How to promote your music on social media

Creating an effective social media strategy is the most important first step for every independent musician, and we cannot stress this enough. A proper strategy should outline your social media objectives, define the strategic steps and tactics you’ll use to achieve them, and identify metrics that you can track to measure your progress and growth.

These are the points that establishing a social media strategy should cover:

• Defining your goals and objectives

• Establishing your brand

• Determining your target audience

• Scheduling and drafting a content calendar

Goals and objectives are the fundamental part of any strategy. They should clearly reflect what you want to achieve with your social media performance and should be the denominators of your success across the networks.

Whether it’s selling more merch, attracting more fans to your gigs, increasing your reach and targeting a wider audience, or simply generating more music streams (all of which don’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive), it’s important for your goals to be SMART — specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. Remember that the more precise your goals are, the more capable and equipped you’ll be to track and analyze your performance.

The term ‘brand’ generally refers to a set of features and elements that identify a company’s goods (product(s), service(s), or business) and distinguish them from those of its competitors. These features typically include the company’s name, identity, personality, logo, product design, packaging, and advertising message.

In music, an artist’s brand is often reflected through their brand identity (name, personality, sound, styles, values, and story), visual identity, and messaging. Some perceive artist brand as a story an artist shares with the world to express who they are and what they do. With approximately 120,000 new tracks released each day, having a clear and distinct brand identity is vital for standing out from the crowd and forming meaningful connections with listeners.

If an artist's brand is the story they communicate, social media can be viewed as one of the platforms through which that story is shared. Everything from your tone of voice to visuals, content, and messaging should align with your artist brand across all social media channels.

Ultimately, how an artist presents themselves on social media plays a key role in attracting the right audience and forming a deeper bond with their music. The cornerstone of your social media presence is authenticity. Being authentic means being seen as transparent, genuine, and consistent, which helps to build trust and loyalty with your followers.

A small tip from us: keeping your branding consistent across selected social media platforms is essential for a strong online presence and can significantly impact the success of your social media strategy. Make sure you use the same name on all channels, produce content that follows clear creative guidelines (while allowing for some variations between platforms), and consistently portray the same story.

We’ve previously mentioned the term ‘right audience.’ The question remains: who actually makes up this group? It’s essential to learn everything you can about your fans and followers, both existing and potential. Social media platforms typically offer reliable analytics that provide insights into your audience's demographics and behaviors.

Collecting and analyzing this data can eventually help you create audience personas — these are fictional profiles representing groups of similar people within your target audience. Clearly defining these personas can help you deepen your understanding of the values, interests, goals, emotions, and behavioral intentions of your audience.

With a specific persona in mind, you can tailor your music content across social media platforms, ensuring that your tone of voice and messaging resonate with the people you want to reach. An audience persona might include details like the name, gender, age, location, occupation, education, hobbies, and more.

Here’s a quick tip: Treat your audience persona like a real music fan! Give them a name, write down their personality traits, and try to describe them in detail. What language do they speak? Where are they from? What music genres do they like? The more specific you get, the better!

We’ve already highlighted the importance of consistent branding, and now, it’s time to explore the value of consistency in content publishing. Sharing your posts on a regular basis helps keep your audience engaged and encourages them to return for more. This is where a content calendar can be a valuable tool. By drafting one, you can:

• Maintain a consistent flow of creative content on social media,

• Post on days and times that prove to be most effective,

• Better track the variety of the content you share and better analyze its performance.

Your content can generally be divided into three categories: personal, professional, and promotional. Personal content gives fans a glimpse into your private life – sharing moments like birthday celebrations, vacation snapshots, or other personal events. While people are often fascinated by the personal lives of artists, especially their romantic relationships, it’s important only to share what you’re comfortable with. Putting your life on display just to get attention and grow your followers isn’t worth it.

Professional content focuses on your career as a musician, covering things like live performances, studio sessions, photoshoots, music video productions, collaborations, and award shows. Promotional content, on the other hand, is produced to promote and market your music, typically as part of specific campaigns.

