300+ social media posts per month?!
To boost exposure for their debut album, Andrew’s band launched an aggressive social posting strategy across YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Instagram, totaling about 300 posts monthly. This approach targets new audiences through multiple niche TikTok accounts and trial Instagram Reels.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
My band hasn’t been very active on social media for years, so with the release of our debut album it felt like a good opportunity to change that. Here was the initial plan for the first month:
1 post per day on YouTube Shorts
6 posts per day across 4 TikTok alt accounts
3 posts per week on our main TikTok and Instagram Reels
2 posts per day on Instagram Trial Reels
This is about 300 total posts, which assuming 500 views per video this would drive at least 150,000 total views.
SO, now we’re a little more than 1 week into this experiment and I can share how things have been going so far. But first, here’s some explanation for why I set things up this way.
Why this setup?
As you may have heard, it’s basically impossible to post too much on social media. Most of the views you get for every post are new people, not your followers. This is especially true on TikTok, but it’s true on every social platform.
The weirdest part of this test is probably the 4 TikTok alt accounts. Essentially I made 4 other accounts on TikTok in various niches. They’re ‘theme pages’ that have content synced to music in niches that people who would like my band would be interested in. I’ll definitely be talking more about these in the future.
But the purpose of these extra accounts, is that it allows me to hit different types of potential fans, and push even more content out to them. As a result videos on these accounts get much more views than our main accounts.
In my last newsletter I figured out that Instagram and YouTube were my band’s best social media platforms. But engagement on these theme pages is actually doing even better.
The purpose of trial reels is it lets me test out some of that theme page content on our main Instagram page without it showing on our page. Meaning i’m not making our brand look crazy all over the place on the grid. Plus, it guarantees that content only goes to new people and not our followers.
How is it going?
So far we’re about 10 days into this test. And surprisingly we’ve actually posted more than initially planned.
Here’s the data for our main pages with some very rough average view counts:
13 YouTube Shorts (average views - 800
15 TikTok posts (average views - 275
12 Instagram Reels (average views - 800
18 Instagram Trial Reels (average views - 300)
Even with my super rough and very much rounded down average view counts, this is already 30,000 views. This also doesn’t include any of the theme page content, because I haven’t added it up yet. But just quickly looking at it I know for a fact it’s at least 30,000 additional views.
This means we can assume we’re already over 50,000 views in the first 10 days.
But how does that translate to streams? Well unfortunately that’s a harder number to measure. I’m running Meta ads on the album of course, and we already have over 2 million streams on the songs that were singles from the album. So it’s hard to see what the organic activity is doing.
For example, look at the Spotify for Artists graph for active streams (streams from people choosing to seek out our music):
Active streams are very clearly the highest they’ve ever been, which does correlate to more social activity, but it also correlates to more Meta ads. The saves are also higher, but that’s also explained by the release being an album.
So to figure this out, in parallel to this test, I have another test running trying to figure out the conversion rate from TikTok to Spotify. I’ll do a future newsletter post about this as well, but here’s a sneak peak:
Essentially I released another song under a fake artist name, and didn’t promote it in any wall except through a few TikTok theme pages I made. So I could add up the views, add up the streams, and calculate the conversion rate.
The current number is showing about 4% and climbing, which is much higher than I expected! Also the streams per listener are wild - like 8X.
Taking our 50k view estimate, this means our views have driven around 2,000 streams. Now that 4% is specifically for TikTok and I bet it’s different for all the socials, but I also suspect we have more than 50k views so i’m considering that a wash.
Going forward
Going forward i’m largely just trying to keep up with this plan for the rest of the month.
The content itself is actually very easy to make. It’s the posting thats the most time consuming. If you want to tag the audio in the social apps, you can’t use any type of scheduling tool. So every single post is manually posted by me on a phone.
With so many accounts and platforms this is quite tedious, and it probably eats up an hour of my day.
In my case I also created a tracking system inside of ClickUp, and the plan is to log every single post on every single platform with the view counts and possibly engagement data as well. This way I can pull all sorts of interesting metrics from the data.
If that ends up happening the full report will likely be end of June into July - stay tuned!
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