In this article, we are going to see how to promote your music on social media platforms.
Unlike a website or blog where you will have to pay for a domain or hosting to keep it relevant.
But where the needle pinches when trying to tailor your music promotion strategy on social media platforms is when you just don’t know the strategies to implement.
Yes! There are definite strategies you need to develop and follow if you really want to get a positive result out of your music promotion on social media platforms.
And if you are able to stick to and read this article to the end, you will be conversant with all those strategies that definitely work.
But before I reveal those strategies, let us first and foremost try to get an understanding of the following facts and points about how to promote your music on social media platforms:
- What is music promotion?
- Definition of social media platforms.
- Examples of social media platforms.
What is music promotion?
As an artist, your music is the product and service you need to showcase to the public for consumption. And if you get it right, you make a living from it.
But the challenge of getting it right lies in making this music available to a larger, and most importantly; the right audience.
Thus, music promotion is the art of making sure your music is available in the right places so that the right audience can consume it.
Definition of social media platforms.
Social media platforms exist as websites or applications that enable their users to create and share content with the people they are following.
It is a medium whereby contents such as messages, images, audio, videos, etc are broadcast to a significant section of the general public who are using that particular website or app.
Examples of social media platforms.
There are lots of social media platforms already existing as well as emerging ones, and some of them include:
- YouTube
- Instagram.
- TikTok etc.
Now let’s quickly move on to see how to promote music on social media platforms.
How to promote music on social media platforms.
Below is a step-by-step guide on how to promote music on social media platforms:
- Know the right social media platforms for musicians.
- Optimize your social media accounts.
- Avoid posting too many links.
- Create other content besides music to engage your followers.
- Be consistent.
- Interact and network with your audience.
1. Know the right social media platforms for musicians.
The very first step to take in promoting your music on social media platforms is to know the right social media platforms for musicians.
This is because all the social media platforms do not seem to work well for musicians.
As a matter of fact, most of the social media platforms were even created without the musician or music business in mind.
And their owners expect artists to use music blogs and forums to achieve the aim of their music promotion.
But that notwithstanding, great music teachers have studied, analyzed, and found the strategies that music artists can utilize to achieve music promotion goals on several social media platforms.
Some of them have been known to work immediately while others usually take time to work perfectly well.
And because of that, you need to really study all the platforms that work well for musicians; before you can achieve the needed results.
The social media platforms we immediately love to recommend and that work well for musicians are:
You can click on the respective links to study how to promote your music on each of the above social media platforms.
2. Optimize your social media accounts.
Your number one goal and target on social media platforms are to ensure people immediately recognize you as an artist, once they view your social media accounts.
And you do that easily by optimizing your social media accounts.
There are definite or various ways you can do so, but the most important, across all social media platforms; is to ensure you have your profile image and short musician bio in check.
For your profile image, the best is to upload artwork of your latest release; be it a single, EP, cover song, or album.
And for the short musician bio, make sure you help people easily and immediately recognize your genre of music.
You can say something simple as “My name is John Mark, musically known as Johnny Mae, I am a hip-hop/rap artist of the 20th century…”
This will quickly help someone who loves hip hop/rap music to immediately follow or connect with your account.
As a rule of thumb, make sure you use the same style across all your social media platforms for consistency’s sake.
3. Avoid posting too many links.
If there is one thing all social media platforms hate the most, it is the word “links”.
This is because links tend to take people away from one particular social media platform to another.
And that decreases their engagement rate
In other words, every social media platform wants its users to spend so much time on it, reading messages, listening to audio, watching videos, etc.
So when you post links that will stop people from doing so, they are definitely going to work against you.
That is why they build an online robot known as an “algorithm”, which ensures post that comes with links, as well as those without or with little engagement, are prevented from reaching a wider audience.
To however overcome this, ensure you publish all your content directly on each of the social media platforms.
You can also check the ones that will allow you to connect to each other so that when you post on one the post is also published directly to the other.
Facebook and Instagram work perfectly well for this.
4. Create other content besides music to engage your followers.
As we all know, you will not be releasing music every single day or even twice a week.
Our advice on music release is always to keep 3 to 4 months interval; so you can really get to promote the current release before putting out another.
But social media requires you to post often. For example, YouTube’s minimum is 3 videos a week, and Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc are unlimited.
Posting often is what will help you to beat the social media algorithm, because people will tend to engage with some of those contents to enable the algorithm to spot and push them out.
For that reason, you must think of how to come up with content ideas that will enable you to post every now and then on your social media platforms.
Never join the league of those artists who only post on social media platforms when they have a new release.
5. Be consistent.
Consistent equals the number of times you post on your social media platforms.
As we said in the last point above, you must work out a means of posting on your social media platforms as often as possible.
So once you come up with the content ideas, also create a schedule that will enable you to create and post those content as you should on your social media platforms.
6. Interact and network with your audience.
Your audience is your customers, those you expect to consume your music anytime you release it.
And you should never expect an audience who does not understand you that much to ever consume your music whenever you drop.
You need people who feel for you, besides falling in love with the kind of music you make; to consume your music.
For that reason, you need to make sure you interact and connect with your audience to build that rapport that will make them feel you.
Interacting and connecting with your audience on social media can be as simple as going into their post and DM to make your own contributions.
Don’t wait until they comment on your own post before you make the interaction possible.
Thus, you need to follow up on every post from your followers that appears on your feed and write something.
Even a little comment such as “That’s a good idea” can go a long way to make people spot you as a serious artist.
Now once they are seeing your interactions on their own account every now and then, they will also be moved to pay back when they see your own post on their feed also.
As a matter of fact, one of the duties of the algorithm is to sort out the people you interact with the most and drop your post on their feed.
So you can see the most reason why you should have so many accounts you interact with on social media platforms.
Lest I forget, if people are seeing other comments, aside from your music links on their accounts, they will definitely engage with that link whenever they see it.
Good luck!
