The Secret Behind Growing On Social Media
Growing on social media requires identifying your target audience, creating content that appeals to them, and maintaining consistent output over time. Different platforms and niches demand tailored strategies and ongoing audience research.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Growing on social media is one of those things that is simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. This is literally the secret:
Identify what type of person you want to see your content
Make content that appeals to that type of person
Do that consistently over time
That’s it, that’s the secret. If you do that you will grow on social media. Any social media platform too.
Now of course there is some nuance depending on which platform you’re on. The types of content that works on TikTok may not work as well on YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels etc. And of course the type of content that works on X or Threads won’t be the same as the short form video platforms.
But that’s where the next phase comes in…
Audience Research
If you don’t understand who you’re trying to reach, you’re never going to succeed unless you get lucky or have a natural talent for making stuff people in your niche want to see.
What you really need to know is which fans of which other bands are likely to be your fans. It doesn’t even have to be just bands, it could be interests, lifestyles, hobbies etc.
From that you can figure out a lot about your ‘fan avatar’.
What artists they listen to
Where they hang out online
How they discover new music
Where they listen to new music
What types of clothes they buy
Do they use Apple or Android
and more…
So think about what type of music you are, and what type of culture you want to have around your music. Then start hunting online to find these people, and find these similar bands, and find these online communities they hang out etc.
Content Research
Now that you know what type of person should see your content, you should start a research phase. This is where you go out and really look at content made by other artists or creators in your sub-genre or niche, and learn what does well.
Don’t just look at the biggest artists in the world, they can pretty much do whatever they want and it will get millions of views. Find some artists in the ‘medium’ category.
If the biggest artists in your space have 5 million monthly listeners, look at what artists in the ~500k monthly listener range are doing. These artists are still grinding, and they’ve likely worked hard to get to where they are recently, meaning their tactics might still be relevant for you to learn from.
If you can find smaller artists that are on an upward trajectory that’s great too, but it’s harder to identify these without access to something like Chartmetric.
I want to clarify that i’m not suggesting you rip off or copy these artists. But nobody really own’s a ‘style’ of social media content. You want to learn the style they’re doing, not clone them line by line. Look for:
Types of videos, is it lip-sync, live performance, cut up clips of anime’s, trend videos, talking to the camera etc?
What trends are they doing?
What locations are they filming in? Is it typically dark, happy, lots of people, no people etc?
How do they interact with fans? Are they talking to everyone that comments, are they really open and engaged or closed off and serious?
Now even if you’re planning on doing something totally original that nobody else is doing, you still want to go through this process. This process will teach you what works in your space.
Even if you’re not going to do that exact thing you’re seeing others in the space do already, you can still apply it to what you’re planning on doing to make sure you succeed in that.
Understand the rules before you break the rules.
By the way, knowing all of this stuff about target audiences and what content they watch will also help you with running ads! Check out my course Spotify Growth Machine if you want to learn more about how I use Meta ads to promote music on Spotify and other streaming services.
Be Consistent
You probably hear this phrase all the time online. But it’s really important.
You don’t want to make content daily for 2 weeks and then get burnt out and bail for 5 months. You also don’t want to keep flip flopping on what types of things you’re doing. Algorithms on social media sites require consistency in the type of content you do.
You shouldn’t feel like a prisoner in your own content schedule, but you also need to consider embracing when certain things do well. For example I know a band that did a very particular style of full band performance in a garage, and it popped off on TikTok specifically. So they did it over and over again to grow their audience from 0 to 50,000 followers in a few weeks.
Every time they posted a different type of video it flopped. So we had to figure out a strategy of content we could make that would get views, and also let their fans know about their upcoming song release.
On the flip side you also need to notice when the content you’re doing is getting the wrong people. Because you don’t just want views and followers, you want the right views and followers. I’ve met several artists with millions of followers on social media with less than 10k monthly listeners on Spotify, because they basically grew the wrong audience for their music.
So on one hand you want to be consistent and follow what works, and rinse and repeat. But you also want to be super sure you’re actually getting what you want. Some problems are easy to fix, like tweaking content to incorporate call to actions, but you can’t necessarily just course correct a page with 1 million followers in the wrong audience.
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