the third single. For the second video, I wanted to experiment with posting a video that was still on a tripod and had the artist sitting this time. The camera was handheld in all the previous videos and he was standing.

This video also flopped, but why? Was it because of the still shot? Was it the sitting? Or was it because it started with the chorus and went into the first verse? Although it was easy to say that a sitting shot, especially if there isn’t any camera movement, doesn’t make for an interesting or engaging video, we learned that wasn’t the case.

Tuesday, October 15, 2024: The third video we posted went viral and hit similar numbers as the first viral video in August. I wasn’t ready to rule out that a sitting and still camera shot could work so I tried it again. This time, I started the video with the second verse and that did the trick. Also, the reason this video also did better is because you can see his entire outfit.

I believe this video helped the next one to go viral, reaching the most views we’ve seen on a single video so far.

Thursday, October 17, 2024: We post the fourth video and it goes viral, reaching over 2 million views across all platforms and becoming our most successful one in the campaign.

Monday, October 21, 2024: We introduced “fit check” as a new type of content to experiment with. As a fashionista, this type of content made sense for the artist and it did well hitting 160k views. It even caught the attention of West Coast legend Suga Free, to whom many commenters during this campaign have compared the artist to during the album campaign.

Friday, October 25, 2024: The new album officially drops on all platforms.

Monday, October 28, 2024: I suggested the artist go live on TikTok and Instagram to talk to fans about the new album. As strange as it sounds, this move was more about showing the new followers that this artist is a person.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024: Because of the viral success of the video we posted on 10/17, we wanted to post another one with the same backdrop. Unfortunately, it was the last and only take we did in front of the house before getting kicked off the property so we couldn’t finish recording the second verse.

Since we only had half of the second verse recorded, we shared a 20-second snippet and it went viral, also reaching 2 million views across all platforms.

Thursday, October 31, 2024: We released our only “traditional” music video for “It Might Not Be Love” on YouTube. This was shot the previous year. For how much was spent on this music video, it did not provide a good return on investment for how it performed compared to the short-form videos.

We posted a short snippet of the music video on socials but it didn’t perform well. The mistake the first time was mentioning the full video was on YouTube in the captions and on the video itself, which could have potentially caused algorithms to derank it.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024: Erykah Badu shared the 20-second snippet on her Instagram Story. Although this didn’t really move the needle, we still gained about a thousand new followers and it was cool to see this as big fans of the artist.

Screenshot of the Erkyah Badu repost on Instagram Stories

Thursday, November 14, 2024: We introduced a new type of content called BS Comments where the artist would respond to negative comments. It’s our take on Jimmy Kimmel’s Mean Tweets where artists, athletes and celebrities respond to mean comments about them.

Thursday, December 5, 2024: Since the traditional music video wasn’t effective, we shot a batch of videos for the fourth single at a local bar. We posted the first short-form video, outperforming the clips pulled from the music video.

Wednesday, December 18, 2024: The best video for “It Might Not Be Love” out of the recent bunch was posted and it also started to take off leading up to Christmas.

Instagram graph showing the Reel performance for It Might Not Be Love.

It’s annoying that once you run an ad on an Instagram video, the performance metric graphics for ‘followers versus non-followers’ disappear so I can’t show previous ones unfortunately. But since we didn’t run this video as an ad, I’m able to share what the graph looks like for this video. Of course, it doesn’t take a data scientist to understand that this is the type of performance you want to see – views increasing from non-followers.
 

Social Media Campaign Costs

 
For this campaign, we wanted to keep costs at a minimum by focusing on building organic momentum on social media.

Even though we accomplished this, we made sure to push the album from all angles. In addition to paying for radio promotion and a publicist, we also put ad money behind videos that were gaining traction to add fuel to the fire. All these things did help, but all of the momentum came from organic socials from these short-form videos.

So if we’re just looking at the core costs of creating and posting videos on social media, including ad spend, it was about $1,000. This also includes a $250 rental fee to book a rooftop to shoot videos for one of the singles.

This does not of course include the cost to hire someone like myself to manage the entire campaign and create the video assets, but if you’re doing it yourself, this won’t be a cost for you.
 

Key Viral Video Takeaways

 
1. Going viral is often unexpected. You hear this a lot from people who go viral. In our situation, it was definitely true. We were seeing some success posting short-form performance clips for a previous acoustic album release but did not expect any of our videos to take off like the first one.

Because it is unexpected, it’s good to be aware of the action steps you should take if it were to happen to you to keep the momentum going. I cover this below.

2. Negative comments are “good.” As you become more popular, you will naturally have more haters and attract more negativity your way. Unfortunately, that’s the way our culture and society works now. But people leaving negative comments ultimately help your video in the algorithms. This can be viewed as a good thing as long as you’re not reading these comments or taking them to heart.

As someone who read most of the comments, I would say 90% were positive and 10% were negative. A lot of the “negative” comments were drawing comparisons to what the artist looks or sounds like to be funny or entertaining.

3. Luck and timing still matter a lot. The first time I posted the video for the first single, the numbers were doing what they normally would do. But the next video took off on TikTok only and not the other platforms.

The second video that went viral, promoting the third single, took off on Instagram and not TikTok.

Through experimentation leading up to these viral videos, I found that posting around 9AM PT on either Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday worked the best for us. The analytics on Instagram and TikTok showed that our peak active users was at about 4PM PT.

Sometimes you don’t know what video will catch with the algorithm. You just have to do your best to use the analytics to find the best times to post and keep trying.

4. Comment baiting in the videos helped. It’s one thing to ask a question in the caption as a way to encourage comments from your fans. It’s another thing if elements in the videos naturally encourage people to leave a comment. This could be from how you look, how you dress or any imperfections in the video.

From our end, it was something that was totally unintentional, but it worked in our favor. The artist is very fashion-conscious and can be a bit more… adventurous with his clothing choices so viewers often left comments about it.

5. Experiment with which part of the song to post. Going into this campaign, my hypothesis was starting the video with the chorus or hook was best move. Turns out that starting the video with the second verse performed best. Now, this may vary depending on the genre or style of music you do so it’s important to experiment.

Also, you don’t need to share the entire verse or include the chorus in the video. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of artists just share 15 – 30 seconds of a verse and have it perform well.

With this in mind, we tried sharing a 20-second snippet of a verse and it took off.

6. Social media success does not directly translate to streaming success and vice versa. Despite earning over 7 million views from all of these videos, we saw a slight increase in overall streaming numbers. Once Snoop Dogg reposted our video to his Instagram followers on August 21st, we saw a noticeable bump in streams on Spotify as shown below.

The streaming impact on Spotify after Snoop Dogg reposted the video for “Take It 2 Far” to his 89 million followers.

In general, the numbers and attention you earn usually stay localized within that platform, except when something goes mega-viral. What I noticed is the reverse is true too. If you get a lot of streams from Spotify playlists, this often does not translate to getting followers on social media.

7. You can’t predict which video will go viral. Initially, I thought if certain performance metrics were high enough, the algorithm would more likely push it to non-followers.

On TikTok, you have ‘average watch time’, ‘percentage of full video’ watched and ‘retention rate’. You would think these metrics are important to them since they’re highlighted in the analytics overview.

When I compared these numbers to other videos, I found that there were some that had better metrics but they weren’t getting the same love with the algorithm. There are likely other metrics that are taken into account, like shares and how many videos are created from your original video/sound.

8. High production and higher costs for video don’t mean better marketing performance. As an independent artist, a traditional music video where you’re spending thousands of dollars out of pocket just isn’t a cost-effective marketing tool in today’s digital climate. That’s exactly what we saw play out in this campaign. We got significantly more reach and followers from 20+ short-form performance videos that cost a fraction of what we paid for a traditional music video.

Most of the short-form videos I put together and posted were shot on a $500 camera (Insta360 Ace Pro is now $300, but there’s also a newer model), but you can do better with most modern smartphones, like an iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Because these videos can be inexpensive and simple to shoot, you can create more and have them edited much quicker. Because content is so saturated, it becomes more of a numbers game than having super high-quality production.

In fact, highly produced content can potentially work against you in the newsfeed as people subconsciously prefer more authentic, less unedited videos. This is why the short-form performance videos that usually perform best are often one-shot.
 

Conclusion

 
Typically, songs and videos that go mega viral encourage and incentivize user-generated content (dance challenges, lip syncs, reactions, reviews) and/or attach themselves to memes or events. For us, that was one area we weren’t able to capitalize on to take these viral moments even further.

Despite that, this was a successful campaign as a fully independent effort. Creating the right content to promote your release on social media doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.

Hopefully, this case study and campaign breakdown was useful for you. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out, leave a comment or set up a call to chat with me.

The post Going Viral On Social Media: Campaign Breakdown For Musicians appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

The days of free organic reach have been well behind us. Basically, ancient history at this point. Although the perception of how TikTok serves content to users seems to be more favorable, the complaints have more so been with Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta of course). To be fair, the YouTube algorithm doesn’t share your new video uploads to all of your subscribers either.

What can musicians do to overcome this challenge with algorithms? Or is it even the source of the problem in the first place? In this blog, we’ll explore that and cover a list of tactics for you to try and “beat” the algorithm.
 

What purpose do algorithms serve and how does it work?

 
I won’t go into what an algorithm is as I’m sure everyone reading is well aware of what it is, or at the least, understands how it impacts (ruins) your social media experiences as the creator.

However, I really want to emphasize an important point that gets lost in the conspiracy theory that platforms intentionally suppress the reach of certain types of posts (i.e. sales related posts). I touch more on this on another blog and explain what I believe to be the real problem.

Algorithms serve a key role in helping to provide a positive user experience on social media platforms because it addresses the problems of content saturation and low quality content. (No, I wasn’t paid by any of those platforms to say that.)

Back in the days, the newsfeed on platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, would show posts in chronological order. This was around 10 years ago before we had the number of users and content creators we have today. The more you would post, the more visibility you received. There were businesses and creators scheduling like 8 to 10 Facebook posts a day!

Algorithms were introduced in social media as a way to address the problem that we would see today… an overload and saturation of content. One of the goals of the algorithm was to encourage/force creators to only make high quality posts/content that followers would want to see and engage with.

For the longest time, the algorithm was a big mystery. People wanted to know how it worked in order to try and game the system or “beat the algorithm”. Although we didn’t know all the exact signals and ranking factors they use and weight it plays, we’ve had a good understanding of what the algorithm looks for.

In an effort to be more transparent, Instagram eventually published a blog in 2021 explaining how their algorithms work and have since updated it recently. This has given us a bit more clarity on how they rank posts and determine what gets shown in the various parts of Instagram (Newsfeed, Stories, Reels, Explore). More importantly, it has given us guidelines on what we can do to improve the reach of our posts.
 

What does it mean to beat the algorithm?

 
It’s important to first define what “beating” the algorithm even means and why so many musicians constantly seek out this information in frustration.

In social media, it’s being able to dramatically improve your organic reach to your followers on a platform for free and not having to use their ad service to get your posts seen. You can look at it as making the algorithm your friend. If you post the right video at the right time, you may see an outburst of views and engagement as the algorithm continually pushes your content to non-followers. I helped create a few viral moments for an artist thanks to the algorithm and you can read more about that campaign here.

This is particularly true when trying to sell something that would benefit you financially. The long, commonly held belief (conspiracy theory) is that the algorithm used in these platforms will automatically suppress the reach of these types of posts in order to force artists to spend money to reach their followers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true, but I arrived at a different conclusion.

I truly do not believe it is possible to “beat the algorithm” on any consistent basis, but there are definitely things you can do to improve your chances of getting better organic reach with your posts. Some of these tactics are features that these platforms intentionally created to help you beat the algorithm.
 

Tactics to improve your chances of “beating the algorithm”

 
Here is a list of tactics you’ll want to consider when developing your social media strategy and posting on social media if you want the best chances of getting free organic reach. It’s going to be a mix of things to do for more immediate results as well as for the long term. These tactics were not for a specific social media platform, but a lot of them are with Facebook and Instagram in mind.