In addition to these content categories, you can also explore various content formats, such as photos, videos, Stories, Reels, etc., depending greatly on the features offered by selected platforms.

Pro tip: While many marketers praise videos as the most effective, photos shouldn’t be overlooked. When creating content, it’s key to consider the goals you want to achieve on social media. Studies show that while videos are better to drive engagement, photos can lead to more conversion. Ideally, having a balanced mix of both can maximize your overall social media performance.

Now that you’ve learned more about social media strategy, it’s time to focus on planning and publishing content. Here are key points to keep in mind as you create and share your posts.

While the quality of your content definitely matters, the idea that ‘quality over quantity' always applies isn’t necessarily true. In fact, both quality and quantity are important when promoting your music on social media. Quality ensures that your content is valuable to your followers, trustworthy, and representative of your brand. Quantity, on the other hand, increases awareness, visibility, and audience engagement, and can boost the algorithm.

It’s also important to remember that each social media platform is different and may require a unique approach. For instance, content quality may be a determining factor on Instagram, while TikTok rewards frequent posting and following the newest trends. Posting more regularly, even though your content is less polished, will often generate more views and engagement on TikTok than fewer high-quality videos. Ultimately, the goal is to find balance.

A quick tip: While posting regularly is important, be cautious of over-sharing! Sharing too much too often can sooner or later annoy your followers and lead to a drop in followers and engagement.

Platforms like X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube all offer opportunities to effectively promote your music and showcase your content to the right audience. As we mentioned earlier, despite the similarities, each platform is unique. For this reason, it’s worthwhile to dedicate time to exploring each platform’s characteristics and features to determine which best suits your style and goals as an artist.

Since it’s not feasible to be active on every platform, focus on those that align with your strengths and strategy. Use analytics tools to track your performance across channels and adjust your focus as needed over time to maximize your reach.

Hashtags, which are the words preceded by the hash symbol (#), can help make your content more discoverable to a wider audience. They connect a piece of content to a particular topic, theme, or event and make it more visible and accessible to those who don’t follow you. By using relevant hashtags, you can increase your engagement, gain more exposure, and potentially attract a new audience who is interested in your music.

The thing to know about hashtags is that they can work effectively, but for that to happen, they must be relevant. It’s crucial that the hashtags you use are not ambiguous and are specific to your content (but not too specific, as that will make them difficult to find). You should avoid popular but generic hashtags, such as #followforfollow, #followme, #photooftheday, or #instagram. These will make your content get lost among the millions of other posts using them.

You can use tools like Hashtagify.me, RiteKit, or Hootsuite to analyze potential hashtags and find the right ones. You can also monitor what hashtags your competitors use and analyze how well your previous hashtags performed. Eventually, if you already have a list of hashtags that prove to perform well, you can look into similar and related hashtags.

Last but not least, consider creating branded hashtags using your or your band’s name (e.g., #thefireband for ‘The Fire Band’). A unique, custom hashtag helps build your identity on social media, engage with a broader audience, start conversations, run campaigns, and promote your releases and merchandise.

The purpose of content scheduling tools is exactly what it sounds like — to schedule content. These tools allow you to plan and schedule your posts in advance instead of sharing them manually on the spot.

You simply pre-select the times and days for your posts and upload your content in the appropriate sizes and dimensions for each platform. By using scheduling tools, you can maintain a consistent posting schedule and free up time for other activities, like making music, creating more content, or engaging with your followers through comments, reactions, and DMs.

There are plenty of scheduling tools to choose from, including Hootsuite, Monday, Buffer, Brandwatch, and Loomly. Hootsuite, Monday, and Buffer offer free plans, with Hootsuite being the most popular, boasting over 18 million active users. The platform offers five different plans and supports more than 20 different social networks.

Social listening and engagement are essential to a successful social media journey. Social listening can be defined as the process of monitoring and evaluating online conversations to understand what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the internet.

These interactions can provide a great amount of unstructured data that can help those in observation to learn what people think of them, improve user experience, and stay informed about new trends, the industry, prospective competitors, and potential collaborators in your genre.

