This changed the way I thought about social media as a musician

how do you grow an instagram account or any social media really it kind of translates to everything when you're in a genre or in a field that is more niche you feel like you don't have mass appeal you have to find the people who are really passionate about the one thing that you do which is probably more valuable anyway since i went all in on instagram last fall in the fall of 2020 i've experienced about a 3x growth so i had just over 3 000 followers in last september when i'd made the conscious decision granted

i thought instagram was dead at that time it's like you can't grow organically anymore you just can't do it because i would post here and there and nothing would get any traction so i made a conscious decision to see if instagram was really dead and apparently it wasn't so i had just over 3 000 instagram followers uh in september of 2020 i decided i'm gonna post daily uh and there was actually a post by an artist that i really admired called blank forms i'll put that on the screen because there's a period in there that

you'll miss if you just hear me say that and he kind of laid out his philosophy of not showing results but just every day showing up doing the work showing the work and letting the audience decide from there and from the moment i saw that i said okay i'm just going to do daily post from for like i don't know i said like a month at first and just see what happens backtracking a little bit i had built that 3 000 followers over the course of four years of being an artist on and being on

instagram so it it was like you know that was it that was all that i could amass at the time and i thought that was pretty good but you know after a month of trying these new strategies i had four thousand so it was like oh well maybe there's something to this so what did i do uh what results did i see from it those are all the things that i want to talk about in this video if you'll stick around so in terms of the actual strategies that i used and how i did this

daily post which i already mentioned i was just creating content a lot of content i would do like long-form jams as they're called with pieces of gear around the studio filmed them and i would chop them up into you know 30-second one-minute clips and i would post them as videos on instagram uh all the all the while increasing my quality of the cameras that i was using and all of that because you know there's a lot of good content on there and you want to kind of at least be at the level that everyone else

and hopefully stand out in some way my thought behind doing daily posts at the time was i thought that that was like an algorithm thing that magically instagram loved you if you posted once a day and i don't know if that's true but it is true that the more you post the more opportunities that you have to be seen by not just your followers but other people who are interested in similar niches that you're into the kind of side benefit uh that was probably more important than the thing that i was setting out to do

which was trick the robots into liking me more the uh the side benefit was that it kind of taught me the discipline of completing things and the discipline of just showing up every day and consistency um which is really important because we start getting caught up as artists in the idea of like everything's got to be perfect uh and obviously we want to grow and get better all the time but uh that perfectionism can hold us back sometimes so you know i've got this i've got 24 hours to turn around and post again so i've

got to get it done and i'm not going to feel quite so precious about each individual post because i know i've got another one following up tomorrow so if it doesn't do well i'm not like oh my gosh the world is ending i spent two hours shooting and editing this thing and like 14 people watched it and three of them liked it which is really discouraging and to this day it can be discouraging it's something we've all experienced on instagram right you spend a lot of time on a post it doesn't get the engagement but

if you keep moving you'll notice that it doesn't feel quite as defeating when that happens another really important thing that i was doing which i got from kind of like a a hacky social media guru type person um the idea of it uh was that they you know wanted you to comment on like 100 posts a day that were in similar niche and using hashtags that were relevant to what you're doing and uh that was a bit much um but it does work uh or it did especially then so how i kind of adapted that

to something that a real person could do um is i would just scroll through instagram for 15 minutes to start the day or whatever not maybe not the best way to start the day i've found since but i would scroll through and i would legitimately look up like pieces of gear musicians that i genuinely admire and just be a person and engage in a way that a person would you know it seems like common sense but we get so caught up in like fire emojis and uh wanting to know what people can do for us

that we forget to genuinely like be enthusiastic about what other people are doing which people can see through that really quickly right so in addition to acting like a person on other people's posts and genuinely saying things that you mean just be a person in general and show that you're a person so maybe be willing to put a face with your instagram page which i know a lot of us shy away from doing that but i've found since i've been willing to like even do youtube videos where i show my face it's like people know

you more and there's a vulnerability that we've all felt because we don't want to be in front of the camera initially um and i think that putting yourself out there in that way just makes a more personal connection and as musicians we just want people to listen to our music as creatives we just want people to like our post of whatever we've made um but i'm the same way if i'm watching someone and looking at them in the eye i feel like on a screen um there's just more of a connection there they feel more

vulnerable they feel more like me hi so sorry to interrupt me but i did want to mention that i have a instagram growth ebook available for absolutely free that you can download through the link in my description on my website um yeah it's free and it gives you all of this information maybe in a more condensed format so you don't have to listen to me ramble any more than i am right now so now i'd like to turn it back over to myself so just to recap i started out in september of last year with