1. Don’t publish “low quality” content. Let’s get the obvious out of the way. This is the low hanging fruit that everyone should be reminded of. Don’t post things half assed without much thought just to get something out there on social media. Quality matters! This does not mean it has to be “professional” quality. If you’re posting a dark, blurry photo of something that doesn’t even have a clear subject, don’t expect to get much engagement. If you post a busy, ugly graphic full of text, don’t get mad that the algorithm is shadow banning you. If the video audio has obnoxiously static noises and you can’t even make out the words, that will not get reach because people will scroll past it.

2. Ask or incentivize followers to turn on post notifications or add you to their ‘favorites list’. One sure way to get your posts ranked on top of someone’s newsfeed is asking followers to ‘turn on the notifications’ to get a push notification whenever you post. All the major platforms have this option to some effect. By default on Instagram, followers will only get a notification for some live videos. You can also ask them to add you to their favorite’s list which allows all your posts to be at the top of their newsfeed. Some of your biggest fans may have already done this on their own without you asking. I know I’ve done that with my top favorite artists. However, you may have to incentivize them to do so. Maybe if you did a random giveaway for show tickets or merch. Or you can announce a limited edition merch drop coming soon so “turn on post notifications for my posts and add me to your favorite’s list to to be the first to know before it sells out.”

3. Pay attention to what’s trending. Always keep an eye out on what’s trending on social media and in the news. Each platform will have their way of informing you of what’s trending. You also see search trends on Google. Whether it’s a new challenge or capitalizing on a story going viral, you want to take advantage of the increased wave of attention and try to ride it if it makes sense for you. This is also a great source of ideas for creating content to help build your fan base.

4. Vary the content mediums. The general consensus is that video content is generally more engaging than a photo. They’re both equally effective, but it really comes down to what your goals are with a post. If you’re trying to get more shares and reach new potential fans, then video would work better. Even a funny, motivational or relatable text quote graphic (for example, a screenshot of a tweet) can be highly engaging and shared. But the reason why you want to vary your content mediums (photo, video, audio, text) is because not all of your followers are the same. More specifically, not everyone that follows you is a die hard fan. Some may just casually know of you while some just like you for something that’s totally unrelated to music. This is why content variation and consistency is key. In the same token, not all of them prefer to engage with videos. Some may have a stronger history of engaging more with photos so the algorithm will more likely rank photo posts higher in their newsfeed. Because every fan is going to be different in how the algorithm understands their connection to you, you want to make sure you’re not limiting yourself to one medium.

5. Optimize your posts. Very simple and basic. Do your best to optimize your posts with a good caption that is appropriate, engaging thumbnails, include emojis, add a location if applicable and tag the appropriate people if they are actually visibly in the post. Never randomly tag people in your posts as that can be grounds for a penalty in the algorithm.

6. Send the right signals. Using hashtags, location tags and keywords naturally (as in, don’t force or overdo it) in your captions to signal what your content is about so that the algorithm can suggest your posts to the right people. These platforms want to use every little detail about your post from the text in the caption to the actual media contents to understand what it is about and who would be interested in that topic.

7. Optimizing your video content for a short attention span. For short form videos, you can optimize it in how it is edited by getting into the action quicker and avoiding long intros. If you’re posting a snippet of your music video, don’t start at the very beginning and jump into a chorus or the most visually interesting part. You may also want to consider doing things at the very beginning to get attention like a video effect and stop the scroll. This also means you are using text captions in your videos, which have become more increasingly popular in TikTok and Instagram the past few years now. Many people will actually watch with the sound off because they may be in the situation where they can’t have the sound on.

8. Post at the “right” time. Timing is everything. You’re never going to get it right every single time. With some trial and error, you’ll eventually get a good feel for what is optimal. Every social media audience is different so the best times are not going to be the exact same for everyone. But whatever you do, do not delete a post if you’re not seeing engagement right away. It’s better to leave it and post it another day and time. You wouldn’t want to make the mistake Noah Kahan almost made when he nearly deleted the TikTok video that eventually went viral. For help and guidance for how to find the best times to post on social media, you can refer to my blog.

9. Post multiple times. Depending on what it is that you’re posting and what your objective is, it makes sense to post the same piece of content multiple times. I wouldn’t do it back to back but I would experiment at different times and days. Because so many factors are involved, you can’t just assume that something doesn’t do well because of the “algorithm” or your content sucks. Also, don’t forget to give your content time to run its course. Because recency plays a role in how content is ranked, at least with Instagram, wait at least 12 to 24 hours until posting anything else after.

10. Try long form captions. It’s true that most people generally don’t read very long captions. And yes, a lot of the posts that I see that get tons of engagement or often very short and snappy, witty captions. But long form can work in certain situations too, especially for good storytelling, so it’s worth testing it out with the right post. Also, take into consideration that the algorithm uses the text in captions to help understand what the content is about so it knows how to better serve it to your followers.

11. Limit flyer-like graphics for promo. Although it can be useful to promote or inform your followers about a new show or merch, they traditionally don’t get much reach or engagement. One reason these don’t do well is because it looks like an ad with the text. Secondly, especially for show flyers, it’s usually only relevant to a small segment of your audience so it’s easy for them to just gloss over the post (unless you’re announcing a general tour with multiple dates). There are exceptions of course, especially let’s say you were added to a big festival for the first time and you’re sharing how excited you are. There’s no avoiding these types of flyer graphics since it’s still a staple that promoters and venues will create and use regularly. What I would suggest is to find a fun or creative way to use video to communicate the same message. This can be a fun skit or even a simple selfie-style video.

12. Do collaborative posts. The power of collaboration with another artist or creator is always a great way to generate engagement for both parties and increase reach while cross promoting to each other’s audiences. Maybe you’re actually doing a song with another artist and you created some video content to promote it. For something like Instagram or Facebook, you want to make sure you add the other person as a collaborator on the post so the post can show up on their profile as well. Be sure to coordinate this effort so that they can accept the collaborator invite. This will increase the chances that the post will get more engagement since it will be seen by both audiences and climb in the algorithm rankings

13. Stir up controversy. Unfortunately, we know that negativity, drama and controversy gets a lot of attention and engagement in social media. This plays well into social media algorithms but it’s not something you’ll want just for clout. It can maybe work if done in a fun and not so serious way.

14. Use carousel posts. It’s been well documented that whenever you post multiple photos or videos in a single post on Instagram, the algorithm will show multiple slides to your followers if they don’t engage with it initially. This means you get multiple opportunities for fans to engage with your posts and potentially help to boost your post in the algorithm. A common type of a post is an image dump where you just post a collection of photos, sometimes even random ones that all don’t go together. You can also do a slideshow type of post where instead of each individual photo being on one slide, you can have part of the next photo on the same slide so you have to slide to see what the rest is and so on.

15. Reposting viral videos. This one is a bit tricky. Reposting someone else’s content on your own account has become more common on social media. At least on Instagram, this is how many of us like to share content we like and not just repost to Stories. We know this works really well for engagement because these are proven videos that went viral after all. Anecdotally, I’ve seen posts that follow the viral video get a boost in the algorithm. But the issue will always come down to the ethics of using other people’s content for your own personal gain without getting permission. Most, if not all, artists I’ve seen do this will credit the original creators in some way but I doubt permission was always granted.

16. Encourage interaction in your posts. This is nothing new, but use your caption as a way to encourage interaction. It can be as simple as asking a question or asking them to tag a friend. If you’re on Twitter, let people know you’ll be answering questions for an hour or so. It’s something I see some of the established artists I follow do quite often. Other captions that encourage interaction include “caption this” or “wrong answers only” to go along with a fun photo of yourself. Maybe even offer a reward for the best response. One thing I will caution about is the specific language you use in your captions. Many years ago, Facebook and Instagram would limit organic reach for posts that asked followers to like, comment or share in the captions. I’m not sure if this has changed since, but it’s something to be aware of.

17. Respond to and like comments within the first hour of a new post. As soon as you make a new post, be on stand by and respond to comments as soon as you get them. Of course, this assumes you get comments depending on the quality and timing of your posts.

18. Go live. Going live on social media, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or TikTok, has lost a lot of its shine since the pandemic in 2020. Before that and the rise of TikTok, these platforms were giving creators a major boost in the algorithm which brought in a lot of engagement for live video content. The replays were even getting more reach. Nowadays, it’s still a great way to get engagement as people who happen to be on their phones will pop in to see what’s going on. At least for Instagram and Facebook, going live is the only thing that will notify your followers with notification by default. Plus, I feel there will be less algorithm bias since they can’t judge what the video is about beforehand.

19. Use engagement tools. Instagram allows you to add mini polls and a question box to do Q&As in Stories. The polls are great on Stories because you can see how specific people respond. That way you can DM them directly to follow up on their answer. Basically, you want as many followers to interact with you in any way possible, no matter how big or small. Whether it’s a comment on a post, a DM that you respond to or even a poll response.

20. Get fans to your email list. A good way to beat the social media algorithm is not to have to deal with it in the first place. This means building that relationship or incentivizing followers to sign up for your email list. To be clear, you still may have an algorithmic element to deal with using email marketing (avoiding spam filters) but at least you’ll have a better chance to reach fans directly. Start with the basics of having an email sign up link in your “Link In Bio” (i.e. Linktree) and on your website. Here are tips on how to build an email list.

21. Strategically share your interests. A few years ago around 2021, the Instagram and Facebook algorithms started leaning more towards interest-based signals in response to TikTok. I remember noticing more and more Reels were showing up in my newsfeed from people who I didn’t follow but were things that I may be interested in based on who my friends were engaging with. As a musician, there’s nothing wrong with just posting music-related content with the occasional personal post on social media. But as a brand, it may be beneficial to experiment with sharing other aspects of yourself like hobbies or other interests you’re passionate about.

22. Be careful with sharing links to other platforms or even mentioning other platforms in the caption. This is one of the more old school tactics or tips when Facebook was the top social platform attention wise. We were advised not to link out to other competitors like YouTube because Facebook wants to keep their users on their platform. They would de-rank posts in their algorithm when you would link out to YouTube to encourage creators to post the video content naivety for a boost in the algorithm. In a similar vein, you don’t want to repost your TikTok videos with a watermark to Instagram or vice versa for similar reasons. To maximize organic reach, post the content natively. Avoid mentioning other platforms with text on a video or in a caption.

23. Create a broadcast channel on Instagram. Instagram’s latest feature allows you send mass direct message updates to followers that opt in and bypasses any algorithm! The feature is called ‘Broadcast Channels‘ and it can be publicly visible for followers to join. When you send a message to your broadcast channel, fans will receive an Instagram notification and view the message as a DM. You can even create multiple channels for different topics or areas of interest (Music, Tours, Merch). As of this writing, it looks like most accounts should have access to it so here’s how to do it.

24. Follow your fans? This is more experimental but hear me out. The algorithm takes into account engagement history a fan has with all of the things you’ve posted. They also factor in your potential relationship with the person. If the algorithm thinks a follower is a friend or family, they’re more likely to show your posts in their feed. I imagine the big signal they determine this is by seeing if both people follow each other and/or have exchanged DMs. I’m not saying you should follow all of your fans but it’s something to think about.
 

Conclusion

 
Musicians and creators hate the algorithm as much as I hate trying to spell the word. But, my personal perspective on it is don’t get too caught up with the algorithms and let it dictate your life and business. You can optimize and prepare the best you can but there’s no sure shot way to bypass the algorithm. There are just so many variables and you can only control so much. Plus, algorithms are always going to be tweaked and there’s no way to know what has changed.

The post 20+ Tactics for Musicians to Beat Social Media Algorithms in 2023 appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Whenever a musician posts about tickets to an upcoming show or new merch, there can be a noticeable dip in engagement and organic reach compared to other types of posts. I’ve seen it happen firsthand many times. Does this always happen? No. Have I seen sales types of posts do really well organically? Yes.

