4 Reasons Your Instagram Account Isn’t Growing | Artist Music Marketing Strategy

with constant algorithm changes it can be incredibly difficult to work out what to do what's working and how to be consistent with it but I'm here to tell you your strategy probably isn't working and here's a full breakdown of why and how to ensure that it does work and you get the fans that you deserve because imagine posting and immediately getting likes immediately getting comments your DMs are full of people saying they love your music your story reviews are flying and anytime you want to promote a song a gig some merchandise people are there eagerly

awaiting it it's totally doable especially with these new algorithm changes well the first thing that most of you have probably seen for quite a while now is the feed isn't chronological so this has put a huge amount of pressure on all creators but especially artists because now it's not chronological it's basing everything on engagement because now your post will be pushed out if it's getting engagement so this is likes this is comments this is saves this is shares Instagram wants to see that people are liking it so they can push out to your followers more

this may seem frustrating but it means that you can kind of hack it quite easily it means that your content can be pushed out even more than it was before and pushed out to new people and the easiest way of doing this is through captions the post itself yes it's important but the captions are where you can really push people to engage you can share a huge caption now basically tell a story which gives you the ability to capture people make them read make them engage with the post which means it's more likely to be

pushed out to more people so for example if you want to post a live picture of you playing a gig tell the story in the description how you got to that point how excited you were that you've sold out the event or potentially something funny happened that night tell the story don't just put us playing Coco because yeah we can all see it you don't need to explain the photo in the description we have eyes so use that space to really engage people but as well as that now because it's not chronological you don't need

to post as much it's all about engagement so posting on the feed should only be for very important things something special and no that does not mean a screenshot of your your Spotify think about what people want to see the insights into you as an artist use the things that you're doing in your career to share with your fans rather than creating content for the sake of content you could honestly post once a month and that would be absolutely fine focus on quality over quantity the main reason being as well this feed is aesthetically pleasing

it's not for raw content anymore and we'll go on to why later on in the video but that feed is for aesthetically pleasing content something that shows you as an artist represents your brand and the beauty of that is you can literally get press shots and live shots all these aesthetically pleasing photos and just dump them think of engaging captions reply to all your comments and Instagram will push it out the main reason it needs to be aesthetically pleasing as well is industry professionals are looking at that and we recently spoke to Mike Lopez who

was a Spotify editor for years and he said that this was important they want to see that they can guess your genre just by looking at your Instagram and if you go to a Spotify editorial right now and go through all the artists on it and look at their in Instagrams you'll see this they're aesthetically pleasing it represents their sound so use that feed post as a bit of a portfolio which I think and hopefully will take the pressure off you next up the huge one which no one can ignore is Instagram reals I think

if you told me the Instagram reals were going to be successful a couple of years ago I would have thought you were stupid because that's what Tik Tok is but Instagram reals have blown up it's a way for artists to get discovered so Instagram in the past was like a Catch net you could catch all of your fans from every other platform and keep them engaged on Instagram whereas now it's that plus a way to get discovered so reals are being pushed out massively by Instagram because although they're being used by quite a few they're

not being taken advantage of by majority so if you are posting on reals they're more likely to push you out reals is where you can show a little bit more personality really simple tips for reals try and drag people in within the first 3 seconds because that's what they're going to see when they're scrolling their feed if they're scrolling and they see a clip of your real and it's not engaging with the within the first couple of seconds they're not going to continue watching so think of a way you can hook people in with within

the first 3 seconds and that can be the text on the screen it can be what's happening in the video really think about how you can pull people in and take advantage of the features that Instagram reals has so text on the screen captions it will literally create the captions for you so if someone's scrolling with the sound off they can at least read it and I'm more likely to click and view the whole thing again you don't need to be super consistent with reals you don't need to be posting one a day but the

more you post on them the more likely you have a chance to actually break on there because it shows Instagram you're being consistent however it always goes back to quality over quantity because if you're posting over and over and over and it's getting no engagement it's most likely not good content really work out what's working with your audience and with new fans whether this is covers and you change up the genre whether this is live performances whether you like doing skits think about what you're comfortable creating and try and create a few a week but

