How to Promote Your Music on Instagram Guide

Music is an intangible commodity that everyone consumes in one way or the other. Music is not just about singing; it covers many professional activities relating to; music-making, marketing, streaming or downloading, and storing. As the competition is very high in every area of life today, the music industry is highly competitive. No matter how gifted or competent you are, you may never get recognized if you do nothing about it. Learning how to promote your music on Instagram is one way to get your music known.

When there was no internet to reach the world, people shared their music primarily through live performances or selling records. Today, music is stored on clouds that provide streaming services like Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud, Deezer, etc., or on websites that can be downloaded at a price or for free. In a social media age, it becomes necessary to leverage the opportunity to reach many people worldwide. As a result, many people use various social media platforms to share their music with a readily available broad audience.

Instagram is one of the social media platforms with the highest number of active users. By implication, you stand a better chance at effectively promoting your music through social media platforms using Instagram. Moreover, there are specific steps to take, things to put in place to do this effectively and obtain the desired result. 

This article gives you a step-by-step guide on how to promote your music on Instagram. Here is an overview of what we would explore in this article:

  • Music promotion
  • Why you need to promote your music on Instagram
  • How to Promote Your Music on Instagram

Music Promotion

In contrast with music marketing primarily concerned with making sales, music promotion involves different actions targeted at persuading people to engage with your music. If you are thinking of getting exposure to your music tracks or getting audience and interaction from the audience, you are thinking of music promotion. The good thing is making sales comes much easier once you can create an influence or impression on people through your music. Traditionally, there are professional music producers. Their job covers organizing gigs, booking artists, advertising shows, and making artists famous. In today’s parlance, music promotion covers more as the online factor is very much involved. To this extent, a musician can be his own ‘music producer’ by simply using the internet wisely. 

Online, there are several ways to promote your music, including; email campaigns, creating playlists, websites, blogs, and social media. Social media stands out as you can even promote your playlist, website, or blog through social media platforms. Moreover, on all social media platforms, Instagram is one of the best platforms to promote your music based on its design and available features.

Why You Need to Promote Your Music on Instagram

You certainly don’t want to promote your music on Instagram just because others do so. There are some unique advantages attached to it that you want to take advantage of. Instagram enables picture and video sharing, which means you get to upload graphic contents about your music or videos that present your music to many Instagram users. Although Instagram timeline video uploads are limited to 59 seconds, other features enable you to post even longer videos like the IG TV, Reels, and the live streaming feature. Meaning, your music videos, rehearsal videos, short adverts, and publicity for your new music can all be shared with the world at the click of a button.

A vital part of music promotion is interaction with your audience. With Instagram, you can get private messages from people. It means you can get gigs, know how people feel about your music, or connect with other people in the music industry. Every Instagram post comes with an added advantage to share with hashtags or tag people directly. Using the right hashtags can make your music reach many people across different spheres of life. The hashtag will resultantly extend your fan base, especially with the like and comment functions that enable your audience to react to each of your posts. You can add download links, website links, or streaming links to your music in your Bio.

The most useful feature on Instagram for music promotion is the sponsored ads feature. It enables you to choose your preferred audience, and with as low as $0.20, you can promote your music using this feature. Nevertheless, the more money you can afford, the larger the audience you can reach.

How to Promote Your Music on Instagram

With more than one billion active users, Instagram is definitely worth the while as far as music promotion is concerned. Many musicians are already taking full advantage of this. Here is a step-by-step guide to promoting your music on Instagram;

Create and Set up an Account 

To make use of Instagram at all, you need to create an account. You can either do this by following this link or downloading the application to your phone or PC. Now you can get started!

Create an account, preferably using your brand name, and edit your profile. The profile picture you use and the information on your Bio should conform to your brand and effortlessly attract people to your page. Your profile picture should be of good quality and be a perfect pictorial representation of you or your music. It is the first thing people see when they visit your page. Your Bio is the section of your profile where you write whatever you want in a maximum of 150 characters. You should use this section to describe your brand and add links you will like to share with your followers.  This step is the most crucial to promoting your music on Instagram; this is where you introduce your brand to your Instagram audience or fan.

Find and Add Followers

Now that you have joined the Instagram community, you need to gain more followers and follow people that matter to your music. People often take your brand more seriously when they discover you have a handful of followers. 