The commonly held belief is that social media platforms will intentionally suppress the organic reach of any posts that involve trying to sell something to force creators to buy ads to reach their followers.

I hear about it all the time within my circles. I’m no stranger to conspiracy theories myself but I also strive to be objective as a mediator-type personality and a professional in the industry.

Although this line of thinking makes a lot of sense and it’s hard to argue against this belief considering that’s their major source of income, there is also another major factor at play.

As much as we hate big corporations and the profit maximization motive that drives them, it’s also VERY possible that typical sales-type posts are inherently not as engaging. It’s also not something people will eagerly share with others either.

The algorithm wants to get posts and content in front of people that will likely engage with it so people continue to scroll and get bombarded with ads. If the initial response to a post is poor, the reach potential is going to be limited. Presentation can play a role in this as well, especially if a sales post comes off too much like an advertisement or busy flyer with a lot of text.

There are definitely exceptions like when an artist is announcing new music, a tour or even merch for the first time. If you’re announcing new music with the cover art, chances are that’s going to do well. These are definitely sales related things that fans typically get excited about from artists.
 

Not all followers are paying fans.

 
A big factor to consider is not all of your followers are paying fans, let alone super fans that will engage with everything you post.

Getting someone to start spending money on you is still a commitment not all followers are ready to consider. It is like expecting anyone who shows interest in dating you is ready to sleep with you or get married.

If you think of marketing as a funnel, the part of your fan base that is ready to buy or take action is generally going to be much smaller like the bottom tip.

On social media, you have to consider that all your followers are in different places of the fan journey. I follow plenty of musicians that I would never spend money on and have no problems scrolling by their sales related posts. While with some other artists, I will buy anything they release despite it taking me many years to get to that point.

It is your job as the creator to make and share content that helps them build a stronger affinity for your brand and ultimately care about what you’re selling.
 

We’ve been conditioned to tune out anything that looks like an ad.

 
Another angle to this is that the average user does not want to always be sold something on a social network that is often used as a form of escapism and social interactions with friends. The mindset or intent of the typical social media user isn’t to buy or spend money.

For decades, we know that people tend to tune out to anything that resembles an ad. We go out of our way to skip ads or fast forwarded through them. This behavior has been going on for decades on network TV and it has not changed online or on social media. Honestly, when was the last time you shared a regular ad post on social media?

So is it fair to say now that sales-related posts (with the primary goal of getting someone to spend money) are inherently not engaging? When ads are in the form of funny or entertaining commercials, we’re more likely to tune in. Maybe the lesson here is if you’re going to try to sell something, try not to make it look or feel like an ad?

At the very least, I hope that musicians will consider that the problem isn’t solely the algorithm looking for keywords in the caption to suppress the organic reach. The fact is, we will never know if algorithms have been programmed to de-rank posts based on certain words or intent.
 

If you can’t beat the algorithm, just pay!

 
The best way to get more reach for your sales-type of posts is to buy ads. Many artists refuse to pay to get better reach and engagement. The frustration is understandable but as musicians, there are some expenses you just have to pay to keep your business operating.

After all, the business model for social media platforms is to build a product that millions of people want to use and spend time on so they can gather all that data and charge businesses to reach certain people with ads.

Here are 3 situations where you want to pay for ads:

• You’re trying to sell something that would generate profit (shows, music, merch, membership).
• You have a post/content that is performing very well organically and you want to boost the success to reach more people.
• You want to test content that is meant to reach new people to grow your fan base.

If you really don’t have the budget or don’t want to pay, you’ll have to rethink how you approach sales post and be more creative with the content. The best type of ads are the ones don’t look like an ad. I notice more artists and entertainers will use short form video to disguise promotion for an upcoming show as a fun skit or funny bit.

At the end of the day, you don’t see Ford or McDonalds complaining that they have to pay money for ads on network television or social media. It’s the inherent cost of running a business when your audience spends time on property or networks that you don’t own.

Remember, social media is rented space even though you think you own your profile, the data and the right to reach your followers for free. These platforms have the ability to delete your profile and access to all of your fans. It’s more reason to build your email list or private membership community and take full ownership of your fan relationships.

The post Are Social Media Algorithms Intentionally Suppressing Sales Posts To Screw Over Artists? appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

There’s a new social media startup that’s generating a lot of buzz due to the high profile celebrities currently active on it as well as some controversy. The app is called Clubhouse and it can potentially be the next big social media platform.

Clubhouse launched in early March of 2020, but I was late to the party as I heard about the app for the first time on 12/22/20 and got an invite the day after. Impressed and excited by its potential for wider adoption, I wanted to write this blog to give musicians a heads up of what may come and share my observations.

Although the focus of this blog is on Clubhouse, it’s really about putting this relatively new concept for a social media platform on your radar. I was literally clueless that a platform concept like this exists so I figure this blog would be useful for musicians to get a head start in case it does become mainstream. After all, it feels like this could be the next big thing, whether it’s Clubhouse or any other many competing apps.
 

What is Clubhouse?

 
In the app store, Clubhouse is described as a “drop-in audio chat.” Think of a virtual chat room where people communicate with their voices instead of text. No comments or DMs. In fact, there’s no text communication except what you write on your user profile. The core social nature of the platform is completely audio-driven.

Conversations are in real-time so it feels like people are actually in a room together. Users can pop in and out of rooms just to listen in as an audience member or get called on stage to join the discussion. You can even ping your friends on the app to join a specific room with you.

Users can create or join live virtual chat rooms around any topic. Topics range could literally be about anything from the music industry, relationships, health, real estate investing and sports just to name a few.

Clubhouse is filled with celebrities, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, business owners, industry professionals and investors, which provide a more personable way to connect and network to these types of people on the app. Some of the big names spotted on Clubhouse include Drake, 21 Savage, Kevin Hart, Jared Leto, MC Hammer, E40, Virgil Abloh, Meek Mill, The Game, Questlove, D-Nice and Joe Budden.

What helps to drive interest is the element of FOMO (fear of missing out) built into the platform. You never know who pops into a room and what can happen.

Similar to how Instagram Stories disappear after a period of time, there’s no trace or history of a room on Clubhouse once it ends. Nothing is recorded so you can’t go back to listen to the conversation. They also strongly discourage any 3rd party recordings. If you try to do a screen capture, you’ll get this reminder:

My first initial impression of Clubhouse was like listening to a live podcast of a conference panel or a radio show. In some rooms, it can feel like Twitter conversations converted into audio form. What makes this social experience unique is that you don’t have to actively look at your phone and you can have it play in the background while you do other things.

Unfortunately for most people at the time, it was in private beta testing. This meant the only way you can try this exclusive platform was with an invite from someone who’s already a member, but even those are very limited. This exclusivity has also fed into the hype. Today, it is no longer invite-only and has lost a lot of it’s luster.
 

What does Clubhouse mean for musicians?

 
Sounds interesting so far right? At this point, you might be thinking:
“Oh no, not another platform I need to be on.”
“I’m sure I can get these same benefits on any other social media platform.”

Although that may be true, what really separates Clubhouse and other social media platforms are the real-time speed of communication and the authenticity of voice. Hearing someone talk also conveys other cues that you can’t from text like emotion and tone.

Live video interaction is great, but it has its limitations. Not everyone wants to actively be in front of a camera and stare at a screen. Although video is always going to be more engaging, an audio-only platform has its advantages in certain situations. There’s a reason why people prefer podcasts over watching videos.

On the other hand, audio-only interaction still has a lot of untapped potential, especially in the social realm. The content can be consumed passively like listening to a podcast. Of course, the audio-centric nature of the app works well in favor of musicians and the music they create.

There’s a lot of value for artists on this new type of platform. Here are 5 benefits that Clubhouse can potentially offer musicians.

1. Networking / Connections

The biggest value proposition that Clubhouse has at the moment is direct networking.

It’s not easy to be in the same room and talk to other famous artists and high-profile music industry professionals, but it’s now possible to do it virtually. Yes, you can DM or tweet these people, but there’s no guarantee they’ll see or respond to it. Not to mention, there’s no real way to know that the person is actually using the account or they’re paying someone else to manage it.

However, in Clubhouse, you know it’s them because you can hear them talking.

During my time in Clubhouse, the networking and the connections made are what most people say is the best part. Whether you’re looking for managers, photographers, marketers, producers, videographers or promotion, it’s all there. There are networking rooms being hosted daily where you can connect and meet new people.
 

2. Exposure

 
There are opportunities to get your music in front of new potential fans and industry people who may want to work with you. I’ve seen rooms hosting events like open mics and artist battles on Clubhouse.

In one room, they had an artist tournament where they pulled different independent artists from the audience and pitted them against each other. Each artist took turns playing their best songs for judges who were music industry executives.

One woman really impressed the judges who wanted to connect with her offline because of her music. Others offered free services including a photographer who offered to do a free photoshoot for her.

In another room, Grammy Award Winning DJ/Producer Kid Capri hopped on stage and asked the artists in the room to submit songs to his email address that he would consider playing on his radio shows.
 

3. Advice / Help

 
Clubhouse is great for getting advice and help from experienced artists and music professionals. Doesn’t matter what area of music, it’s been covered and talked about on the app.

Here are some rooms that I managed to sit in:

• “Why Do You Need a Manger”
• “How to Build Your Brand, Network and Networth”
• “The Art of Mixing and Mastering: How to Process Your Vocals”

Often these types of rooms are run like a panel or Q&A. You raise your hand and a moderator brings you on stage to ask a question. Everyone discusses it and you get real-time responses.

You’ll have established artists share advice and personal experiences as well.

In the brand building room that I was in, the moderators asked Lil Mama to share her story and some advice. She spoke about how she grinded and broke into the industry with her breakthrough single Lip Gloss. Although it seemed like an overnight success, she was on the verge of quitting the industry because she wasn’t getting plays.
 

4. Community

 
Clubhouse is very topic-driven so it’s easy to gather like-minded people around similar passions, hobbies or interests. As an artist, you can find your community to connect with or build your own.

On the app, you can join virtual clubs around specific topics that host their own rooms and events for their members.

As you can imagine, clubs are the backbone of the app so it’s something they are continuing to build out. In one of the town hall meetings, the creators of Clubhouse talked about adding a paid membership feature in the future.
 

5. Live Audio Content / Performance

 
One of the big events that happened on Clubhouse was the audio adaptation of the Lion King Musical. It was performed live on the app with a 40-member cast, narrators, band and choir in 20 different cities. They even had PTR (“pull to refresh”) imagery where they had specific users switch out their profile pictures to build imagery to match every scene of the show.

Surprisingly, there were no noticeable latency or lag issues, which can open up new possibilities for musicians.

Imagine being able to perform as a band or host jam sessions remotely on Clubhouse while fans can tune in like a live radio station. I have not personally come across this on the app yet, but I have heard from someone I know, who has participated in a jam session with musicians in different parts of the world, say it worked.

You can do something as simple as hosting a listening party of your new single or album then host a Q&A with fans.

The one downside was the audio quality on Clubhouse hasn’t always been the greatest, but they have been implementing upgrades to improve it. They’ve already introduced a feature called “Music Mode,” which offers your room improved better sound when it detects your phone is connected to something like an iRig. In the most recent update on 3/5/21, you can change audio quality if you’re on stage as a speaker. This only affects how others hear you and not how you hear yourself. Tap “…” to switch your audio quality settings. Set it to ‘high’ if you’re performing or set it ‘low’ if you have bad internet connection.

I’ve seen some people tinkering around with audio setups using iRigs to produce the best sound on the platform so you can look for tutorials on that. Here’s one from Butterscotch:

How Does It Work – Tour of Clubhouse

 
In case you have never seen it before, I wanted to share a general overview of Clubhouse and what the experience is like.

