Which social media platform is best for music marketing?
A social media experiment tested organic video performance across Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, and TikTok. Results showed Instagram Reels led in views and comments, while TikTok had the highest like rate but the lowest overall reach for this band’s content.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to go over a social media music marketing experiment i’ve been doing. Specifically, to measure which social media platform is best for organic content performance. Meaning uploading vertically formatted content and seeing how it performs with no advertising or any other forms of promotion, and tracking the data.
Over the years i’ve met bands who do best on every platform - its not always just TikTok. Some people do best on Instagram, YouTube or even Facebook, and I wanted to see how my band compared and share the data with you.
This test was run across Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels and TikTok. I made 7 videos and posted them on all of these platforms. Here’s some data to get your interest:
As you can see, Instagram Reels won by a pretty good margin. YouTube Shorts wasn’t too far behind but Facebook Reels and TikTok weren’t even close. To me the most surprising metric here was how TikTok was the worst performing social media platform.
Now I have more data we’re going to cover, but I want to stress that this doesn’t mean TikTok is dead. The point of me showing this to you is to prove to you that it’s not always about TikTok.
YOU and YOUR music project will naturally resonate with the users on a particular social media platform the most. The only way to tell which one is to post on all and see what happens. Probably to just run a test like i’m talking about in this post.
Now with that out of the way, I tracked more data than this which thickens the plot even more…
As you can see in the image above I also tracked likes and comments, and then calculated the ‘like rate’. I wish I could have tracked shares or saves but the data on these platforms isn’t consistent across all of them.
Overall TikTok was the biggest winner in terms of likes - double the amount of likes per view compared to the rest. YouTube Shorts had the worst like rate.
TikTok however was pretty bad with comments, almost as bad as Facebook Reels (both averaged to less than 1 comment per video). Instagram Reels won the comments with an average of 2 comments per video.
Now you might be wondering why does TikTok have better like rates and why is Instagram the best for views? The answer is: I don’t know. But I have some guesses:
For my band Instagram is where we have the most followers. Even though most of the views you get from these types of videos is from new people, it could have influenced the algorithm to push out the video further than the rest.
TikTok had much less views, so the small sample size caused the like rate to be higher as a fluke
Our band’s demographic centers around millennials (25-44 is our biggest range on Spotify), which tend to flock to Instagram and YouTube more than TikTok.
But here’s another huge takeaway I want you to take away from reading this.
We made 7 videos, and got 14,686 views from them across platforms. These videos took less than 30 minutes to make.
Social media isn’t really about going viral anymore. It’s about showing up and getting consistent views over time. We could do this every week, and get 15k views, 350 likes and 24 comments for free. Plus all of that content helps our advertising efforts, and we’d start getting compound growth from that over time.
It’s easy to look at a video getting 200 views on TikTok and get discouraged. But when you look at the lump sump, the additive effect of cross posting, it becomes much more worth it. And nothing I showed today had big numbers.
Now how many of these people went an streamed our music? Who knows. Probably like 1% of these viewers, which would be 15 people. But if it is actually 15 people, that’s 15 new potential fans for a pretty low amount of effort.
I do have another test running know trying to measure what percentage of TikTok views turn into streams, so be on the lookout for that!
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency Southworth Media specializes in running Meta conversion ads to promote your music on streaming platforms, email list growth, tour promotion and more.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
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