Producing great music is of no use if nobody is listening to it. When it comes to the best ways to increase the reach of music, social media platforms tops the list. If you have little or no idea about how to promote music on social media platforms, we got you covered. Keep reading further to know more!
Table of Contents
Social Media Music Marketing
For every artist, being able to create something new is not enough. They should know how to promote their creations otherwise their efforts get wasted in veins. Suppose, you’ve produced a mind-blowing song but if there is no one to listen to, what’s even the point?
Social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook etc. have gained enormous popularity. There are billions of users on these platforms. Hence, it will not be wrong to say they have a huge pool of audiences. These platforms are a great way or rather the right way for artists to promote their creations.
Below is an overview video of social media marketing.
If you want more general info about social media marketing check out Hubspot’s overview. However, if you are a musician looking to promote your music on social media keep reading this blog.
Social Media for musicians
Below is the complete guide that will teach you the basics of social media promotions on different platforms
YouTube
YouTube is the best platform for promoting your music and increasing its reach. Over the years, it has gained enormous popularity and a substantial user base.
In fact, many popular artists like Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes etc have started their music careers from YouTube.
Here are the best ways by which you can promote your music on YouTube:
Start Your Own Music Channel
The first and foremost thing is to start your own YouTube channel. You can easily create it in a few steps. Once you create your channel, you will be able to upload your music videos easily.
But before uploading videos, there are some things you should know. The whole point of uploading videos is getting more people to find it and view it. This can only be done by giving a well-optimized and suitable title to your video. This will help the viewers to find your content.
For example: when someone searches for “Hymn Of The Weekend” or “Coldplay Cover”, YouTube shows the videos relevant to these specific keywords. It reads your title and video description and shows it to YouTube users.
Include a Call to Action
It is extremely important to add a call to action at the end of a video. Ask your viewers to like, comment on your video and subscribe to your channel. It helps to increase the metrics by which YouTube judges the quality of your content. The better your video engagement is with the viewers, more frequently it will be promoted during the search or as ‘recommended videos’.
Create Playlists to Help Viewers Track Your Video
To help your viewers find your video easily, create a suitable playlist and add all your videos in sequence so that they can watch continuously. A good is to create separate playlists for different type of music like unplugged songs, instrumental songs, albums etc.
Upload Tutorials
Tutorials and covers are a great way to increase audience engagement, especially to beginners. Start by creating tutorials for demonstrating your talent and guiding others on how to do it. You can also upload covers by your favourite artists by creating your own version.
Vlog Often
Vlogging is a good way to engage and connect with the viewers at a personal level. All you need is good communication skills and some decent devices. The best thing is you can even vlog using your phone.
Collaborate with Other YouTubers
Collaborate with other YouTubers and promote each other on your channels. It is a great way to target a large audience. For this, you have to convince an established YouTuber who also produces similar content like yours to take part in the collaboration. Also, don’t target YouTubers who already have large audiences as they’re less likely to accept your collaboration.
Ask Others To Use Your Music In Their Videos
Most YouTubers use different types of music in their tutorials. You can ask them to use your music in their videos and give you credits by posting your link in the description box. It will help you to gain a few more viewers.
Without any doubt, Facebook has the most number of users across the globe. Over the years, it has become a crucial platform for music promotion. Here are the few tips by which you can promote your music on Facebook :
Get Started By Creating Your Facebook page
It is different from a Facebook profile and helps to reach a targeted audience. If you want, you can even convert your personal profile into a Facebook Page.
Build Your Contact List
Increase your network by collecting email addresses from your Facebook page. You can use these contacts for sending promotional emails in bulk.
Organise Exciting Contests And Giveaways.
Ask your fans to like and comment on your video and give them free goodies like MP3s, Passes To Your Concert etc. Do this at regular intervals to keep them visiting your page again and again.
Connect With Your Audience.
Social media platforms require a higher rate of interaction. Therefore, keep yourself connected with your audience. Create polls, take feedback and let your viewers share their opinions and what they feel about your music. Facebook has included a new “questions” feature which you can use to conduct polls and communicate with your fans.
Use Good Quality Pictures.
Be it is your profile picture, cover photos or other posts, use only high quality and original photos. Your profile picture should be very attractive and captivating. Post pictures of your band or stage performances, they really impact the audience and help in promotions. Meanwhile, you can also ask your viewers to share those pictures to spread the word.
Keep Updating Your Followers On Facebook.