When you first log in, the default home screen displays a list of rooms for you to join. It’s unofficially dubbed the “hallway” where you can pop in and out of these virtual rooms. What you see is curated based on who you follow. Currently, there’s no easy way to search for rooms to join based on a topic. It’s a bit restrictive, but their algorithms and search/browse features will continue to evolve in time. You can at least search clubs and users that can lead you to topics of interest. There’s also a topic directory you can use to find clubs and users.

In the upper-left icon allows you to search for people. The envelope icon is where you can send invites to join. The calendar icon shows you upcoming room/events that have been scheduled by people you follow. The bell icon shows your activity and notifications. The bottom right-hand corner icon with the 9 dots is essentially your friend list – users you follow and have followed you back.

Once you join a room, you’ll be presented with avatars that represent each person inside. Click on someone’s photo to see their profile.

The structure is like a live conference panel or Q&A with users acting as moderators and speakers shown at the top. Everyone below is the audience.

If you want to speak and be a part of the conversation, you raise your hand by clicking the hand icon so a moderator can send you an invite to get talking privileges on stage.

How to Join Clubhouse

As mentioned earlier, Clubhouse was in the testing phase where you needed someone who was already a member with a spare invite to share. New users get one invite and can earn more over time. Clubhouse has now opened up to the public so an invite is no longer required.

To get started, download the app and sign up there. Clubhouse was only available for Apple iOs but they recently launched on Android users from the U.S. as of May 2021.
 

New User Tips and Info

• Party Hat Icon – New users will have the party hat by their photo for about a week.
• Maximize Your Profile – Your profile is the only place where you can communicate with text so make sure you add as much relevant information about yourself there. What people tend to do is check out people’s profiles while listening in a room, especially if you’re brought on stage as a speaker. Just keep in mind that you can’t link out to any other websites except Instagram and Twitter.
• Follow Wisely – The rooms you see in the hallway are based on the people you follow, your friends (you follow each other), the clubs you joined and topics you select. Be aware of who you follow if you don’t want certain rooms to show in your feed.
• Mute Your Mic! – If you are invited on stage to be a speaker, mute your mic right away since it’s left on by default. This way you’re not accidentally interrupting and distracting anyone who is currently talking. (Update: It looks like this has been fixed, but be sure to check just in case.)
• Swipe Right! – If you want to hide rooms you don’t want to see in your hallway, swipe to the right to hide them.
• What is PTR? – If you hear “PTR,” that means pull to refresh by dragging down on your screen with your finger. This can be done to refresh the hallway or update the room. People will often say this if they change their profile picture or show an updated list of who is next to speak.
• Start Small – Join smaller, intimate rooms so you’re more likely invited on stage to be a speaker or create your own rooms to get a feel for the app.
• Be Respectful – If you’re brought on stage, be aware of how each room operates. Usually, bigger rooms will have a moderator to help guide the discussion and keep things organized. This also means don’t speak out of turn or talk over people. If you’re being rude or engaging in negative behavior (trolling), you can be kicked out and/or reported.
• Room Sizes – The maximum number of people in a room is 5,000 at the moment, but this will change soon. This is important to know if you want to attend big events, like Elon Musk’s first time on Clubhouse, as the room maxed out quick. Fortunately, there were other overflow or spillover rooms and people broadcasting the audio on other platforms.
• Watch Out! – Be careful about potential scammers or people spreading bad information. Although there’s a lot of positive things about the platform, it doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be shady people on there looking to take advantage of artists. Anyone can put anything in their profiles so make sure to verify that they are who they say they are before connecting with them or listening to their advice. One way to do this is to see if their real Instagram and Twitter accounts are linked to their Clubhouse profile. You can only display a social media username and have it clickable if you can log into the account. So if someone says they are Taylor Swift, their Clubhouse profile should have the correct Taylor Swift Instagram linked in their profile that shows 146 million followers.
• Town Hall Meetings – There’s a weekly town hall meeting on Sundays with the app founders, Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, where they go over app updates and answer any questions. It starts at 9:00AM PST and goes for about an hour. This is a great way to stay up to date with the latest changes.
• Recording – If you create a room and plan on recording it to repurpose on other platforms, be sure to mention in your title that you’re recording. Usually, people will just put a red stop sign emoji with the word “recording.”
• Room Types – There are 3 types of rooms you can create: open, social and closed. Open means it’s a public room. Closed is a private room. Social rooms are where only people you follow can join. The same goes for any other speakers who are added. It’s something you’ll want to do when you have more mutual follows. Don’t forget to add a topic if you’re creating an open or social room so people can decide if they want to join or not.

Conclusion

 
With the popularity of audio content (podcasts) and the integration of voice control in everyday products over the years, it was only a matter of time that an audio-based social platform would pop up on the scene. Whether it’s Clubhouse or another audio-based social media network, I wanted to give you a heads up on what’s to come so you can prepare yourself as an artist.

Who knows if Clubhouse will reach mainstream status when it is ready to go public. They do have some obstacles to overcome as the app has its issues with moderation, audio quality, harassment, trolls and scams. But then again, what social media platform doesn’t have these issues.

It’s currently run by a couple of people so it may take some time for them to get things ready to open up. However, I do hear they’ve been improving features and functions pretty regularly so maybe it’ll be ready in 2021. Something that could be of interest to musicians is their plans to integrate monetization into Clubhouse which includes a seamless way to tip/donate, one time paid events, paid club membership fees and possibly even brand sponsorships.

At the moment, there aren’t any popular audio-centric social media platforms that allow users to interact and engage in real-time like Clubhouse, but there plenty of competitors popping up. Twitter started heading in that direction with their “tweet with your voice” feature in June of 2020. Shortly after, they launched Spaces and invite-only as well.

There is also Stages from Discord. Spotify acquired Locker Room that operates like Clubhouse. Facebook will have its Clubhouse clone too. Even Reddit has started their own audio-based social platform called Reddit Talks. You can add Slack and LinkedIn to the list as well.

It’ll be interesting to see all these platforms compete, but it looks like Clubhouse has the hype and upper hand at the moment.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens since we’re in uncharted territory with a concept like this. It’s entirely possible that the allure of Clubhouse can dissipate once it’s opened up to the public. After all, what has created so much hype and intrigue for this has been the exclusivity and intimate rooms that celebrities are in. But so far, it seems like the majority of people love the app and see a lot of potential for it in the future.

Let me know in the comments your thoughts on Clubhouse!

You can follow me on Clubhouse here.

The post What is Clubhouse and Why Musicians Should Be Excited It + New User Tips appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Now with over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram has become one of the most important social media platforms for musicians, especially younger generations. It’s such a versatile platform with plenty of functions and settings that the average user might miss.

In this blog, I will cover Instagram tips, tricks, tools and tactics from the most basic to more well-known ones to maximize your presence and fan engagement on Instagram.
 

Leave a Note

 

This feature on Instagram allows you to leave a short note or a song snippet that sticks on top of people’s direct message page for 24 hours. It will also display on the top of their profile picture from their main page.

As an artist, this could become a good way to remind others of a new release or an upcoming show. Currently, only those who follow each other can see these notes so it limits the potential reach this has but things may change in the future. However, this hasn’t stopped artists from using it as a promo tool as it is.

Add Lyrics to Your Songs In Instagram Stories

One of the newer features on Instagram Stories is the ‘Music’ sticker that adds lyrics to your story from a song you choose. There’s a good chance your music doesn’t have lyrics to show, but here’s how you add them.

When you upload your music to your music distributor (CDBaby, TuneCore, DistroKid), make sure to opt-in to Instagram & Facebook monetization which allows your music to be used in Instagram Stories.

Facebook and Instagram pulls lyrics from a third party site called MusixMatch. In order to add lyrics to MusixMatch, you need to verify your artist account on their platform. This allows the lyrics you input, to be the official lyrics.

Go to their website and follow the steps here:
https://about.musixmatch.com/artists/verified-artist

Once you are verified, you’ll sign in and add lyrics to your songs by clicking the ‘add lyrics’ or ‘+’ by the names. They will show specific guidelines, so make sure you follow them.

Once you submit lyrics to your song, there’s a MusixMatch app where you can listen to the song and sync your lyrics to the music. Go on the Musixmatch app, find your song and click on ‘Sync.’ You basically tap the button when the lyrics should be coming in.

It may take some time for Instagram to pull the info from MusixMatch and have the changes live in Instagram Stories.

Other Notes:

• Musixmatch should pull your new releases from Spotify and Apple Music. If your music is not on musixmatch.com, you will need to email them at artists@musixmatch.com with Spotify and Apple Music links to your release.
• Make sure to input the lyrics accurately the first time around, because it can be annoying to fix and redo. The same goes for syncing the lyrics to the song. Once the song is synced, there’s no way to redo without having to email them and have them start the process over.
• If there are instrumental gaps between lyrics
• It can take days and maybe even a week for song lyrics to show in Instagram Stories so be patient.
  If your song lyrics actually contain the word “lyrics,” it may be flagged as spam and not save to the website.

For more on leveraging song lyrics in your marketing, you can also check out this blog.
 

Sell Merch Directly on Instagram

Instagram Shopping is a feature that allows you to tag merch items you are selling in your Instagram photos, videos, Stories, Reels and IG Live so fans can buy products directly on Instagram or get linked to your online store to buy it. It basically creates an online store front right on your Instagram profile.

It is a bit of a process to set up and there are some requirements that need to be met.

Convert to a Creator Account

One of the first things you should do, if you haven’t already, is convert your Personal account into a Creator account. Instagram now has two types of Professional accounts and the Creator account was made for artists, musicians, influencers and other public figures.

A Business account used to be the standard for anyone that wasn’t using it for only personal use, but now it applies more for retailers, local businesses and organizations.

Creator Account gives you:

• Access to growth metrics in your analytics.
• A ‘Promotions’ button to easily pay to promote your posts.
• An action button to your public profile. The most relevant action button is ‘Email’ unless you use a service like SuperPhone where you can have people call or text you.
• Separate tabs for direct messages (DMs) to make it easier to manage higher volumes of DMs.

Link Sticker in Instagram Stories

Update: The swipe up function has been retired and replaced by a link sticker. You can add a sticker to your Stories that users can click to take them to another website.

As you may already know, you are only allowed one active that can link outside of Instagram, which is on your Instagram bio. You can’t even share a clickable link in your post captions. The only other way to show links is using the Link sticker in Stories. The best part is this feature has opened up to everyone. You no longer need 10k followers like the the original swipe up required. It makes it so convenient and useful to link your fans to your videos, ticket links and merch.

Here’s how to do it: Take a photo or video in the Stories screen. Click on the sticker icon on the top.

Tap the link sticker with the chain next to it. Type in the URL you want people to go to when they tap the link. Click ‘done’ when finished then post your Story as you normally would.

Bonus Tip: You can place a GIF sticker over the link sticker and have the GIF sticker be clickable. After adding the URL to your link sticker, pinch it down to its smallest size on your Story and add a GIF sticker. Search something like “Tap Here” or “Buy Now” and find something that could cover the link sticker completely. Now after you publish your Story, your fans can tap the GIF sticker to go the website in your link sticker.
 

Add More Links to Your Profile

We all know that you can only have one active URL at a time. A common workaround is to use one of these free link services that allow you to display multiple links from the URL in your Instagram bio.

Once you create an account, you will copy the URL they provide and insert it into your Instagram bio. Now when someone clicks on it, it will load a simple page with other links in it. You can include a link to your website, your latest single, music videos, merch or a newsletter sign up.

Schedule Posts to Instagram from Desktop / Laptop

Instagram is known as a mobile app, where all your photo and video posting is done from your phone. Now, you can actually post from your computer to Instagram. Better yet, you can even schedule posts, which is something you generally couldn’t do in the past on the mobile app.

To get started, you’ll need to go to Creator Studio and link your Instagram page to your Facebook page.

https://business.facebook.com/creatorstudio

From the main screen on Creator Studio, click the Instagram icon at the very top, next to the Facebook icon. If you haven’t connected Instagram yet, it will prompt you to do so.

Once you’ve done that, click on the ‘Create Post’ button on the top left to start your post. Currently, you can post to the Instagram feed and IGTV with Creator Studio, but not Stories.

Captions operate and format the same way they do on the mobile app. Hashtags should be included in the caption since you can’t comment on Creator Studio. One of the benefits of posting through Creator Studio is that it will tell you how many characters, hashtags and mentions you’ve used in the post.

To schedule the post, click on the arrow icon next to the ‘Publish’ button, and it will ask for a date and time.
 

Adding Line Breaks to Your Bio

As discussed above, Instagram will not format your text the way you want it and allow line breaks. Normally, if you do line breaks or an empty line using the ‘return’ button, it doesn’t stick in Instagram. It ends as one big paragraph.

1) Use a Notes app – To format your bio the way you want, first type and format it in another app like Notes on an iPhone. Copy and paste it into your Instagram bio section and save.

2) Use this web app – Type your bio formatted the way you want in this web app. Convert it then paste it into your Instagram bio.

https://apps4lifehost.com/Instagram/CaptionMaker.html
 

Request Verification for Blue Check Mark

 
You can now manually request a verification blue checkmark on your Instagram profile to show people you are official.

Go to Settings -> Account -> Request Verification

Just keep in mind that this is for more established or recognized public figures. You can read more here.
 

Post Notifications

You can be notified with a pop-up notification on your phone whenever someone posts on Instagram. Fans may naturally do this for certain people they follow. Encouraging fans to turn on notifications whenever you post is always helpful for getting any engagement boost in the news feed.

One way to encourage this is to offer some giveaways that require followers to respond as quickly as possible.
 

Hashtag / Location Tools

 
By now, most people on the platform understand the importance of hashtags for visibility and exposure on Instagram. You can use up to 30 hashtags in a standard post and 10 in a Story. Just keep in mind that only 3 hashtags used in Stories have the potential to show up in the hashtag Stories feed.

You also have the ability to geotag your posts and Stories so others can see what you’ve posted when they click on the location. Locations that are searched for will also display posts that were tagged.
 

Follow Hashtags

 
One of the newer functions of Instagram is the ability to follow hashtags. Doing so allows posts to show in your feed from others using the hashtag you are following. Followed hashtags will also show as a bubble in your Stories feed up top. This is a good way to keep tabs on local hashtags that are relevant to you as a musician, or tied to a community you want to engage with.

Or maybe you have your own hashtag associated with your brand, whether it’s your name or tagline, that you want to follow.
 

Link Hashtags and Other Accounts in Your Bio

 
You can include hashtags and other Instagram accounts in your profile bio so they are clickable. This is just a convenient way to link to other artists or accounts you may have. You might even have your own branded hashtag you want to display.
 

Appear in More Search Results on Instagram

The ‘Name’ field in your Instagram bio is actually searchable, meaning Instagram uses what you type here to display results in their search function. You can add other words in the ‘Name’ field so that someone searching for that word will be more likely to see your profile. Just keep in mind the character limit is 30.

For example, if someone types “bay area singer” in Instagram’s search function, your profile will show up if you put that in the ‘Name’ field of your bio.
 

Change Display Font on Profile

You have the ability to change the fonts displayed on your profile. It’s a good way to show some uniqueness for your branding, but don’t overdo it.

Planning Out Post Layouts

 

Having a clean grid of photos when someone lands on your Instagram profile can create a positive impression for your brand. However, it may not be easy to see how your posts would look as a whole. There are a number of apps that help you visualize and plan your posts out.

Add a Clickable Link in IGTV Post Descriptions

 
Links saved in IGTV video descriptions are now clickable. You don’t need a certain amount of followers as it works for all users. The only drawback is that viewers need to expand the description box by clicking on it to see the link.
 

Post IGTV Preview in Your Feed

 
If you want to post videos over 60 seconds, use IGTV and post a preview to your Instagram Feed. Don’t forget you can link people to your IGTV videos in Stories, even if you don’t have 10k followers.

As of right now, you can’t use IGTV posts or previews in Instagram Ad campaigns.
 

IGTV Supports Landscape / Widescreen Video

You can now upload videos that don’t take up the full screen vertically. If you upload a typical landscape 16:9 video, you can tap the square corner icon on the bottom right corner in IGTV to change the screen orientation to widescreen. Before this change, your IGTV video had to be shot or rendered at 9:16 vertical video to fill the screen.

Read more about this update here.
 

Repost Other People’s Content in Your Newsfeed

 
Instagram does not have a native share function that allows you to post someone else’s content to your own feed. There are a few apps that allow you to do this, but the one I have used is Repost app.
 

Share Posts into Your IG Stories

 
Instagram algorithms dictate what people see in the feed based on a number of variables. One of them is engagement. This means not everyone will see what you’ve posted. A way to drive extra views on a new post is to share it to your Stories. What people will commonly do is find a way to tease or entice people to click the post to create some urgency to see it.

This is great for sharing other people’s posts you like into your own Stories. I like to think this is Instagram’s way of allowing users to share other content and posts.

Here’s how to do it: Click on the arrow button underneath the photo or video, next to the like and comment button. It will ask you if you want to share to your stories or share it with other users. If you share it your Stories, you can add text and stickers before posting. Anyone that clicks on the post in Stories will be taken to the post.

Upload Multiple Stories at Once

 
If you’re posting multiple Stories to Instagram, you can load up to 10 photos or 15-second video clips at once so you can edit and publish in bulk. You can edit each Story one at a time.

Here’s how to do it: From your Stories camera screen, swipe up to show your photos and videos from your camera roll. Click the multiple image icon in the upper right hand corner first, then select the clips.

Note that if you select a video clip longer than 15 seconds in this mode, it won’t automatically split them like it normally would if you didn’t use this feature. Hopefully, this may change in the future. In the meantime, the workaround is to load a longer video clip up to a minute into Stories, then download each individual 15-second clip.
 

Hide Posts Without Deleting Them / Archive Old Posts

 
Once you post something, you don’t have to delete it if you don’t want it to be visible in your profile. You have the ability to archive posts so you still have access, and even bring it back another time. For musicians, I like to hide flyers after an event is over. Having a bunch of flyer posts on your Instagram profile is not attractive so this is a good way to hide them.

To archive, click on the ‘…’ in the upper right-hand corner of your post and select ‘Archive’ to hide it from your profile.

To view all your archived posts, click on the 3 line icon in the top right-hand corner of your Instagram profile and select ‘Archive’. By default, it should show you archived Stories. Click the word ‘Archive’ in the top middle, then select ‘Posts’ to see archived posts.
 

Control Photos and Videos You’re Tagged In

 
There’s actually an entire section on your profile that shows content that others posted and tagged you in. Swipe left twice on a profile page to see.

By default, it’s set to ‘Add Automatically’. Some people may not always like what they are tagged in so you can actually approve anything before it displays in this section.

To do this, go to your ‘Settings -> Privacy -> Tags -> Toggle ‘Add Automatically’ off. Below this option, you can manually select individual photos or videos to hide in the tagged section of your profile.

When someone tags you, you’ll get a notification. Go to the post you were tagged in and click your username tag in the post itself. You can also click the top ‘…’ in the upper right-hand corner of the post and select ‘Post Options’ to add to your profile.
 

Disable Activity Status on Instagram

 
By default, if you’re using the Instagram app, others will see ‘active now’ under your name on the direct messaging page of the app. If you’re away, it will display when you were last on Instagram. It’s a convenient way to know who’s active on the Instagram app so you can reach out to them with a direct message if you need it.

Some people don’t want others to know this, so you can easily turn it off. If you switch this off, it means you can’t see anyone else’s activity status.

Settings -> Privacy -> Activity Status -> Show Activity Status

You don’t have to worry about the public or any of your followers seeing this unless you’ve accepted their message request in the ‘Message Requests’ tab. Otherwise, people who you follow that you follow you back will see this.
 

Quick Tips

• Carousel Posts: Creating a carousel post (where you can post up to 10 photos and videos in a single post) is a great way to get engagement. The reason why is because Instagram will automatically show different photos and videos in your follower’s newsfeed if they don’t engage with it the first time. I’ve seen this myself a number of times where I would scroll past someone’s carousel post, then another photo/video in that same post will pop into my newsfeed later.
• IG Live Notifications: Whenever you go live with IG Live, all your followers will get a notification by default (unless they turned them off). If you hop on someone else’s IG Live as a guest, your followers will also get notifications. This makes IG Live an effective tool to get people attention and cross-promote audiences without having to worry about their algorithms.
• IG Live to IGTV: You can now post your IG Live videos directly to IGTV so people can re-watch anytime. Be sure to share the IGTV video to your Stories after your livestream is done to get more views.

The post Instagram for Musicians: Tips, Tricks, Tools and Tactics You Might Not Know appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

According to a Nielsen study commissioned by Instagram from 2016:

• IG users spend 30% more time listening to music on a weekly basis in comparison to the general U.S. population, and they’re more likely to be listening to pop, hip-hop/rap and R&B.
• Instagram users are 42% more likely to spend money on music during the year, in comparison to the general population’s annual music spending habits.
• 90% of Instagram Users Stream Music, compared to 76% of the general population.

While it’s easy to get caught up in wanting more followers, I think it’s worth pointing out that there may be reasons why people may not follow you in the first place.

If you’re having trouble getting more followers, here are the 10 most common reasons why people aren’t following you.
 

1) You have an incomplete profile.

 
I want to start with this because it’s the easiest thing you can take action on. Every space you can control on your profile is a chance to convince someone to follow you. If you’re missing a bio or not writing something useful (which is what I usually see), that’s 150 characters you’re not using optimally.

It’s all about first impressions. If someone lands on your profile, chances are they’re going to see your name, profile image and your bio first. Make sure to maximize this opportunity.

If music is something you want to do professionally, you want people to take you seriously. You need to be able to communicate why you’re someone they need to follow. An incomplete profile is not a good way to convince people to follow you.

2) Not focusing on branding.

 
If you haven’t thought about branding, that’s a big mistake. Although it’s great to share your music, provide updates and engage with fans, you want to be able to use your Instagram account as a tool to define and develop your brand. The two key ways this is done is through your bio and the things you post.

The problem is many artists don’t invest time to incorporate their brand in their profile as a way to stand out.

Your profile bio is an opportunity to communicate what you’re all about as simply and clearly as possible. You don’t need to get too elaborate, just be straight forward. I’m sure you’ve seen people list points about who they are using emojis. If you clearly state who you are and define aspects of your brand, it’s easier for people to decide if you’re who they want to follow. Look the following as an example:

Here’s an example of an optimized Instagram profile from Butterscotch.

Outside of the bio, you have a few design elements you can control and customize on your Instagram profile:

• How your photos and videos are displayed in the profile grid and the Instagram Highlights circles above it.
• Create a consistent feel and theme with your posts. One way is to use photo filters on all your posts to give it that consistency.
• If you have Instagram Highlights, optimize the cover photos on them so they match your branding.

3) Your content sucks.

 
Posting photos and videos are the lifeblood of an Instagram account. Unfortunately, content creation can be difficult to do. Some people really have trouble knowing what to post. If you don’t have or show promise of good content, there’s no real reason to follow you if you’re still building your brand.

One of the big reasons why your content is not attracting followers may be because you’re not thinking about how your posts look in your profile. A common thing I see a lot is too many promotional posts (like flyers and repetitive cover photos). If you don’t have some strategy in mind, it’s going to look like a mess.

Another common reason it may be unappealing is that you’re not providing value. Content often is meant to achieve certain goals through your posts – education, entertainment, inspiration, perspective, informing, personality or connection. If this is lacking, it’s going to be harder to get followers.
 

