The Ultimate Social Media Guideline
Find your crowd
Be appealing towards existing and potential fans
Look good
Have a professional look towards partners & potential collaborators
How to be relevant
Stay in the loop and make sure you're top of mind
Work with the algorithms
Make it clear to music services that you’re an active artist
Social media is, in its essence, a relationship tool. It will help you connect with your audience and build a relationship between you as an artist and your fans. Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit.
Why you should care about social media
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Brand
Social Media should act as an embassy for your brand, meaning it should reflect the graphic styles and values of your image as a whole. Since your socials will be the primary source of brand interaction for music fans, it’s really important to have cross-media coherency. Essentially, just be yourself and keep the same look through every channel. When this is done right, one could hypothetically blur all the faces and text of your Facebook page, Instagram or Twitter, and it would still be clear as a day that it’s your page.
Do I have to be an influencer?
It’s not necessary to become an influencer on every platform there is. Vlogging is not for everyone, and that’s okay. Your social media presence should be based solely on your ambition. It’s better to just choose one or two mediums and update them regularly than to be on every platform and not be able to update them properly. Choose your platform based on your interests, which ones you usually use and where your fans are. For some artists, there’s even regional or contextual platforms that are more important than the big three, such as VK if you or your fanbase is largely Russian.
Post frequency
It’s usually a good idea to post some type of interesting content every day. Social media rewards activity, since platforms want people to stay on their platform and consume content for as long as possible. Therefore, helping platforms by creating valuable content can help your page grow by boosting your “value” in the algorithms. This doesn’t mean that you should force yourself to post every other day if you don’t have anything relevant to say. The easiest way to make sure you post valuable content every now and then is to make a nice and easy-to-follow content plan and stick to it. If that content plan includes 1 or 10 posts a week, that’s entirely up to you — but if your content doesn’t have a purpose, it’s better to not post at all.
Private or personal
We always recommend artists to create Social Media channels that are devoted to their music. Keep pictures of vacations and baby photos on your private account, and focus on your artistry on your artist account. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be personal on that account, just don’t be too private. Things like inside jokes with your friends might be better suited for a private account.
Try to keep a good balance between your private and artistic life. Each artist has their own ratio. If you want your audience to focus 100% on your music, you might not need to share every private party or lunch you attend. But if you prefer a more “down-to-earth” and “close-to-fans” persona, then these kinds of posts do have a place. Consider that each platform has its own “personality”, too. Maybe you’ll share more personal views on Twitter? Or your goofy side on Tik Tok? The important thing is that it’s always clear to fans what kind of content they can expect from you on which platform.
Examples: Billie Eilish usually uses her Instagram Stories for more personal content, giving us a glimpse of her dog, meals, etc. once in a while. Her feed is more focused on her professional career, with info about her releases, features on magazines etc.
On the other hand, Bon Iver’s Instagram profile focuses mostly on his music and political views. He’s very outspoken about the causes he supports, but you rarely see posts/stories about his private life.
To follow or not to follow
To follow, subscribe to or friend request people on Social Media is a core functionality of all platforms. Because it’s hard to be social all by yourself, right? So while it’s important to follow people within your field (like other artists, managers, record labels, superfans and so on), it’s also important to unfollow dead ends. You should follow accounts that you’re interested in and inspired by.
Don’t follow people only to hope that they follow you back. Look at the situation from the outside: Let’s say you visit a profile, and they follow 1000 different people. Despite that, they only have 20 following them back. What kind of impression does that give you? Maybe that person isn’t really worth following, and they’re only following people for a possible follow back. There isn’t really a specific number to this, but try to keep your following rate balanced and true to what you want to see in your feed. “Follow for follow” tactics does not grow your fanbase, ever.
Feed vs Story
This mainly applies to Instagram and Facebook, since both platforms mainly focus on two different forms of content. You have a “permanent” feed or timeline which is like an archive for all your posts. Here, your audience can always go back to see and read about who you are. Stories are only available for a day before they automatically get deleted. The best way of knowing where to post what is to ask yourself the following questions:
- Is this still going to be relevant in 48 hours?
- Is it something that should be available to anyone who visits your page in the future?
- Is this going to be news for your audience? As in, it’s not something you’ve already posted about recently.
If the answer is yes to all the above questions, then it’s probably a really great post for your feed! If the answer is no, then it may be better to keep this one in the stories. Just as it’s really important to post valuable things that help your brand permanently* in the feed, it’s as important to keep your more personal stories where they belong: in the stories.
* Note: Pictures in your feed aren’t permanent in their true definition (you can always delete/archive them), but they’re indeed more permanent than a story.
Hashtags
Hashtags (#) are a way of classifying your content so it shows up together with other people’s content of the same type. If you post a photo of your lunch with a hashtag called #food, other people who search for food-related images might see your photo, too. The thing is, hashtags have become overused and it’s harder than one might think to actually use them as a way of boosting your post. If unsure, it’s better to keep it clean than to overdo it.
The golden rule for hashtags is to use a mix of fast-consumed hashtags with low-consumed hashtags. Hashtags that are popular and posted by many (#love #happy #music e.g.) have a big audience for a short moment of time, while low-consumed hashtags are more niched and often local (#chamberpop #metalcore #WayOutWest2022), which means that they will stay visible in the hashtag feed for a longer period of time, but perhaps for a smaller audience.
DisplayPurposes is a great website for finding relevant hashtags that are both high- and low-consumed. Use different hashtags and look at your statistics to find the ones that generate the most visitors.
How to choose profile photo and banners
Choose a profile and header photo that tell a story together. The profile photo should be a picture of you where your artist persona is clear as day. The header should focus more on your style and could be a picture of you, your logo or something else that helps you communicate your brand. The most important thing is to use the two different spaces wisely, and to not see it as an opportunity to showcase the same photo from two different angles. Examples:
