8 Reasons an Artist's Instagram Doesn't Grow | Promote Music on Instagram

are you putting up great content on your Instagram but nobody's engaging well you're probably making one of these 8 mistakes it doesn't matter how many followers you have on Instagram if they're not engaged followers if they're not liking your post if they're not commenting if they're not watching all of your Instagram stories then they're certainly not going to stream your next track or buy your merch or come to your gig when you announce it on your social media so you need an engaged audience to be a successful artist some artists are getting signed to major

labels like Universal Sony and Warner just because of their social media presence alone so all of your effort that you're putting into your Instagram content if you're not getting the engagement then it's all going to waste imagine having hundreds and hundreds of comments on every single post with people telling you how much they love the content how much they love you and they like everything and they go and stream your music because that's what you should be getting if you've got good quality music so if you're not getting that you're probably making one of these

8 mistakes the first mistake you're probably making is you're taking too much from your audience instead of giving you need to be giving constant good quality content to your audience in order to keep them engaged now what I mean by this is imagine going to a profile and seeing all they've got is out now in capital letters and the down emojis and it's a link to the Spotify to go and stream the track and then you look at the content and all it is is my next track is out now out now pre save it

here store on your stories it just says pre save will stream my new track and it just gets boring all of the new potential followers are going to follow to see that kind of content and your existing followers are just going to get bored by it you need to be making consistent good quality content that people want to see more of and a hack for you is instead of having your out now post on your feed have them as an ad now if people have engaged with your content before they won't mind seeing an ad

for your music so what you do go to the Facebook ad manager and I'll put the link below of where you can get started with this and create a custom audience and the custom audience is going to consist of everyone who has engaged with your previous content and it will collect everyone who is engaged with your previous content and make that your audience so all of the good stuff goes onto your stories and goes onto your feed so when people are scrolling their Instagram timeline I'll be looking through stories that will get an ad that

your music is out now now there's nothing wrong with an ad because obviously they've engaged with your content before but what's amazing about ads is that you only see a post or an Instagram story once so the algorithm will not show the post again to that user if they've already seen it or engaged with it and the Instagram stories they only last for 24 hours and you only watch them once and if you've got less than 10,000 followers you can't do a swipe up link the best thing about ads is you can do a swipe

up link and you can have a link from the post going to your Spotify so that's just amazing because that means that one people can click the link and go and stream your track you can't do that without an ad and secondly the ad will be shown to them more than once an ad can be up to four times on their timeline until they decide to act on it so if they're at work it'll be inappropriate to start listening to music but they see your ad it's not wasted because they might see that ad again

in the evening and there is a good time to listen to your new track so get on the Facebook ad manager and start using ads the second mistake you've probably made is not attracting good quality followers and by that I mean you might have followed an unfollowed to be able to get your followers up or you've DM people asking for a follow now think about it if someone easily follows an account because they've been asked to or you've begged them in the DMS they're probably not good quality follower that means that they followed you because

you asked them to or because you followed them and they didn't want you to unfollow not because of the quality of your content or the quality of your music so when you put up a new post they're probably not going to even see it because they're following so many people because they follow so easily and secondly they never followed you for your good quality content in the first place so they won't even take notice of it so you would rather have one engaged follower who likes your content then 20 followers who aren't engaged so don't

obsess over the number of followers you have because that's just an ego thing that is vanity metrics you want engaged followers so don't do techniques like following unfollowing all of the time because you'll just end up with less engaged followers and even worse if you've got say 30,000 followers and no engagement then the people who do follow you and do engage won't even see your post because the algorithm will see that those people aren't engaging and will push out your trap and your track won't push out your post anymore the third thing is you need

a good bio now if a new follower is coming to see what your profile is all about and they see a bio and all it says is just out now stream my track that is boring that's like every other emerging artist out there you need to think what makes you stand out now that you know the trick of using ads for outnow posts you can put in your bio whatever you want you can really sell yourself sell the content that they are going to be seeing that is why people follow you because they're going to

be following the content that you post you can either say a little bit about yourself keep it quite literal and factual or you can put something quite quirky funny or just something that is going to get people to want to follow and that is something that you're just gonna have to come up with but you can actually fit a lot of text in the Instagram bio just make sure the first couple of lines are the most enticing and attractive bit because there is a c-more option and it is only the first two lines that are

actually visible on mobile and desktop now so first two lines and then you can go into more detail at the bottom the fourth mistake I see is not having interesting enough Instagram stories that is mostly where the activity is on Instagram people just go straight to the stories I'm sure you are the same you go to the stories first and then you go to the feed the feed is usually just kind of aesthetically pleasing pictures or videos these days but the stories are where the action really happens and where all the entertainment happens and if

you don't have in entertaining stories then people aren't going to constantly watch them and you'll go to the back of the queue have you noticed that Instagram doesn't have chronological stories its algorithm based it's who you are viewing the most is what comes first or who gets the most engagement comes first so you need to be getting a huge amount of engagement on your stories now to be honest the first mode we made this mistake as well we took a tip which said that every time you put up a new post on your feet to

get more engagement on it post it on your stories I don't know if you've noticed but we've stopped doing that as often and the reason for that is because if you just bombard your audience with stories which tell you to go and look at a new post it just gets boring and hours our story views just plummeted so what we're concentrating now is making sure every single story is adding value to people it is not just a constant advert and you need to do the same so every single story you put up you've got to

think is this something that people are going to remember and when they see that there is a little highlight there that says I've got a new story up are people going to click it because they want to see more and to be honest if you go to polished with your Instagram stories it will stick out from the other content the user is viewing because most of their friends will just post selfies and talking to camera stuff and you want your content to fit in with all of that so they consume it if it kind of

just sticks out people will just see it as an ad for you as an artist and just skip it so don't be afraid to be raw unedited it's only up for 24 hours what's the worst that can happen now if you want it to be up for more than 24 hours you can have story highlights and I highly recommend using these make sure you've got a good cover art for each highlight and advertise it get people to watch your highlights because that is a good display of your best content and what people are likely to

see and that is my tip number 5 which is make sure that your content is something that people want to see more of you need to be able to build either a story or a theme on your Instagram stories which shows that you are going to be creating consistent content so imagine one of your posts flies and it gets picked up by the algorithm one of the hashtags is really helping you and on the discover section of Instagram your post is coming up do you want people to see is just a worn off post like

it and disappear or do you want people to think I want to see more of this content let's go to the Instagram and see if there's more of it if there is they will hit follow and then you've got another engaged follower so just make sure you creating content that people want to see moral and it's obvious that you've got this ongoing theme and mistake number six is not engaging with the followers that you already have it's human nature to always want more so you always want more followers you're not satisfied you have 1,000 followers

when you dream of having 20,000 you get to 20,000 and you want a hundred thousand we're never satisfied as human beings with what we have and don't let that affect your Instagram strategy where you take your followers for granted if someone replies with just an emoji then reply back to them and say something about the content that they're creating constantly show your audience that you are there in the comments section reading every single one and when they see that you were doing that they will feel appreciated they feel like if they take the time to

comment on your posts then they will know that you've read them and you might engage whereas if you're not engaging with your comments and you're just thinking I deserve all those comments because my content is fire then people aren't going to engage because it's just going to be a boring comment section with no discussion and one tip is reply with a question so don't just reply with some emojis or a statement that ends the conversation if someone comments come back with a question because that creates even more engagement and boosts you up the algorithm again

and it's amazing what happens when you ask someone a question they want to talk to you they want to voice their opinion on your feed and either more discussion you get the higher the algorithm will place your account as something that people want to engage with and mistake number seven follows on from that you're not giving your audience something to engage with you need to whether it's using Instagram stories whether it's using polls asking questions or doing it on your feed itself and asking questions or putting a mini blog post with your opinion on something

give your audience something to engage with and I think the reason artists don't do this is that they are afraid that nobody's going to engage and they're going to be embarrassed but the truth is if these people didn't engage they're worthless to you anyway so don't worry about people seeing that people aren't engaging with your content because they're not seeing the content anyway it really doesn't matter so it's important to try and ask questions to your audience voice your opinion and give them something to engage with don't just be passive with your content because then

your followers will be with you and the final mistake is just not posting enough you need to be posting at least daily and the reason for this is not algorithm related although it probably will help the algorithm the reason for it is it takes a while for people to build a rapport with you to feel like they know you if they just see one single post then they don't feel like they know you if they see you every single day if they're following your story if they're following your journey and they know a bit about

you you they know your opinions and they can see that you are constantly engaging with people and get a feel for who you are then that means that they will engage more with you because they almost feel like you're friends because that's what social media is it is social by definition so they need to feel like they know you they need to feel like if they saw you on the street they know enough about you to go over and say hi so constantly be posting constantly be putting out content out there especially on Instagram stories

because that's the most personable it's the most role and you're putting yourself out there someone who can be engaged with I hope this video has been useful if you want to see more of our content then do subscribe do comment down below because we practice what we preach and we will read it and we will respond and we'll see you in the next video [Music]