4) You post poor quality content.

 
Instagram is a visual platform. When people are scrolling through their feed, you want people to stop and pay attention to your post. Of course, no one expects everyone to have the most professional photos or videos. But if you’re photos are blurry, out of focus, too dark or overexposed, your content becomes very unattractive in the feed.

Now, you don’t need to be a visual expert, but you want to be viewed as a professional musician. Often times, poor quality visuals communicate amateur.

Even though as the artist, you will have others capturing content for you, you need to have some base understanding of what is good and not good for your image. Read up on photography basics so you have certain standards and criteria when you have others doing it for you. The photo and video quality of the average smartphone can be really good for most of your social media needs as long as you know the basics. However, it would be wise to invest in paying others to capture high-quality content for you.
 

5) Not using hashtags or using too many hashtags.

 
Hashtags are essential for your posts and account to be discovered on Instagram. If you’re not getting followers, it may be because you have no way for people to find what you have to offer.

Not only does it help when people browse specific hashtags, but they can also be useful in helping you get exposure on the Explore tab of Instagram.

Even though your limit is 30 hashtags per post, you only need to focus on the highly relevant ones. Don’t just use the broadest and popular hashtags!

The other problem is posting too many hashtags or hashtag stuffing. Not only does it look messy and unprofessional, but you also risk getting shadowbanned.

Although shadowbanning is not confirmed, there has been suspicion by many in the online marketing community of such a thing where Instagram makes your post less visible without letting you know if it suspects you of spamming through excessive use of hashtags. The general consensus is to change up different combinations of hashtags in each post. If you haven’t been getting followers organically through hashtags, you may want to see if you’ve been shadowbanned.

6) You underestimate the importance of a caption.

 
When you post something without a caption, it looks and feels very weird. You rarely ever see it so it looks very out of place. If you post a lot without captions or even just a couple of words, it shows that you’re lazy or don’t care.

At the very least, you should at least write something relevant to what you’re posting. A good caption doesn’t have to be long. Sometimes it makes sense to only use a few words. Incorporating longer captions or long-form posts are great too if that’s something you’ve tested to work.

The idea is you want to provide context around what you’re posting. Use it as an opportunity to tell a story, document your journey as an artist, show your personality, inspire others or provide insight. Your photo/video work goes hand in hand with your caption. They compliment each other.

I find that writing a caption can be time-consuming so plan ahead.
 

7) You don’t respond or engage.

 
The last thing you want your social media accounts to be is a one-way broadcasting tool. Accounts that do this are not attractive to follow.

Earlier on in your career, you should respond and interact with as many people who comment or message you. Not just on your own posts, but other people’s content as well. The power of social media is in two-way interactions and being personable.

You don’t have to be friends with all your fans, but you want to build relationships and show that you’re a real person. When potential new followers see that you’re active, it makes it more inviting to click ‘Follow.’

As you become more established, you’re less expected to interact as you become busier. However, you still want to show that you’re active and that you care about your fans.

It’s also in your best interest for visibility to engage with the way the Instagram algorithm work. Engagement on your posts helps to signal that your post is good and should be displayed to more of your followers.
 

8) You follow way too many people.

 
Having a lot of followers gives the perception that you are socially validated by others. On the other hand, when you follow a lot of people that are very disproportionate to the number of people who follow you, that gives off a bad impression.

If you have 500 followers and you follow 5,000 or the maximum of 7,500 (done over a long period of time because Instagram does have hourly limits to fight against spam), it looks suspect and desperate. It looks like you’re a spammer or a bot.

If your strategy to gain more followers is to follow as many people as you possibly can to see who follows you back, you may be more of an annoyance and people won’t want to follow you.
 

9) You’re not posting regularly.

 
People generally like to follow accounts that are active. If your last post is months old and possibly weeks apart from the last thing you posted, then that’s not a good sign to show that you’re active. This is not to say you should post a bunch of random things every single day. You should always prioritize quality over quantity, but take the time to plan and strategize.
 

10) No Patience.

 
Lastly, building a following is not easy work regardless of where its at. In our fast-paced, instant gratification society, we want success to happen quickly. When we become impatient, it can get us to make poor decisions like spamming people or even buying fake followers.

It’s crucial to understand that people generally want to follow accounts that they see potential value in. Building value for yourself as an artist and brand is going to naturally take time so that’s why patience is key.

In my next blog on Instagram, I will talk about the right way to get more followers.

The post Instagram for Musicians: 10 Reasons Why People Aren’t Following You appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

Think of Facebook Ads as a tool that you can use to get exposure for your music video and potentially lead people into your fan funnel. Once in your fan funnel, it can be easier to sell your music and merch to your fans. The good news is you can use Facebook Ads to do this also.

There are different ways and strategies you can go about it, but I will guide you through one way to sell your music and merch to an audience that is more likely to buy based on how engaged they were by your videos.
 

General Overview

 
This process combines the 2 objectives in two separate Facebook Ad campaigns. The idea is that you want to spend your ad budget to get people to watch your music video first, then create a custom audience based on people who are engaged. In this case, engagement is based on how long a person watches a video.

People who watch, let’s say 75% of the video, are more likely to be interested in your music and more likely to take a favorable action, like buy your music. Someone who watches your video for only 10 seconds is less likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Facebook allows you to build this audience based on multiple videos watched. It’s a good way to take a cold audience and create a warm audience.

Just remember, if you select people who watch a higher percentage of your video, the fewer people will be in your audience. So choose something that is reasonable for the audience you are targeting and budget. You want to aim to build an audience of at least a few thousand so adjust accordingly.

Later, I’ll show you how to see how many people watched a certain percentage of your video so you can use that data to adjust your criteria.
 

First Campaign Objective: Drive video views to your music video

 
Create a campaign using the ‘Video Views’ objective. Name it something you can easily identify later if you need to look back at the data.

Ad Sets

 
I would create at least 2 ad sets, one for each type of audience:

• Cold Audience (people who don’t know who you are)
• Warm Audience (people who are familiar with you)

Your cold audience would be the demographic of people who are more likely to resonate with your music, so you’ll be targeting your audience based on location, age, gender and interests. You can also create a ‘saved audience’ based on this information so you can target them in future ads.

Remember that you want to be specific and not too broad when you’re targeting millions of people on a $5 budget. I’m usually working with a $10 – $50 budget so the audience size usually ranges from 10,000 to 1,000,000 depending on the objective.

Another type of cold audience you could be using is a ‘lookalike audience‘ based on a custom audience like engaged Facebook page fans.

For your warm audience, it could be your engaged Facebook page fans, email list or website visitors. These are custom audiences that require a few extra steps to build.

Examples of different custom audiences you can create.

I won’t cover that in this blog, but the quick way to access a warm audience (your Facebook fans) would be in ‘Connections’ in the ‘Audience” box. Select ‘Facebook Pages’ then ‘People who like your page’ then select your Facebook page.

I’ve found in my experience that this isn’t great and that creating a custom audience of Facebook fans who have engaged with your page in the last 365 days is far more effective.

You can do different combinations of warm and cold audiences, but to keep it simple, we’ll go with just 2 ad sets. Maybe you don’t have a warm audience or you want to keep it simple, you can create one ad set based on a cold audience.

Be sure to name your ad sets so you can easily distinguish them. I usually will label ad sets based on the audience I’m targeting.
 

Placement

 
Don’t do automatic placements. Most of the time, you will want to select Facebook Feed and Suggested Video only. I don’t mess with any other placements.

If you want to be more cost-efficient, select ‘Mobile’ only for Device Types. Most Facebook users are on mobile devices so reaching ‘Desktop’ users is going to be more expensive in comparison because they are a smaller audience. Just remember to select ‘Device Type’ first before checking the individual platforms.

If you want to promote your video on Instagram or Stories, create a separate campaign and select placement for Instagram Feed. The ad should have a call to action button that links them to Facebook video. Remember, you only can do a 1-minute video so you’ll have to cut it down.

Bid Strategy

 
For the most part, you’ll just need to input your budget, daily or lifetime. Set how many days to run the campaign. Do at least 3 days.

‘When You Get Charged’ is what you will have to think about. You can either get charged based on 1,000 impressions (CPM) or every time someone watches for at least 10 seconds.

If you have your audience targeting down, then it makes more sense to be charged by impressions because it’ll be more cost-effective.

If you do the latter, you’ll get more engaged people theoretically, but it can limit the potential of how many people you will reach. This option saves you money, especially if the ad isn’t performing well. It’s like insurance so it’s ideal if you’re just trying out an audience for the first time.

Once you have the targeting dialed in, you’ll want to be charged by impressions.

Ad

If you’re going to use an existing video post, make sure to optimize the description before creating the ad. Once the ad goes live, you won’t be able to edit it.

You will have the option to add a ‘call-to-action’ button to show in your video ad. For example, you can add a link to a platform that the song can be streamed or purchased. However, if your goal is to get people to watch the video, the button could be a distraction.

You may even want to experiment with using a shorter version of the music video specially for these ads.

It would be a good idea to run a test campaign with a smaller budget for at least 3 – 5 days to test your cold audience.
 

How to Create Your Custom Audience

 
If you haven’t already, you need to create a custom audience for video views:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/manager/audiences/

1) Click on ‘Create Audience’ and select ‘Custom Audience’ in the drop down menu.

2) Select ‘Engagement’ and then ‘Video’ right after.

3) Select the videos you want to use and the percent of the video watched. Be sure to name it something that makes it easier for you to use later.

4) Once you confirm, give it some time to populate before you can actually use it. It takes roughly 30 minutes to an hour from my experience.
 

See Video View Analytics

 
Let’s say you ran a video views campaign and you want to see the breakdown of how long people watched your video. You can use this information to optimize your custom audience settings for later.

In the ‘Campaign’, ‘Ad Set’ or ‘Ads’ tab, click on the ‘Columns’ button on the right side. Select ‘Customize Columns’.

Type in “video” or you can just scroll down until you see the following columns. Check the following boxes:

You should now see the following:

For example, let’s say you want to build a custom audience of people who have watched at least 50% of your videos. You ran a campaign with multiple ad sets and you want to know which ad set will most likely give you more 50% and up watchers. By selecting these columns, which most don’t show by default, you can see how these ad sets performed based on the criteria you are looking for. By knowing this, you can create a new campaign and put more money behind that ad set to build that custom audience more cost-efficiently.

Second Campaign Objective: Push ads to your new custom audience

 
Now that you have your custom audience based on video views, create a new campaign using the ‘Traffic’ objective. You can use this campaign to push people to buy your music and send them to your shop to buy merch.

Ad Set

 
You’re going to select the custom audience you created. If the size of your audience happens to be too broad, you may want to narrow it in more by setting location, age, gender or interests. Otherwise, I would change the location to Worldwide and leave everything else as the default.

Personally for placements, I always do ‘Edit Placement’ and stick to either Facebook or Instagram feeds.

Budget and schedule. Make sure that you’re setting it for at least 3 days.

Similar to the video views campaign, I select Impressions most of the time for ‘When You Get Charged’. Link Click (CPC) is the safer option because it just means you only get charged if someone clicks on the ad, but you generally will need a slightly larger budget (minimum $5 per day).

Ad

 
You can push them to buy your album, follow you on Spotify, send them to your website to buy merch or even opt-in to your email list.

Image or video – If you’re using an image, be sure to refer to this. If you’re using a video, keep in mind that square and vertical video perform better. Make sure it’s high quality and relevant to the action you want them to take.

Your copy (text) – To keep everything consistent, your copy or caption should all be relevant to the action that you want them to take and motivate people to do it.

Link (landing page) – If you’re sending them to buy your album or merch on your website, make sure you send them a link directly to that item.

Just remember that effective ads are ones that the media, text and landing page have a good synergy. The image or video should be catchy, if possible. The text uses persuasive language that may include certain psychological marketing triggers. The landing page should take the person exactly where the image and text promises with as little steps as possible.

