What Artists Should Post On Instagram When First Starting Out

welcome back to another video this is a topic that i've really been putting off covering since we started the channel and the reason for that is it's so difficult and it is incredibly artist independent so in this video i'm going to try and cover as many points as possible and set you up in the best possible way to start posting and growing your following even though you literally have no followers right now so to get started i've made some points on my notepad i'm liking this notepad at the moment it makes videos a lot easier

and then we make sure that we don't miss anything so to start the topic i want to talk about the fundamentals behind instagram and posting on instagram when you have literally no followers because it's a lot different to when you have say 20 000 to 100 000 followers the fundamentals are different so the first point is it's the worst thing ever it is literally like you're sitting there with an instagram account and you've managed to decide your username and possibly got as far as your profile picture and nobody is following you it literally says zero

and you haven't even made a single post yet so where do you even start what even is the point in making a post or putting up an instagram story you're gonna look like the stupidest person in the world with zero followers and an instagram story up so where'd you even start with it and that's what i want to try and cover in this video and just so you're aware it is horrible it's horrible for everyone but every artist has been through it and got through it and you will too so the first one is practice

practice practice now that is a cliche in like every single skill but it does apply to instagram and it often gets overlooked because what artists tend to do is want to wait until they've got a certain number of followers and then they will start posting to those followers but the problem is that when you do get those followers you're not prepared and in practice in order to keep them there and keep them engaged so what happens is if you look at influences in the fitness industry or established artists they manage to post something every single

day and you think how how do you come up with that much content and so many things are going on in your life that you are finding like five to ten things worth posting on your instagram story let alone having pictures to post on your feed and the answer is that they've been doing it for so long that it just becomes second nature and then their their frame of mind shifts into being able to know exactly what to post so even though you don't have any followers you need to know exactly what suits do you

and what suits you on the day-to-day so there is no harm in practicing and now is the time you don't want to get on new music friday and then get a ton of followers from it on instagram and then you don't know what to post and you're not able to keep them there and then you start posting it turns out your audience didn't like it or you didn't like it and then you end up losing that audience as a complete disaster now is your time to practice and get it right and understand what is best

for you and your potential audience and what happens is when you practice it brings me on to my next point which is think with content first and be opportunistic because your frame of mind changes everything that happens in your life becomes an opportunity for content whether you go somewhere whether you see something in the shops your frame of mind instead of thinking something you think it in terms of an instagram post maybe you'll think something is overpriced maybe you'll see a funny shaped piece of fruit in the supermarket and you think that's a funny shaped

piece of fruit but in reality now you're gonna think that's a good instagram post if you do go down that route and it suits your brand of course which we'll get onto later so your men your mind shifts into a mode of being able to create content so easily that you'll wonder how you ever couldn't because you are just constantly coming up with opportunities to make a post so my next point is followers increase exponentially so you need to understand exactly how it happens for an artist it doesn't just shoot up as soon as you

start posting it doesn't just stay flat it's like a curve and i'll show you now hopefully that's coming up on camera but this is basically how your instagram growth is going to go and that it's so important that you understand this and understand where on this graph you are because you could be going for three years and not realize where you are you might be here and you might give up and then six months time you were going to be here if you had just kept posting so you're essentially going to be here like literally

this is your mom basically just your one follower and then you're going to be start posting and start posting and nothing's going to happen you're just going to probably get about 10 followers 20 followers and then suddenly it takes off and then you don't even know where the followers are coming from you have to go to your insights to understand where you where those followers are coming from so it's important to know that so you're not disheartened when you get to here it's meant to be like that and that will always happen like that for

an artist's career so now you've got that graph in mind it takes me on to my next point which is no one cares about you until they do which means that you can't break from instagram you can't have people caring about you all of the time and what you are doing no one's going to instantly fall in love with you because of what you've posted on instagram they're going to come from spotify or come from your music video on youtube and then probably come to your instagram and see what you have going on and that's

when they start to care nobody is going to care what you are putting up straight away when they don't even know you exist maybe they'll come across your post but never heard of you as an artist and then they don't care you have to accept that that you can't convert everyone and the quicker that you accept that the easier it becomes because then you know who you are who you are targeting and why people are coming to you and following you and becoming a fan the final point is don't do stupid because now that you

know all of this if you don't accept all of these points you'll start to do stupid such as following and unfollowing to get your first thousand followers or you end up working with a marketing company who guarantees to grow your instagram following by getting more exposure to your fault to your profile but your posts don't need to change and that that it doesn't work like that there isn't a company out there who can just get people to see your profile yeah you can run ads on your profile but if that company doesn't touch your content

and doesn't optimize your content where's that traffic really coming from do you really think it's real do you really think that suddenly because you're working with this company that your existing content is perfect and it's going to convert and all you needed was that extra boost of traffic from this company it doesn't work like that but if you don't have the right mindset you're easily sold on the wrong services and the wrong product so do bear that one in mind so now we have the fundamentals down this is the part of the video that you've

really come for which is basically what do you post on instagram how do you figure out what you're going to post to your xero followers the first thing you're going to do is define your brand what do you want what is important to you because you've got to like your content as well if you start serving your audience only then you end up not enjoying the content and it shows in the content and you're not able to sustain it for that audience and you attract the wrong audience so firstly what do you want to be