Here are a few tips to enhance your engagement and create a positive image of yourself as a musician:

A simple and smooth user experience is key to keeping your followers connected with your music and content. When you promote your latest release, upcoming tour, or other events, make it easy for fans to find what they need. You can share direct links to your music on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, or Bandcamp, and make sure that your website and important information are easily accessible from your social media profiles.

Tools like iMusician’s Artist Pages showcase all your assets in one single place. You can display all your releases, share previews of your videos, promote your tour and other gigs, and even include a designated press section.

If you sell merchandise, try exploring selling features on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. While social media isn’t traditionally used for commerce, an increasing number of users now browse these platforms to discover products and even purchase directly through them.

Consistent communication with your fans and followers is crucial for fostering engagement and building a strong community. By responding to comments, questions, shares, likes, and direct messages, you can strengthen your relationship and deepen your connection with your followers over time.

It might come in handy to think of social media as a powerful communication tool that creates meaningful interactions and conversations. Effective community management can additionally boost your followers’ loyalty and commitment to your account.

An integral part of social listening is staying informed about current and upcoming trends. While it’s impossible to follow them all — and, frankly, potentially harmful to your brand, too — knowing what’s popular can help you utilise your creative strengths and make content that’ll resonate better with your audience.

Social media trends to follow in 2024:

• AI is gaining more influence in content creation,

• Social media platforms are pushing longer video content,

• Playful, fun content is becoming increasingly popular,

• People love to watch behind-the-scenes content.

Gated content is a type of content your audience can access only after taking a particular action — e.g., providing their contact information, following your Spotify account, or pre-saving your upcoming track. It’s absolutely vital, however, that the content is offered free of charge and not hidden behind any additional costs.

Almost anything you produce content-wise can be gated — a newsletter containing yet-unrevealed release information, an exclusive teaser to your music video, or a booklet providing early access to your newest merch or ticket sales.

Ultimately, the purpose of creating gated content is to ignite a sense of exclusivity among your audience and thus make them more interested in your music. It also allows for more direct communication with your fans while providing valuable insights based on the information they share. Such data can be used to refine your audience persona or plan future campaigns and events.

Tracking, collecting, and analyzing data is essential for any successful social media strategy or marketing campaign. Social media analytics help you evaluate and measure key metrics, including views, likes and shares, reach, impressions, and engagement, which can indicate how effective your content is and how well it performs.

Additionally, as mentioned earlier, the data offers valuable information about your current and potential audience, helping you understand their demographics, such as age and location, as well as their interests, goals, behaviors, and social media habits.

In a nutshell, the data you gather can demonstrate how well your social media strategy aligns with your values and artist brand and whether you’re using the right platforms. It can also help you determine the best times to post and analyze potential competitors.

Each social media platform comes with its own analytics tools – like Facebook Insights, TikTok PRO Analytics, Instagram Insights, and X Analytics – but you can also consider using third-party tools, such as those provided by content scheduling platforms or marketing data providers. These usually offer various pricing packages, including free plans and trials.

Social media offers vast opportunities and prospects for advertising. Generally, there are three main categories of social media advertising. You can either share posts that pick up views naturally (‘organic posts’), pay money to increase your post's views and reach (‘paid advertising’), or earn content in the form of comments, likes, and shares that have been given to you free of cost (‘earned advertising’).

As organic reach has become more challenging, paid advertising provides a fast and effective way to reach the audience you want — either by targeting new audiences or expanding your existing ones. Since all major platforms offer advertising options, it’s key to focus on those most relevant to your target audience and the content you create.

For instance, TikTok primarily appeals to teenagers and Gen Z, Instagram is popular with both millennials and Gen Z, X (formerly Twitter) usually attracts men aged 24—35, and Facebook caters to a broader audience with varied demographics. A good strategy is to start by advertising on platforms where your organic content has performed well and continue exploring from there. Additionally, practices like A/B testing can further help identify which platforms and ad formats — whether photo ads, messenger ads, or video ads — work best for you.

Beyond paid ads, there are other ways to promote your music on social media. You can collaborate with other musicians, grow your following by interacting with fellow artists, or use gated content to drive more interactions and enhance engagement.