The post How to Use Facebook Ads to Promote a Music Video and Sell Merch appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

In the last 3 months, Hobo Johnson has:

• Reached 700k+ Facebook followers (up from a few thousand)
• Gained 256k+ Youtube Subscribers
• Sold out shows all over the U.S. and U.K.
• Reached #11 on Billboards Heatseeker’s Chart
• Had at least 4 of his songs at the same time on Spotify’s U.S. Viral 50 Playlist
• Booked his first big festivals – Bumbershoot in Seattle and Outside Lands in San Francisco

In the world of virality and mainstream artists, this is relatively impressive. But to the average independent artist, this is an astronomical feat for a 20 something-year-old adult from Sacramento.

How did he do it? It was all thanks to this video he released with this band The Lovemakers on March 7, 2018:

It wasn’t a hot recorded song or album that propelled him to internet stardom. It was a NPR Tiny Desk submission video recorded in what looks like someone’s backyard in Sacramento.

After watching the video, you may be inspired to create your own Tiny Desk submission, but don’t expect the same success.

The fact is Hobo Johnson is a one of a kind artist with his own unique energy.

This story hit home for me, because I currently do live in Sacramento where Hobo Johnson is from. I’ll be honest and admit I underestimated Hobo Johnson. I’ve known about him for a couple years before this happened, but it never occurred crossed my mind that he was capable of this kind of success.

In this blog, I will share what stood out to me about his story that I think other artists can learn from.

Note: The quotes you see are actual comments people have left related to Hobo Johnson. I find that reading and studying comments is very insightful.
 

1) Going viral is still NOT a viable strategy.

“Literally watching this man rise in just the past 2 weeks blows my God damn mind.”

As inspiring as his story is, trying to go viral as a way to become “successful” is not an effective strategy. It’s much harder than it seems.

However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t study the various factors or characteristics of a video that can increase the likelihood of something you create going viral. This is a good habit, because it shows you what makes great content that people want to share.

Take a look at 3 artists who have gone viral in the past few years (I tried my best to not include hip hop artists).

2015: Post Malone with White Iverson:

2016: Rich Brian (Rich Chigga) with Dat Stick:

2017: Clairo with Pretty Girl:

If you’re not familiar with these videos, I would watch them and pay close attention to what elements or characteristics these artists have and what stands out in their songs and videos. I will touch on some of these things in this blog. After watching, you should notice reoccurring elements in Hobo Johnson’s song and in each of these 3 example videos.

The fact still remains that you shouldn’t sit around and bank on trying to manufacture a video or song so it will go viral. But, if this is still a channel you want to pursue, there are key elements that can increases your opportunity. If you’re interested in learning the science of going viral, check out my other blog.

One last point. Hobo Johnson even said himself that he was caught off guard that this was the video out of all things that caught on.

More often than not, it would appear that artists achieve viral success when it’s unexpected. I have yet to come across an artist who has gone viral because they intentionally were trying to or knew they were absolutely on the right path to becoming a viral success. Authenticity is so important nowadays that we can detect bullshit and people who are trying too hard.

You don’t need to go viral to be a success, but sometimes it just takes that one song or video to trigger a chain reaction for everything that you’ve worked for to come into fruition.
 

2) You can do something different and still become successful being yourself.

“He is definitely talented and different.”

I’m sure we’re all familiar with this message, but I think it’s important to reinforce in today’s society. It’s easy to get caught up in trends and conform to what is popular, especially in music.

For several years now (thanks to the internet), we’ve been seeing a shift with all types of different people becoming popular who don’t necessarily fit into the typical mold, more so then in the past it seems. There’s a market for all types of people who are: awkward, not physically fit, weird, quirky, dorky, gay, goofy looking, scrawny, shy, unattractive, have different body types or strange styles, dress funny or don’t conform to gender roles.

Because we have the ability to become our own media company (a Gary Vee reference) via social media, there’s more room for diversity and opportunity for different niches in music.

Hobo has created his own distinct sound and style that resonates with others like him. There isn’t anyone that I know that comes close to his voice.

This shift is a sign. People like different. In other words, there’s more opportunity to be accepted for who you are because it’s easier to find and connect with people who are like you through the internet.

This doesn’t mean intentionally trying to be different or over the top just to gain attention. It needs to be authentic, which ties into the next point.
 

3) People really appreciate vulnerability and authenticity.

“I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety my whole life and I think that’s why I enjoy his art. Not too often you see people these days being vulnerable on purpose.”

I think artists and musicians put themselves in vulnerable positions in varying degrees through their lyrics and performances. Music has always been an emotional and personal outlet, but I think we’re seeing a higher level of it now.

Even Kanye West has openly talked about his addiction to opioids, insecurities of being overweight and bipolar diagnosis.

When you really open yourself up, I feel it makes it easier for others to emotionally connect with you and relate to your music. It puts you on the same level as your fans. In a culture of superficiality and status, vulnerability brings out a layer of authenticity that people can trust and resonate with.

Some topics are so sensitive that we are taught not to talk about them, like insecurities, addictions and mental illness. In western culture, discussion of these topics can be seen as a sign of weakness that brings about shame and embarrassment.

There is social pressure to present an image of ourselves in a positive light on social media all the time, because we think that’s what others want to see. I see this quite frequently in artist bios.

Of course we want to highlight our achievements and accolades, but I believe sharing the struggles and challenges we experience are just as important because it makes for a good story. To me, music is about connection and oftentimes as Hobo says, “not feeling so alone.”

Eligh of the Living Legends, an artist whom I work with, is someone who openly talks about his addiction to heroin and is now 12 years sober from all substances. His brand has grown organically around sobriety, and many of his hardcore fans really relate to him, especially ones who deal with addiction themselves. Many of them will reach out to ask for advice and guidance. Because he allows himself to be open and vulnerable, he’s developed a deeper relationship with his fans.

Although Hobo Johnson’s persona can come off as slightly exaggerated, it’s clear that he’s coming from a place of real life struggles when he touches on topics of loneliness, anxiety, low self-esteem, depression and the hardships of growing up in a broken family. How he expresses his emotions clearly resonates with his fans:

“He sounds like he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown… hella relatable.”

“Dude, lyrically your analogies are the shit. They’re honest, creative and still very relatable. You have a lot of endearing qualities that really make you seem very much like the rest of us, shy, awkward, maybe a little ADD. Heard Peach Scone the other day and became an instant fan.”

“It is refreshing to finally hear someone that brings up inner emotions and someone who is so real and in your face and no bullshit. I’m happy there are still people like that left. I like the idea of putting your life in a song and just blast it all out in the open.”

“I have to say, the main reason I am a fan of you, Hobo Johnson, is that you’re real. Your emotions and lyrics are raw and extremely relatable. You’re very very unique. Seems like you have been through a lot of shit in your young life, and I have as well. That’s why I can relate so well.”

Hobo has a unique energy that even if you don’t necessarily relate, you can respect the art and what he brings. Although I knew of him before he blew up, I was never a fan, but I did appreciate his emotionality and vulnerability.
 

4) Nothing gets people talking more than controversy.

“I honestly don’t know if this is rubbish or pure gold. This is like the 100th time I’ve heard it as well.”

We know that beef and controversy in music helps get people’s attention and sell records (back when people use to buy them). In our social media driven world, anything polarizing that gets people debating and arguing is great for exposure and social transmission.

Not that Hobo Johnson is a “controversial” artist, but he has definitely stirred up a lot of discussion and even confusion about the type of music he does.

Common questions and issues that often come up when talking about Hobo Johnson:

• Is this really hip hop or rap?
• Is he a rapper or slam poet?
• Is the song good or trash?
• Is he creative or creepy?
• In Peach Scone, is the crush on his friend scary or unhealthy?
• Is he misogynistic?
• Is he actually talented?
• Is he exaggerating too much?

I think part of this “controversy” has to do with this concept of music genres being challenged from crossover artists and blending of musical styles. Apparently people have a problem when artists don’t have clear genre lines to define and categorize them.

Hobo Johnson has described his style as “low-fi hip hop with folk-punk influence.” A similar thing happened with Post Malone when he first came on the scene and people tried to describe his music. Although he calls his music “genre-less,” others have called it a fusion of hip hop, country, grunge, R&B and electric folk.

As a result of his popularity and apparently ambiguous nature, Hobo Johnson has received a lot of negative attention.

“I keep seeing his name on Facebook, but I have no idea who he is and why he’s getting so much negative attention. He keeps getting death threats, his apartment was broken into and his mom possibly being doxed…”

Here’s what his critics had to say:

“This is just awful. I cringe every time I hear his voice which is all the time because these videos keep getting passed around. Stick something sharp in my ears instead.”

“This shit is garbage. Fake deep. Creepy and cringy shit from some weirdo stumbling over his words and staring oddly into the camera.”

“The musicians don’t have much talent. Neither does he, and all he talks about is being in the friendzone. It’s fucking dumb.”

“Seems like nobody’s allowed to have a negative opinion or critique on this man’s music without an 80 comment reply of people calling that person a dick or an idiot for having an opinion. This kid has some lyrics I can dig, but his exaggerated emotions to give off his persona feels forced …. Like birthing a child forced.”

As you would expect, his fans will defend him and share their perspectives:

“I don’t understand how people believe the lyrics to Peach Scone are misogynistic. It seems like the opposite to me. What I got from the lyrics is that it’s about a man who loves a girl who is in a relationship with someone else. Even though it hurts him, he realizes that he wants her to be happy. The lyric towards the end… I just hope she doesn’t get hurt…is probably my favorite. It shows how much he cares for her.”

You often hear sayings like, ‘you know you’ve made it or become successful when you have haters’. I use to think it was silly, but from a marketing and branding perspective, it actually makes a lot more sense to me now. Hating, controversy and debating get people worked up. As a result, they comment and share more.

You also hear the saying, ‘any press is good press’. Polarizing views feed into social sharing and give you more exposure. This doesn’t mean you should create controversy on purpose to gain exposure, but be aware of its impact.
 

5) The power of social proof and influence is powerful.

“I went from not knowing who tf u were, to wtf is this??, to “ehh its ok”, to “Peach Scone” being stuck in my head and now I’m a fuckin groupie all in a matter of 48 hours. Seriously love you right now! Your music speaks to my soul lol 1.7k people felt the same.”

By now, we’re all aware of the power of social proof. It’s the reason why most artists obsess over how many followers or subscribers they have on social media. You know you are being subconsciously judged by the numbers displayed on your social media accounts.

It’s all about shaping a favorable image to those who don’t know you. We often associate these vanity metrics as a sign of quality. However, it’s not as influential as we might think, because it can be easily faked.

The one thing you can’t fake is when thousands of people share your content, and that’s powerful social influence. People shared that Peach Scone video on Facebook 130k times. The actual share number is even higher, because it doesn’t take into account the people who shared it after that and the shares of the Youtube video.

When things go viral and get passed around like the Hobo Johnson video, there’s a lot of interesting social science going on. What others think can influence our own perceptions of what we think is a “good” song.

You might think that anything that is “good” would naturally become popular or successful, whether we’re talking about music, books, art or movies. Historically, this has not always been the case. Many famous artists and authors have been passed on and rejected many times in their career before making it big. Why is that?

Matthew Salganik, a Princeton Sociologist, conducted a study to understand that very question.

In the experiment, he set up a website where people could listen and download music for free. It contained a list of songs from new, local artists that no one had heard of. Song order was shuffled and participants could see what others had liked and downloaded. Over 14,000 people were randomly placed into 8 different groups, or worlds, that all started with the same initial conditions.

Theoretically, the best songs should be the most popular in all 8 worlds. However, that was not the case. Some songs that were the most popular in one world, were one of the least popular in another. The conclusion was that quality or talent alone isn’t a predictor of success. Social influence plays a big role as well.

