Social Media For Artists: How To Do It Right

I’m not going to stand here and claim to be a social media guru. I do, however, know a few tips that can help you look a little more professional and hopefully grow your audience by posting consistent and thought-out content. Here's how to approach social media right.

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The Importance Of Social Media

You may not think social media is very important; you made a page one day, filled out a few boxes, invited some friends to like the page, and let it sit there. In the words of Call Of Duty's Captain Price, “Now it’s a ghost town”.

I did this too. While I did understand the importance of social media, I just didn’t have time to keep it up to date; which probably hurt me. Truth is social media and content marketing is the best thing you can do to grow and maintain an audience.

Just taking a moment out of the weekend each week probably would have helped me more than I know; but now that I’m running Fretless Studios full-time, I’m not doubling, but quadrupling down on the social media game.

Consistency Is Key

Being consistent is HARD WORK. You should be posting once a week minimum. It can be kind of daunting to try to find one thing to post about every week!

Luckily there’s some things you can do to make this daunting task a little easier.

The best thing you can do to make sure you are consistent in posting is batch working. Plan out the next month or two instead of trying to do it once weekly. This will make your content related and you can make sure you’ve got at least one post per week!

This will also make your type of content consistent. You can have a certain format like memes, paragraphs, phrases, whatever, and they can all revolve around a similar topic; which will help your audience know what to expect and stay with you for longer periods of time.

While yes, it may limit how you present your content, it shouldn’t limit what your content is about. You can even mix up the format of your content to involve 2-3 formats; just make it consistent and you should be good!

Be Engaging With Your Social Media

Social media works two ways; it is social after all. Try to engage with your audience on a regular basis; that means liking comments, thoughtful replies, and asking questions.

Something to spark conversation and engagement is asking questions in your post. Make it natural and thoughtful of course, though, you won’t want to ask a question simply just to get people to interact with you.

Pictures and videos without a doubt get the most eyes on your post. Try to center your content around this; they don’t have to be the highest quality, though it doesn’t help. Hiring a photographer wouldn’t be a bad investment for photos to add to your content for posting!

Keep Branding In Mind

It definitely won’t help you grow if you have a Pokémon set as your profile picture. Obviously, put your logo on there! Or, if you’re promoting an album or EP, set the cover photo of that as a temporary profile picture. The goal here is to be as recognizable as possible.

Being recognizable will increase your chances of having fans at shows, increasing merch sales, and growing your audience.

Give Value; For FREE

While yes, your music may be of value to your audience, you shouldn’t look at it that way. Think of it more as your product. Do you like products being shoved in your face by every company on the internet? Probably not haha!

Instead, find ways to give value to your audience and potential audience to keep them around; and obviously don’t do it just to grow your audience! Be a good person, there’s never enough good in the world!

Some examples of value are special deals, important/new and interesting information, entertainment (not something you are trying to sell), physical things you’re giving away at shows, the list goes on.

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With these short tips you should be well on your way to growing your audience on social media! It’s definitely hard work so please don’t underestimate it. You may not see a ton of growth right away, but the goal is playing the long game. Quick likes are just going to end up being quick unlikes.

Let me know if any of this helped you! Do you have any tips and tricks when it comes to social media? I'm always looking for ways to improve!

-Michael