Here is a guide to gaining new followers on Instagram for Musicians. As a Musician, how can you grow your Instagram followers? When you’re building a brand around your music, it’s super important to have a loyal fanbase on Instagram.
Over an eighth of the population are on Instagram with over 1 billion monthly active users, so the potential fans you can gain by simply uploading images and videos to Instagram is insane.
Instagram Musicians followers Instagram Musicians followers
Instagram For Musicians
Since gaining popularity over the last few years, Instagram has become a big part of online musicians’ social media toolkit. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some top tips for using Instagram as a musician and how to grow your followers.
The app has been in existence since 2010, which may seem like an eternity in the fast-moving world of digital marketing and social media. However, many musicians have only taken to using Instagram as a means of self-promotion over the last few years.
Like all social media, there are some good habits to get into to make the most out of the digital photo-sharing app.
How to Grow Your Instagram Account as a Musician
Do you want image-uploading content and getting thousands of likes within the first few minutes, getting hundreds of DMs every day from fans saying they love your music and a brand approaching you to do collaborations due to your engaged audience, well this article is going to explain how you can secure that.
All of these tips are completely free to do and will increase your fanbase exponentially if done correctly, so let’s discuss how you as a musician can start growing your Instagram following today. Follow @1710media on Instagram.
How to add Lyrics to Instagram and Facebook
Completely fill out your Musician Instagram profile
Are you a musician? Your Instagram biography should be concise and regularly updated. It should include upcoming concerts/tours and possible album or video clip releases. Do not hesitate to integrate hashtags (e.g: musician – artist #pop) inside your Instagram biography, this will bring people to your profile and gain you, new followers.
Instagram is a very good tool for musicians to promote themselves. You can easily integrate a SmartLink into your Instagram biography, which allows people to listen to your track/album on all streaming platforms. Get a standard Artist Bio here.
Stay True to Yourself
In order to gain followers on Instagram, you must first define a basic premise: as a musician, what do you want to pass on? Is your image important? Then don’t hesitate to plan a photo shoot that you can take content from as you go along with your Instagram posts. What if you don’t want your face to be seen? Don’t worry: define a universe or theme that fits your project and with which you feel comfortable.
You should never feel out of step with your content on Instagram, for the sake of your personal well-being and because your followers will feel it.
Instagram Content
We’ll start with the most important thing about your Instagram as a musician and this is the content you’re putting out.
The content you put out to the world is entirely your brand in 2022. The content you can create is broken down into 3 main areas and the content you chose to create depends entirely on your personality and the brand you want to put across – entertain, educate and document.
Instagram Caption & Hashtags
Now you know the style of content you’re putting out; you need to use the most engaging caption and the correct hashtags to reach a wider audience.
A compelling caption will lead to more engagement and engagement is one of the key factors that’ll hack the Instagram algorithm, pushing you out to a wider audience. Within your caption, try to get your followers to engage, so you could ask a question or get them to tag a friend. Start a conversation so that the content involves them rather than is just shoved in front of them as that isn’t as enjoyable for the consumer.
Musicians should Interact with Instagram followers
Now your content is out, you need to be engaging with your audience because as I already mentioned, this is how you’re going to get the Instagram algorithm on your side.
If you’re putting out high-quality content with compelling captions and the appropriate hashtags, you’ll be getting comments. A clever tip for this one is to reply to comments with a question as this will lead to further engagement.
So, if someone comments ‘love this photo’, you could reply ‘so glad you like it, would you be interested in seeing more of this kind of stuff on my feed?’. The more engagement the better.
You can also engage with your fans via DM, so try to be messaging every single follower to start a relationship.
Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are used by 500 million users every day. This allows spontaneous content, so post as often as you can, and take advantage of the features e.g. Polls, Q&A’s, Quiz and Sliders
If you want your Stories to be reaching more of an audience outside of your immediate fanbase, you can use hashtags within your Story. Take your picture or video, use the appropriate hashtags, and upload it. You can easily hide the hashtags within the image if you use the same color hashtags as the background and it’s so simple to do. You’ll get way more views on your Story, which will lead to growth in the following also.
Be present on other social media to grow your followers
Spread the word on your social networks: invite your Facebook, Twitter, etc. communities to subscribe to your Instagram account.
Invite your friends and if they are very good friends, ask them to invite theirs! Are my followers’ followers my followers?
Musicians should avoid Buying Instagram Followers
It is best to start with a community of engaged, present, and active followers who will stay for the long term.
Instagram has become even stricter with paid systems; as soon as it detects “abnormal” activity, the account is “shadow banned” and put in the shade.
Sponsor posts to gain new Instagram followers
You don’t have to have a big budget to get your sponsorships to work on Instagram. It’s all about targeting: age range, location, and interests.
It’s better to reach a few people who are likely to be hooked on your project, than 1 million people who won’t pay attention. The more precise the targeting, the more likely you are to gain followers.
Putting a small budget of '#2000 naira' per day for your stories is already a lot and allows you to gain visibility quite quickly! Focusing on the story format is the most efficient way to reach small budgets, using precise targeting thanks to statistics.
A brief history of Instagram
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger founded Instagram in 2010, in San Francisco USA. The idea was originally to develop an app that’s main focus was on photo sharing, with built-in preloaded filters and time-limited video. In that sense, Instagram has managed to largely stay true to its original brief.
Fun Fact: The name “Instagram” was created as an homage to the words “Instant Camera” and “Telegram”.
- By December 2010 (barely two months after its launch), Instagram had already amassed more than a million users.
- In 2011, v2.0 was launched (with more filters) along with the world’s first organized “Instameet”. This was where users met up in their respective areas to go on “photo walks”.
- Later that same year, the “Hashtag Weekend Project” saw users submitting pictures with a specific hashtag and Instagram sharing their favorites on their profile.
- The number of users continued to grow and grow. By the end of the year, Instagram was the “iPhone App of the year”.
- April 2012 saw some really big changes for the company. Facebook purchased the company, reportedly for around $ 1 billion in cash and stock options.
- This saw its user-base jump by 80 million, as well as added features like photo maps and web profiles. Ellie Goulding released a music video created only using fan-made IG submissions.
- By 2013, Instagram had well over 150 million active monthly users. Photos could be embedded on websites, and users could directly message one another. This year also saw the launch of sponsored advertising content.
- 2016 saw the advent of Instagram “Stories”, where users could temporarily upload pictures that would last for a maximum of 24 hours.
You are unique, your music is unique, so your Instagram must be unique too. Don’t be afraid to mess up remember that everyone will have forgotten in 48 hours. If you are a group of musicians, talk about it beforehand to define who is in charge, but don’t hesitate to multiply the content.
How To Get Your Music on Instagram & Facebook Stories
1710Media will upload your music to the Facebook/Instagram Audio Library where users can select your tracks to include in their photos or videos via Music Stickers. Then we register your tracks with Facebook & Instagram Content ID so that if your music is uploaded into user-made videos, you will then be eligible to claim earnings on those videos. Being on Facebook & Instagram makes sense because it allows you to monetize your tracks on the service. Adding your music to Facebook & Instagram can open up new opportunities for your online music sales.
We can distribute your music to Facebook and Instagram. You can simply select the “Instagram & Facebook” checkbox when uploading your music on 1710Media.