about 3 000 followers on instagram uh as of today which is the first of december that's when i'm filming this of 2021 uh i'm at 11.5 k on instagram so you may be asking yourself well is it worth it was it worth all of that time and effort that you spent into it and my answer is yeah maybe kind of and the reasons may be different than what you think like yes it is easier to reach more people uh your posts have a better chance of kind of getting on the explore page and stuff if

you have more followers just because it's even though a small percentage of your followers see your posts it's still a larger number of people because you have more followers and more engaged followers hopefully if you've been being a person been being a person yeah the the drawback of instagram that i've found is that if you ever do anything that's slightly outside of the niche where you built your audience like say i did a lot of synthesizer and gear related posts and that's really where i got the bulk of my followers and then i release you

know piano music or i decide i want to launch an online course that's similar to what i do but maybe slightly off from what i do it's really hard to reach new groups of people um because those followers don't really help you out if it's something that they're not used to seeing you'll get a few true fans who will follow you anywhere which is what you really want anyway but it hurts you with reach to new people because you're just not getting the engagement on those posts where you're kind of trying to branch out a

little bit so you kind of feel like you have to stay in your lane which is not a feeling that i ever really want and as an artist i don't think we should ever feel like we're trapped you know put in a cage the other really big issue with instagram which may be changing and it's changed a lot uh just in the last few months i've noticed that hashtags have kind of gone away as being something that's super important they're going trying to be more like a search engine like youtube which would be awesome i

don't think it's totally working that way yet because i've seen a pretty big drop in engagement of course i'm also not quite as consistent as i was like at the height of this because you need time to step back and and create things and then give your brain a chance to live outside the algorithm for a while but it is not a long-term evergreen search engine like youtube there's a reason why i'm shooting this video telling you about what i did on instagram and putting it on youtube because i've kind of grown to see the

value of things that last for a long time so if i had it to do all over again would i poured all that effort into youtube instead of instagram probably probably so in hindsight uh just because people search for things on youtube and if you know kind of how to use keywords and things you can stay in that search engine for a long time when you post something to instagram if it doesn't immediately perform pretty well like in the first few hours it's pretty much gone forever and no one's gonna see it again um again

i hope that that's changing i hope that they are moving to being more of a search platform and keywords uh seo is going to be more important but we'll see we'll see what happens with that so overall i would say yeah i'm glad i did it um if nothing else just for those side benefits that i mentioned of being more consistent being more personable finding new creators and fellow creatives that i really enjoy and have gotten to know and have actually had working relationships with some of them yeah it's been overall a good experience has

been frustrating at times just knowing that your content doesn't survive even if your post performs pretty well it doesn't survive more than like a week or two at most and then it's kind of lost in the void so what am i doing now i'm continuing to use instagram because i have built my largest audience there but i'm focusing more on this youtube channel and building an email list so that i can kind of have ownership over my audience and it's not controlled by an algorithm that's totally outside of our control you probably heard that instagram

can go away at any moment and there's nothing that you can do about it so if you put all your eggs in that basket it's kind of a kind of a tough deal same kind of thing goes for spotify even though that's something that a lot of artists in my genre probably don't want to hear spotify playlist whole other topic for a whole other video oh one more thing uh something that i never hear anyone talk about when they talk about instagram growth they kind of give you this formula of like do this and do

that and the algorithm will like what you are doing there are two variables that i can't tell you whether anything that i've done is gonna work for you or not and that's the fact that you're a different person and your content is different than mine you know you could use these same techniques and double what i've done you could use the same techniques and get half the results that i've gotten i don't know because no one knows and it doesn't mean that your work or you are better or worse than me it just means that

it's different and the algorithm likes some things better than other things and yeah some of it translates to like 60 second clips or 15 second or like .5 second clips like micro reels which i hear is coming uh very soon to instagram which is actually going to be fractions of a second i don't know if you've heard about that um really looking forward to uh creating content for for that platform i'm gonna try to do more of these videos that are like my experience with promotion um music marketing and those kind of things that can

be really daunting and scary if you are just starting out or even if you've been at it for a few years like i have um it can still feel overwhelming so i'm not an expert but maybe i've made some mistakes that you can learn from or maybe i've hit on something that has worked out for me that that i can share that will help you too so if you will getting back to what i talked about earlier hit the subscribe button i am focusing more on this youtube channel you can also sign up for my

email list where i'm going to be sending out both videos like this as well as other music related things like sample packs i've got several sample packs and i'm going to be doing some online courses next year as well and you can be notified of all that stuff by me directly and not some algorithm where you're hoping that it shows you the things that you value and want to see so hope you got something out of this video hope you do really well in 2022 on instagram and whatever else you're trying to do and i

hope your art gets heard slash seen by as many people as possible