Instagram Stories: A Musicians Guide
If you are any kind of musician, I bet you have Instagram. If not, WOW! How is life under that rock of yours? Just kidding, kind of. Instagram is an extremely powerful tool in engaging with your fans and building meaningful relationships. With more than 1 billion active users and a tonne of interactive features like Instagram Stories, taking full advantage of this platform is too important to pass up.
What Are Instagram Stories?
A story is a little snippet post. Instagram stories enable you to create short posts about your day that are visible for 24 hours before disappearing. Very similar to Snapchat. This has its perks, because you won’t flood your fans news feeds when you share your content. Instead, they can opt to view or skip it depending on their mood.
What Should You Post?
Stories are a great way to nurture your relationships with your fans. You can post more content every day, without harming your engagement or sending your fans on a hunt for the unfollow button. The content you share can vary from backstage interviews, behind the scenes videos or even clips from your music video. You can post simple photos of you out and about, share GIFs or Memes, share engagement branded imagery or give shout outs and anything in between. There really are no holds barred here, the Story feature is yours to use how you see fit. Although, if you want to maximise your performance, you should think about your content rather than just slap out whatever you feel like it.
What is important though is that you keep your content consistent. Don’t spend a day posting about your favourite yogurt and then post a music promo in the evening. No one is going to suffer through you reviewing that vanilla Greek yogurt with pineapple sprinkles for 12 minutes.
Your goal on social media should always be to share content that enriches your brand. As with all social media activity, whatever you share should enhance your image and nurture your fans relationships and perception of you. Anything that doesn’t do this… Cut it!
Create A Theme
Creating a theme for your content can make your life much easier. When you follow a content theme, you will have more direction on what content to create and share. By keeping to a theme, you will have a consistent message and style that you are building on with every post. This helps you, as a musician, to develop content that your fans find engaging.
Whenever you create content, it is vital to remember, the content must service you and engage your fans. Your followers are here because they like you and they want to get to know you and your music. Don’t spew out random, irrelevant content. Give your audience something of value. Consistency is key in building effective social media presences. Keeping everything as part of an overall theme helps to maintain this consistency.
Content Ideas
- Run A Poll- Polls are a great way to engage with your audience and get to know their opinions.It also makes them feel directly involved in your content. Mix it up regularly though! Polls work very well when they are split equally between music content and random, personal content.
- Q&A- Instagram Stories have a question feature, where users can ask their own questions and you can answer them on your story! This is a good way for fans to really get to know you.
- Countdowns- If you have important news coming, this could be a good way to tease it. You want your audience to be hyped for the release, so tease announcements and run countdowns on your stories.
- Behind The Scenes Content- Why should you have all the fun and keep it to yourself?! Let your fans see the fun that you and your band have behind the scenes by sharing small snippet videos to your story.
- Pets- Who doesn’t love cute little puppies! You could use your Instagram stories to show off your pets and loved ones.
- Music Shoutouts- What are you currently listening too? Is there a musician you know who you want to share some love with? Share your favourite music and artists on your story so your fans can check them out.
Mentioning Other Users
A very effective way of spreading your content is to tag other people. These people then get a notification about your post, so be sure to make it content that is relevant and they would want to share.
When you add someone to a story, they are able to share that same content to their story, as well as adding content on an overlying layer. Their viewers can then follow that story through to your profile to see what else you have to offer.
This can be a great way of collaborating with other social media influencers and musicians to get your name out there. Giving support to fellow musicians who you want to succeed can help you break into their audience too. It’s a win, win, really!
How Often Should You Post?
Posting frequency for Instagram Stories differs from how you would post on Instagram normally.
Stories are a great tool to help maintain your visibility and get noticed by your audience. To take full advantage of these, try posting 3-5 times a day. This will share a good amount of content to engage your audience, while avoiding oversharing. Don’t be that person with 30 stories up at one time.
Story Links
Once you reach 10,000 followers or get verified, you can add links to your stories. Then your user can swipe up to head to an important website, like your other socials, your Spotify page or perhaps your gig ticket provider. You can use these links to promote a lot of different things.
Are you looking to get your music out there? With Identity Music you can get your music all over the globe in order to gain the maximum exposure. By using our distribution and music promotion services, you’ll be able to take control while watching your music reach new heights.
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