again no pressure quality over quantity oh and if you are going to repurpose Tik Tok content which is completely fine make sure you don't have the Tik Tok Watermark we've seen it firsthand it literally destroys All Views probably because Instagram have literally stolen Tik tok's idea so they don't want to push that out the next thing that Instagram are going heavy on is Shadow Bunning people that are faking engagement so buying followers buying comments buying likes this will not only lead to your ego being massively hurt when you put something up and realize that no

real people care but it will also lead to Instagram blocking anyone seeing your content so if you're buying any of these things or you're following and unfollowing stop immediately and potentially even look into starting a new account it might feel rough if you have like 10K followers but if only a 100 of them are real if you post on your story saying I've created this new account they should move across there's absolutely no point having these fake numbers we often hear people saying like oh but labels will sign me if I have this amount of

following on this amount of streams they have software to see where those followers are coming from they have software to see where the streams are coming from if it's fake they're a lot more likely to not sign you than sign you because they know they're not going to make any money from you they know that there's no real fans there there's no potential so the only person you're actually pleasing with this is yourself you're just stroking your own ego stories stories are still so important this is one that I would say is more important than

any of the other features because stories are what get your existing audience hooked and it's the easiest way to promote because people can directly click a link and go to another platform so you can push people to Spotify you can push people to YouTube you can push them wherever you want if you've got their attention with stories this is the only place where you want to be consistent there is absolutely no point posting one story a week the reach will be rubbish and people aren't likely to click it they probably not even likely to see

it because it will be at the end of their stories so you want to be consistent with these but there is so little pressure on stories and I think so many artists forget this you can literally post a picture of your coffee and then you'll walk to the studio and then you in the studio then a clip of you performing in the studio like just Capture Moments throughout the day and and that is the beauty of stories it's up for 24 hours so if it doesn't perform well you got another another chance tomorrow and the

day after and the day after Instagram's not going to punish you for having a few bad days of stories they are going to reward you for actually posting on stories so try to be as consistent as you can on here the example I used earlier not every artist can do some artists have full-time jobs some artists have children they have a lot of things going on so they're not focusing on the music all day every day however you do have other routes you can go down for example using text you can have a black screen

and just write out something and then people might reply to it and then you have the ability to screenshot that DM and put that on your story and then someone else replies to it you can have constant dialogue with your fans which doesn't require you to be showing your everyday life there's content in everything you do in life and I don't that sounds really depressing because it sounds like you have to make content from your life but it's a good thing because there's content from anything that you do which puts so little pressure on you

as an artist definitely use what the features that Instagram stories have to offer for example q&as polls links take advantage of those because they're there to be used and they're more likely to increase engagement and finally with the stories don't be afraid to repeat yourself I post about how much I love coffee you're going to see a picture on my story every single day maybe even twice of a different coffee cuz I bloody love coffee and that's absolutely fine it's in line with who I am as a person and this will work for you as

well if you have something that you do every single day share it because it's true to who you are and people are going to get to a point where if you don't post it they're going to say huh I wonder if they did that today and it should come naturally to you because you're a passionate artist you love what you do show that I think a lot of artists will be surprised by what I've said today the idea of quality over quantity the idea of putting little pressure on yourself but I think what we're seeing

more and more is artists hating social media blaming social media for their lack of success but really social media is just a way of spreading the word about yourself telling people about your music telling people about your art your brand your story your messaging just because you're not getting good engagement doesn't mean the social media platforms are the devil you're potentially just not using them right so hopefully this video was helpful and hopefully you can change up your strategy put a little less pressure on yourself and enjoy the journey a bit because the minute you

start enjoying creating content is the minute that it actually starts to succeed you can tell when someone's not enjoying it which means it's not the right content for you so enjoy it follow the strategy and you will see the results and if you're really struggling with those content ideas we get information from Tik Tok and Instagram themselves and we put it out to our members every single week we outline any algorithm changes new features and some content ideas as well so I'll leave a link in the description for that one I hope you enjoyed the

video and if you did give it a bit fat like and if you're not subscribed make sure to subscribe and I will see you in the next one