do you want to be mysterious do you want to be funny do you want to just post cool pictures of yourself or do you want to be incredibly talented and show your raw talent every single day there are artists doing all of these things and you need to decide what your brand is going to be once you've got that you need to identify similar artists with that brand no artist is unique enough to have a load of potential fans who aren't a fan of another artist already your fans are going to come from somewhere there's

no one who's got to the age of 15 and have never fallen in love with an artist before that doesn't exist so you need to understand where are you going to pull that audience from where is your brand going to be similar and then take inspiration from them doesn't have to be similar content it can be similar content but take inspiration and do your research and see what they are posting and then see what works for them and see what doesn't look at the likes look at the comments figure out what is getting the engagement

what is that audience liking because now you have your brand you'll start to understand the audience and the types of posts that they are posting in order to get that engagement and you will see that some posts will absolutely tank and some will work and then once you've got that you can start to take your unique approach on it when you have that research and data at your disposal so now you have that you've got a blank profile with nothing on it i want you to make six posts pictures or videos whatever you like just

get six up there and the reason for that is because when you go to a profile on your average phone you see the first six posts therefore you know it is populated you know that there is something there and worth following so when you do make posts further and then people go to your profile that they see that this isn't just your first post you are going to be consistent and continue to make posts now on those posts you don't need to put hashtags or run ads on them or anything like that it's just there

to populate so don't be too precious about it just make sure it's kind of on your brand it's simply just for populating but you are going to have two types of posts you need to plan which posts are going to be for a new audience and which are going to be for your existing audience yes you are going to have some posts that are kind of a hybrid of the two however once you keep posting you will realize what kind of posts attract a new audience and what posts just engage your existing audience so when

you have for the new fans you can put hashtags but there is no point in say having a picture of yourself with a boring caption like had a great day today and then expect it to pull a new audience that one is for your existing audience but it still works for the new audience because when they scroll through your posts when they're deciding whether they want to follow they will see that there's an existing audience there engaged and you are engaging back with them and therefore they will follow so it does serve a purpose to

be serving the existing audience in order to get new followers but you need to understand that there are those types of posts and i know we are talking about instagram today but that serves a purpose for youtube as well you do have different types of videos but i'll come on to that in another video in the early stages no need for stories i'm talking about in your first 10 posts you've got under 30 followers there's no need for stories at that point however stories do become very important when you are starting to get traffic to

your profile when you're seeing traffic come to your profile we are seeing a huge increase in artist followers when they have a story live there's something about that instagram colored ring around your profile picture where people see that is active and they want stories to be able to follow people seem to value stories a lot more than they follow the value feed posts therefore always have a story every single day above 30 followers have a story live even if it's just one or two because you're still in the early stages you're still figuring out you're

still practicing that is how you get more followers you can use hashtags and stories i'm fine with that but as an artist i wouldn't try too hard to get discovered through instagram alone from our experience they're not that good quality fans when they discover you directly from instagram you're an artist you make music let your music do the talking so if they've come from spotify for example they come from youtube therefore they've already heard your music and they're in love with the music first it's a lot easier to convert people into a lifelong dedicated fan

when they come from the music first now you can get people from the content but converting them from the content to the music is a lot more difficult and time consuming because you are banking on them liking your content and then the music which is a lot more niche people do have their types of music that they like and don't like whereas types of content can be a lot more broad so i wouldn't stress too much about getting discovered on instagram i would try and capture people on instagram from those other places and final and

the second last point captions are important so the way the instagram algorithm works is it will push out your feed post the longer people spend on that post so people think that the more people who are liking and commenting on it is what makes it get pushed out actually if people pause their scrolling and look at it for a longer time than other posts that is what makes peop the instagram push it out because instagram doesn't care about how many likes and comments you're getting it doesn't get paid for engagement it gets paid for showing

ads so they want people to spend more time on the platform and if you can show content that you are spending if you can show instagram you are showing in your content that you are spent that you're getting users to spend more time on their platform they will reward you so it's a big misconception i see a lot of people saying the is not favoring me here's a post and they post it on their stories and saying go engage with this because i need the algorithm to push it out it's because people are skipping past

that's why when someone starts an instagram post with hashtag ad and it doesn't get pushed out as much it's because people see it's an ad and then they flick past because they know that it's content that is not necessarily what they signed up for and the final point is no bragging i see this a lot so people are bragging about the number of streams that you have on spotify but it that doesn't make any sense to me because they've either come from spotify and therefore they know how many streams you have or they've come from

instagram and they don't care about how many streams you have because they care about your content and then they're going to listen to the music and then there's also bragging like bragging about rented cars and you rent a lamborghini for the day to look really cool or you're bragging with how much money you've got bragging doesn't work to be able to get people to be able to get followers and convert them into fans so that is one of the biggest mistakes we see in artists is just bragging about numbers bringing about numbers of fans how

many tickets they've sold the fact that they've sold out a show that kind of validation is a bit of a misconception as well you don't need that validation perhaps you if you did want to try and sell tickets you could i do quite like it when artists create a bit of urgency in their ad saying they've only got a limited number of tickets left but bragging that it's sold out doesn't really do much so that covers all of the points i hope that that is able to give you inspiration on what to post on instagram

and we can't give you an answer such as we'll post lots of pictures of nice scenery with a caption like this or post a talking to camera video about this particular topic because it's up to you your instagram user you know what the majority of people across all industries post on instagram and what works it's up to you to decide and lend different topics different types of posts and incorporate it into your brand and incorporate into your content so i hope you found this video useful subscribe if you're not already drop it a like if

you have found it useful and we'll see you in the next video