One of the ways to increase your IG followers is to follow others. Some will follow back those you follow, and your name will be suggested on their page to their followers. Meaning you can gain two followers by following one. You should follow record labels, other musicians (especially those whose music correlates with yours), and producers, most preferably the big names. Also, your online activities will help you gain more followers. It is essential that you create a social engagement with your followers to keep the ones you have gained interested in your brand; they can recommend your music to their friends. Most of your followers will come from those who find your posts attractive and exciting, so you should create quality content consistently.

Create Quality Content 

To promote your music on Instagram, you need to create quality content. Your content includes photos, video clips, and the caption on each post. Posts on Instagram can be seen by both your followers and other Instagram users. Therefore, if you post the right content, you get to attract more people to your brand. 

Your understanding of your followers and target audience will help you to create content that will engage them. You can make videos of your live performance, studio session, just for fun activities or pictures of you making your music, graphics of your upcoming events, music promo, and so on. The exciting thing about it is that you can post many at a time.  Ensure that with most of your posts, your audience can have a taste of your music. 

To attract IG users to your posts, use only quality pictures and quality video clips, create captions that appeal to and attract your followers/fan base and add the right hashtags to your caption. Hashtags are essential in reaching new potential fans, use many hashtags, but a maximum of 20 is good at this stage to reach a broader range of people. Your hashtags should align with your brand and what you want. For example, if you are into soul music, you may want to use hashtags like #soulmusic, #adele, #livemusic, etc. (Instagram also suggests hashtags). Instagram posts will be suggested to people searching words with your hashtags, which alone can promote your music beyond your imaginations.

Post Content 

Knowing how to post the right content is not enough. To achieve your goal, you must post at the right time, learn from experienced users and use other posting features.

If you want to do things right, you should start by observing those already doing it and getting results. Find strong IG users whose music or brand is similar to yours and observe how they post when they post and the pattern they follow. Then apply such to your page and posts. Always post your content at the right time. Use your IG insights on your profile page to track your followers’ presence. And it will help you predict when most of your followers will be active, the more the engagements on your posts, the longer your posts stay at the top of the feeds, and the more new fans you can attract. 

Use other features to post more extended or more content like your Instagram reels and stories. Add your stories to highlights so that people visiting your page can go through them anytime. Apart from hashtags, you can tag people and pages to your posts by using the tag option during upload or by typing the tag. For instance, to tag Adele to your soul music video, you can add @Adele (The IG user name of the person or page you wish to tag) to your post.

Be Consistent and Plan for Posts Ahead

One of the things that keep you soaring on Instagram is consistency. If you go silent for long, your followers become stagnant or decline as people can unfollow you. Moreover, if you post daily or four times a week at regular intervals, your followers can anticipate your posts. It would help keep them engaged and updated about your brand.

Scheduling your posts is also an essential part of promoting your music on Instagram. There are tools like Buffer and Hootsuite that enable you to schedule your posts. You can choose to be spontaneous with your posts but creating posts in advance takes off the pressure, especially when you have so much to do. So, if you have a music tour, you can create your graphics and contents ahead of time and schedule them to be uploaded live at a specified time. Moreover, you can choose to be spontaneous with your posts.

Use Instagram Ads 

So far, the discussed steps focus more on your existing followers and less on new people but using the Instagram ad or paying for sponsored posts focuses mainly on new people. Getting new followers from your posts can be done effectively by paying for ads. The good thing is, it does not cost a fortune, and it can have such a massive impact on your music as far as music promotion is concerned. Facebook owns Instagram; hence, you can use Facebook Ads Manager to set up your Instagram ads. To learn about setting up an Instagram ad using the Facebook manager, click here

However, before considering this option, you must know your target audience and how much you can afford for a sponsored post; the cost largely depends on your preference. Setting up the ad, you get to set your preferences based on; gender, location, number of daily reaches, and duration of the ad, which will then determine the cost. You can use this feature for advertising your shows, promoting your new release, or increase your number of followers. Especially when you are just starting, you should use this feature regularly at least once in six weeks.

Promote Your Instagram Using Other Social Media

You can use other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to promote your Instagram page. You can do this by adding ‘my Instagram handle’ to your posts and referring people to your IG page. Since you already have many activities going on Instagram, you can easily connect with friends from other platforms.

Conclusion : How to Promote Your Music on Instagram Guide

It is only wise to take advantage of platforms like Instagram to promote your music in a social media age. The cost is meager compared with what you stand to gain and the large audience you can reach. Moreover, you must know how to promote your music on Instagram to maximize its benefits. Follow the guide as highlighted step-by-step in this article, and your music will gain the desired audience and attention in no time.

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