In most cases, social influence isn’t enough to make something that is actually “bad” be considered “good” or vice versa. The experiment showed that quality was correlated with success. While it may not completely change your perception of what is “good,” it’s enough to tip the scales to get people to pay attention rather than scroll past it in the news feed, especially when it is seen frequently.

This is only a brief rundown of the study. You can read it in full here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/musiclab.shtml

This is why shared content is powerful. When people share your content and it goes viral, we interpret it as being too difficult to fake. As viral marketing expert Jonah Berger states, “Social influence only works when other people’s opinions or behaviors are observable.” In the context of the experiment, we take into account what others think and do to shape our own preferences.

“This randomly came up in my Facebook feed: hated it, couldn’t stop watching it, COULDN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT AND MISSING IT FOR DAYS. Found it on YouTube bc I remembered the lyrics, have replayed it 5 times.”
 

6) Even with more exposure, you still need to build your brand.

“Maybe Hobo Johnson will use his music to become some kind of bad ass mental health advocate.”

It seems like many artists out there think that exposure is all they need to become “successful.” To be exposed or discovered is a short term thing. You need people to actually stick around for the long term. This is where your brand comes in.

In my opinion, having a strong brand played a big role for Hobo Johnson becoming a viral sensation and resonating with so many people.

I won’t touch too much more on branding, since I talk about it in a bunch of other blogs. However, the two things I want to point out is that his brand comes from an authentic place and it is consistent.

Hobo Johnson’s persona may seem a bit exaggerated, but at the core of it, it is still an authentic extension of who he is. A self-deprecating, neurotic guy who deals with insecurity and being in the friend zone.

His brand ties very well with his story about getting kicked out of the house and living out of his 1994 Toyota Corolla at the age of 19 – hence the name Hobo Johnson (Real name is Frank Lopes).

For as long as I’ve known of him, his brand, look and style has been unchanged. Same voice. Same weird look. Same delivery and awkward sense of humor. Look back at all his stuff and you’ll see the same consistent characteristics of who he is.

When you look at his content, website, posts and videos, there’s a consistent feel that really comes off as his own. Bad grammar, cheesy and outdated graphics, corny / amateurish style and totally not professional, which makes him more relatable. He comes off as someone who’s doing really badly at trying to fit in; unconfident, unsure of himself, but it plays well to his “hobo” persona.

Even the music video he released after blowing up is consistent with his brand:

“This music video is so oddly aesthetic since it’s the complete opposite…if you know what I mean?”

His tagline on Instagram reads:
Songwriter. Poemer. AbletonLiver. Piano Player Kinda.

His mailing list is titled “join our cult.”
https://www.hobojohnson.com/cult

This is his Kickstarter campaign from early 2017:
Kickstart Hobo Johnson’s Kinda Good Music Career
 

Additional Resources

 
If you’re interested in hearing more about Hobo Johnson and his story, check out the links below.

Interview with Anthony “The Needle Drop Guy” Fantano

DJ Booth Article: I Really Wanted to Hate Hobo Johnson… But I Couldn’t

Hipster Rapper Hobo Johnson Is Going Viral — & It’s All Thanks To THIS Music Video!

The post Going Viral: 6 Important Lessons Artists can Learn from the Rise of Hobo Johnson appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.

As many know, the Facebook newsfeed has been controlled by complex algorithms to determine what posts and content will show up in your feed based on a number of variables including: who you follow, what you post and your past interactions on the platform.

Back in 2016, Facebook announced a change to their news feed algorithm that would prioritize posts from friends and family and bring them to the top of your feed. Personally, I haven’t notice much of a difference since then, but it looks like they’re not done yet.

On January 11, 2018, the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a big upcoming change on his Facebook page. Adam Mosseri, Head of News Feed, followed up with a blog that outlined these changes.

In a nutshell, because space in the news feed is limited, Facebook wants users to see “less public posts from businesses, brands and media” in their news feeds and more content from their friends and family. More specifically, they want to prioritize content that encourages “meaningful social interactions between people.” Facebook realized that the platform has become a passive content consumption experience, so they want to move away from that.
 

Why is Facebook doing this now?

 
Facebook wants to put “friends and family at the core of the experience” to strengthen our relationships and improve our well-being and happiness.

“The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos — even if they’re entertaining or informative — may not be as good.”
– Mark Zuckerberg

In a way, you can interpret this big change as Facebook returning back to its roots, where there was less focus on brands and businesses and more on people interacting with each other. For years now, Facebook has been oversaturated with content and noise, which could be why people have spent so much more of their time on other social media platforms.
 

What does this mean for music artists?

 
Just like with any other brands or businesses, musicians will need to change their strategy on how to reach their fans on Facebook. Before we get to that, here are some specific ways the new Facebook changes will impact you as a brand:

1) It will be harder to reach your fans organically on Facebook.

Users will see more posts from friends and family and less public content from brands, businesses and media. Organic reach before this change was only at 2%, so you can expect to see it drop even lower.

The VP of Facebook News Feed, Adam Mosseri, tells TechCrunch, “I expect that the amount of distribution for publishers will go down because a lot of publisher content is just passively consumed and not talked about. Overall time on Facebook will decrease, but we think this is the right thing to do.”

He continues on explaining the impact of the new process by stating:

“As we make these updates, Pages may see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease. The impact will vary from Page to Page, driven by factors including the type of content they produce and how people interact with it.”

2) Certain content will be demoted.

Posts will be ranked differently, giving priority to “posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people,” according to Facebook.

Video and articles tend to be passively consumed. Since content like memes, quote graphics and short consumable videos usually drive more likes and shares, but not really comments, you can expect them not to rank high in the news feed as well. But if Facebook’s algorithm categorizes the content, even video and news articles, as a discussion driver, it will probably rank higher in news feeds.

3) Posts that inspire back and forth discussion will be bumped up.

The main focus of these changes is to bolster interactions with people, as opposed to users engaging with brands. In other words, they want fans interacting with other fans, as opposed to fans interacting with musicians or artists.

Content examples Facebook indicates would get boosts from generating conversations would be live videos, Facebook Group posts, local business events and trusted news sources on important issues.

4) Comments are more valuable than likes or shares.

Posts and content that drive people to comment and interact more with each other will be a stronger ranking factor in the algorithm, but how that is determined is unknown.

However, we do know that longer comments will have more weight than short quick responses. Liking a post is a more passive engagement, so that won’t mean much to Facebook. Shares can be considered a form of passive engagement unless it’s posted with a comment. At this point, even though it’s speculation, I think people will more likely see your content if fans share to their page, as opposed to seeing it directly coming from another Facebook page.

5) External links to other sites and articles may be penalized.

Facebook wants people to stay on the platform and have the interactions take place there. Taking people away to articles or links outside of Facebook is not good because people are less likely to comment once they are off of Facebook.

This is something Facebook has already been doing. Some artists I know try to game the system by posting links in the comments, but I’m sure Facebook is aware of this workaround.

6) Facebook Ad prices will go up.

Exposure in the news feed has become even scarcer now, so the only guaranteed way to get eyes on your content is through Facebook Ads. Naturally, supply and demand dictate the cost for Facebook Ads will increase.

7) Algorithm kicks in at the post level.

It was also announced that personal profiles will be subject to the same changes as business profiles. This means that the algorithm will work at the post level and won’t account for where the post is coming from.

Some artists may like to share their music-related posts from their personal Facebook page as a way of circumventing the algorithm. However, with these changes, it won’t matter.
 

How should you adapt to these changes on Facebook?

 
As an artist, it’s going to be a unique challenge to adapt to these new changes.

Stop Engagement Baiting – Years ago, asking fans to like, share or comment in the caption used to be a viable strategy to get people to engage with your posts. Even before this change, Facebook has already been penalizing posts that ask fans to take specific actions, so it goes without saying that you can’t ask fans to comment with each other.

“Using “engagement-bait” to goad people into commenting on posts is not a meaningful interaction, and we will continue to demote these posts in News Feed.”

Encourage Fans to Use ‘See First’ Feature – This is one guaranteed way you can get your posts in your fans’ news feeds without having to pay. In the ‘Following’ tab right below the cover photo, fans have the option to make your page a ‘see first’ in their news feed. This makes sure your fans see your post at the top of their news feeds.

Use Facebook Live – When it comes to video, it sounds like Facebook will favor those who go live, as it’s been shown to create more dialogue and interaction than regular recorded video. For those who are not familiar with this feature, I put together this article: Facebook Live Guide for Musicians.

Research has shown that live videos lead to greater discussion among viewers and get an average of six times as many interactions as pre-recorded videos.

Learn Facebook Ads – If you haven’t already been using Facebook or Instagram Ads, now is the time. You will definitely have to pay to reach your Facebook fans, so it’s important to learn on your own how to do it effectively or find an expert to create ads for you.

Try Facebook Groups – Just from what I’ve been observing so far in my own news feed, I see that Facebook Groups I’m in are being prioritized over business, media or brand posts. If you have a Facebook Business Page for your music, you should be able to create a Facebook Group. Don’t do it purely as an attempt to circumvent these changes; however, if you have a large enough fan base, creating a special fan club with Facebook Groups could be something worth experimenting with.

Ask Questions – Obviously, what better way to spark conversation then to ask your fans a question!? It could be a text update or you can include an engaging photo. As mentioned earlier, longer comments are valued more than quick one or two-word responses. The tricky part with asking questions is you want fans to comment with each other and not necessarily just with you, the artist.

A couple years ago, Immortal Technique asked his fans in post to respond to the question “How did you first hear about my music?” This question received over 5.1k comments, which was a lot compared to the comments he got in other posts. The cool thing was people started talking to each other, because some of them shared a similar story.

Now this isn’t the perfect example that Facebook is looking for, but I really like this simple question that drove so many people to comment. The cool thing was Immortal Technique said he was going to try and read every story, which probably pushed more people to share. Apparently my story was like many others as it got 86 likes on that post.

Focusing on Quality over Quantity (Post Less) – Keep in mind that one of the problems that prompted this whole change in the first place was that there was an oversaturation of public posts. Feeding low quality posts is just adding to the noise, something Facebook does not want. The days of posting just to post are over.

“Pages making posts that people generally don’t react to or comment on could see the biggest decreases in distribution. Pages whose posts prompt conversations between friends will see less of an effect.”

Reduce or Avoid Promoting Shows on Facebook – This also means stopping automated reminders for upcoming shows from sites like Bandsintown. These types of posts have, in my experience, produced low engagement and result in more bad than good, especially with these changes.

In general, I have noticed posting about upcoming shows with a typical flyer tends to have a lower engagement on Facebook. You should limit these type of posts or ensure that they are done creatively. On the other hand, promoting a Facebook Event for your show may be bit better with these news feed changes.

I think the problem is that fans are less likely to engage with a post about a show that’s not in their area. A better option is to encourage fans to track or follow you on Bandsintown or Songkick (Spotify) because they get email notifications when you’re performing in their area.

Don’t Depend Only on Social Media – The changes discussed in this article show what it isn’t smart for artists to only depend on social media as a way to reach and stay in touch with fans. You are at the mercy of business decisions that you have no control over.

This is why having an email list is recommended. The reach is generally higher with an email list compared to social media, and you have ownership of your fan’s information. Read up on how to start building your email iist.

Watch for Trending Topics – It makes sense that people are more likely to talk about and have discussions on a relevant and timely topic. However, you should be careful with controversial, religious, social or political topics. Nothing gets people to interact with each other more than controversy. As long as the topic is relevant to your brand and what you stand for as an artist, then it could be a good way of generating conversation. Just don’t ever provoke your fans solely as a means to get comments.
 

Question for you

 
A month after the announcement in January, I’m already starting to notice more of my friends’ posts on the top of my news feed. Have you noticed the changes yet?

The post Major Facebook News Feed Change in 2018: Here’s How Musicians Should Adapt appeared first on D4 Music Marketing.