While most people have replaced Facebook with Twitter, you can use it in the same way you use Twitter for frequently updating your followers. It will give them an idea that you’re active on the platform.
Share As Many posts, Videos And Photos You Like.
Sharing is Caring! Share as much as you can. You can share your video links, vlogs, tutorials, short clips and whatnot. Also, share other artists’ content on your page and anything you like. It will give your followers an insight into your likes and taste.
Reply To The Comments
Don’t just ask your followers to like and comment on your post. Reply to the comments in order to encourage the followers to keep coming back to your page. It will also create a stronger bond between you and your fans.
Let Your Fans Know You In Person
By giving a glimpse of your personal life, you can keep your followers and fans active. For this, keep posting small things like checkouts, outings and even daily routines. It will make your followers humanise you and know you better. They will be able to connect and relate with you in a better way.
Try To Manage Your Facebook Page By Yourself Rather Than Hiring A Manager
Try to manage your page yourself especially if you’re a beginner. It will help in giving it a personal touch. Also if you hire a social media manager he will only treat your page as a business, he will be unable to give that personal touch and include depth in your posts. When you do it yourself, you will be connected emotionally which will keep your followers growing.
If you ask about the most popular social media platform at present, it has to be Instagram. Due to its huge popularity, it has become a great platform for promotion. You can promote your music on Instagram through a number of available posting options like photos, videos, stories etc.
Here are the best ways to promote music on Instagram :
Pay Special Attention While Creating Instagram Bio
Not everyone knows, but a good and well-defined bio creates a lot of impact on the followers. It is a great space to introduce yourself and your goals to your audience.
Here is how to can create an impactful bio :
1] Introduce yourself in brief, no long descriptions as you only get 150 characters. Keep it simple!
2] Include a link in your bio. This link can be your youtube channel, website, blog or other social media account.
3] You can keep changing these links whenever you want. Suppose, you’ve uploaded a new song on your YouTube channel, you can include it in your bio and ask people through stories to click on the link in bio. Basically, you can keep adding and removing recent links.
Use A Captivating Profile Picture
Instagram is all about photos and visuals. It is very important to post attractive photos that people love to see. When it comes to the profile picture, use a visually appealing photograph that instantly grabs the attention of users. Your profile picture should be able to speak on your behalf. There are no specific rules. So, be creative and spruce up your display picture.
Expand Your Content
The best part about Instagram is, it allows the users to diversify their content in order to reach a large audience. You can post various forms of content like photos, videos, stories, IGTV etc. to maximize the engagement of viewers.
Good Quality Photos
Photos are the main type of content on Instagram. So, post original and good quality pictures. Be creative and use pictures that showcase your music smartly. For example, You can post a picture that is closely related to your song and share links or details of that song in the caption.
Post-Short Videos
Videos are a great way to promote your music. When you include your music in a video, the chances of it getting recognised gets higher. You can post a maximum of 60 seconds vi videos through Instagram posts. If you can’t make it to a video, you can even use a still picture with music in the background.
Moreover, try to use subtitles with your music video because most of the users scroll through the feed with muted sound. So, providing them with subtitles helps them to sink in your content especially when they’re in public places without headphones.
Use Attractive Captions
Instagram allows you to include a maximum of 300-450 words in your captions which is a good number. You can utilise this limit in posting quality content. You can write a detailed post about your upcoming gig or album. If you want you can even share a short story or inspiration behind your song.
Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are one of the most important features since 2019. These stories are of great use for marketing purposes. As per the reports, Instagram covers whooping half-million stories daily. These stories are a great way to engage with followers.
With Instagram Stories, you can upload up to 15-second video which lasts for 24 hours. You can add clips or previews of your song and attract more audiences.
Apart from songs, you can also include various music-related things in your stories such as your music schedule, release dates, previous launches, upcoming albums, upcoming concerts etc. You can also connect with your followers personally through stories by answering their queries or simply communicating with them.
Also, there are many activities you can do through Instagram Stories like running polls, Questions +Answer Session, Giveaways, launching contests etc.
Instagram TV or IGTV
IGTV allows you to upload longer videos, up to 10 minutes for regular profiles and as long as 60 minutes for verified profiles. Another good thing is IGTV is designed vertically and gives a full view of the video unlike the video option in the post.
Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are very crucial on Instagram. They help you to get recognised and help other users go find your content. Further, Instagram uses these hashtags for recommending content to users based on their past activities. Due to this algorithm, hashtags play a very important role in increasing your reach.
As for now, you can add 30 hashtags in a single post (in the caption + in the comment section). Not only in posts, but you can also include hashtags in your stories but not more than 10.
Moreover, include the most relevant and popular hashtags in your posts in order to get visible to a number of users.
Make Use Of Instagram Ads Sponsored Posts
This is perhaps the best feature of Instagram. You can easily promote your content through sponsored posts and ads. Although depending on organic reach is good but not the best idea because it is getting reduced due to different algorithms. Thus, you can invest a little to increase your reach.
You can do this by switching to a business account and investing in ads to reach a targeted audience.
You can choose from a number of available options for Instagram ads. Some of these are Single image ads, video-based ads, story-based ads etc.
Twitter is the fastest and smart way to promote your creations. If used in the right way, you can increase the reach of your music to thousands of people within an hour. Here is the smartest way to promote your music on Twitter:
Longer Tweets
Twitter only allows you to write your tweet within the limit i.e 140 characters. So, instead of in-line tweets, write longer posts because longer tweets get more likes and retweets.
Use Captivating Words
Because you get a limited 140 character space, use it wisely by selecting attractive words, mainly cool verbs.
Tweet At The Right Time
The smart way is to tweet at a time when there is high traffic. Generally, after 2 pm Twitter traffic increases significantly because most of the users get free time to sneak into the platform. Tweet by keeping in mind the schedule of a majority of your audience.
Tweet Often On Weekends
Instead of tweeting important music updates on working days, tweet on weekdays. The reason is pretty simple, traffic during weekends is fairly high. The best time is to tweet from Thursday to Sunday.
Request Others To Retweet
The easiest way to get more people retweet is to ask them for the same. It doesn’t take much effort to like or retweet, anyone can do that if you appeal in a polite and friendly manner.
Get More People Retweet At The First Hour
If you want more people to see your tweet, try to spread as much as you can at the first hour itself. It increases the likelihood of your tweet reaching a large audience.
Include Links At The Beginning Of A Tweet
Whenever you add your music link in a tweet, always add it in the beginning. Experiments have shown that such tweets perform a lot better.
TikTok
TikTok is the hottest trend these days. It has become a popular social media platform that has almost 1 billion users across the world as of now. The majority of the TikTok users are the teenagers and young generation. Thus, It can be used to target a number of audiences with a similar interest. You can gain a substantial fan base from this platform.
As of now, you can upload a 1-minute long video on TikTok and can promote it in several ways.
Some of the best ways to promote your music on TikTok are as follows :
Start A Contest
This is the best way to promote your content on TikTok as an artist. It doesn’t matter whether you want to promote your solo music or the entire band, you can do that easily by using this amazing feature. As you know, TikTok is mainly popular for lip-syncing videos. You can take advantage of this feature and ask others to lip-sync on your song. In return, select the best ones and give them prizes like some goodies, free tickets etc.
You can spruce your contest more by asking others to dance on your music. Trends like these go viral in no time and if you’re lucky your song will get viral too in no time.
Use Relatable Hashtags
Just like Twitter and Instagram, TikTok also uses hashtags. You can use these hashtags in a similar way you use them on other platforms. It will help you to increase your popularity and emerge as a brand. Therefore create relevant hashtags and include them in your posts. Also, appeal to others to use your hashtags when they post their videos on your song or in the contest. Unique hashtags will help others to reach you and remember you.
Collaborate With Other TikTok Artists
There are plenty of influencers on TikTok. They create amazing content and have thousands of followers. You can collaborate with them to build your network and get recognised among the other users. For this purpose, find a TikTok artist with a substantial follower count who can readily collaborate with you. You can either promote your music with him by coming in a single frame or simply ask him to promote your creations through his own video. This will help you in gaining popularity in the shortest time.
Organize Location-Based Contest
This is another great way to target a specific audience based on the location. You can choose a particular location and organise a contest by using specific hashtags. It will help you in increasing the reach of your musical composition to a specific location. With time, you will be able to increase your exposure to a bigger number of audiences successfully.
Final Words
Social media platforms are a great way to promote your talent. The reason is the popularity of these platforms among the users. Through these platforms, you can get more people to listen to your music or watch your music video in the shortest possible time. With a little knowledge and patience, you will be able to achieve success in promoting your music and getting recognised for the same.
