I Posted 400+ Times on Social Media in 5 Weeks to Promote My Music (was it worth it?)

My band came out with our debut album Liminal about 5 weeks ago, and one thing I committed to doing during the first month of that album coming out was posting over 300 times on social media to promote the songs on the record. So, in this video, I'm going to walk you through exactly what posting strategy I did and the results of that, and it's going to be a great time. >> [music] >> So, when I say we posted over 300 times on social media, here's what I mean. We have an Instagram, we have a YouTube, we have a Facebook, and we have a TikTok. And this is actually not even the extent of it, but but for example, we have videos that we're posting on our TikTok page. Those are essentially duplicated also across YouTube and Facebook and TikTok. The same posts get posted across all platforms. On top of those videos, I also did something extra. One, Instagram has a feature called trial reels where you can post videos that don't show up in your page, and they only get posts to non-followers. And the next thing is I posted 150 additional videos in except from what we're posting on on these pages to like burner/theme page accounts that I created. Some are like fan page accounts, and some are more theme variety page accounts. And so, there's 150 posts in that, which I do have a custom dashboard I've been I've been coding to pull in all this data. Um and so, this is kind of a breakdown, which I'll walk through a little bit more later, but of all the different posts and the stats for all the different posts are just on on TikTok. This actually does include our band page, but it also includes the um the other TikTok accounts, too. So, uh there's kind of a lot of data here. So, uh I guess let's just go platform by platform. Instagram. So, Instagram, predominantly you're posting reels. And I'll talk a little bit about the content first because we tried a lot of different content types. So, if I go back to roughly when our album came out, which was around here, um I did a lot of videos in this exact place that I'm sitting right now where I just flipped up my microphone and saying some lip sync performance content. I also tried the whole hook thing, which you'll see is a trend going through a alt metal song written by humans. My music isn't even trending, so if you see this your algorithm's built different. I did a long talking video walking people through the album and through the the CD packaging and then later there's a vinyl one like that. I tried different hooks like day one of me watching you listen to music for my band's album where I'm just staring at the camera kind of watching someone check it out. And I also tried guitar solo content cuz one of our songs has guitar solo. I tried the anti-AI angle to be like, "Hey, you know, human artist, if you're sick of hearing AI stuff in your feed, you you are a human artist if you like us." I tried doing genre-based hooks. And I also tried more emotional hooks or some might call them cheesy hooks. Uh, but some of these are cool and some of these make me cringe, but I wanted to just try all of it. So, for example, POV you're 34-year-old man driving around town singing along to your own songs in the car. Um, kind of playing off the fact that I'm I'm not like 20. Um, I'm like a I'm like a guy that's married and has a daughter, right? So, I I wanted to play off that fact and just lean into it and not try to like be someone I'm not. So, me at 1:00 a.m. after my wife and daughter go to sleep. This was actually one of our better performing posts. So, we we used this hook a few times. I stole hooks from other people online. Uh, no shame. Um, war in the Middle East, expensive gas is like the 2000s all over again, so we use a rock music over there. I saw a bunch of artists using similar hooks to that, so I just ripped it off, which actually worked quite good. Um, so that's a tactic I recommend. If you see if you see someone using a hook that you think might work for you, just take it and repurpose it and make it your own. You can't copyright hooks like that. Um, I tried ones that relate to the story of the song. And this is me just sitting in my car, right? I'm just sitting in the car at dusk just kind of looking off into the distance with a textbook. That got 832 views, this thing. Right? Just me staring off into the distance, which is why I tried so many of these stupid videos of me just like looking at the screen. 1,000 views. Me just looking at my phone, watching someone listen to my song for the first time. So, one big takeaway that I want you to take away from this We're only on Instagram so far, but your content don't have to be fancy, right? It can just be you literally just looking at the phone with your song playing over it. I tried flow stage videos, which I had an interview with with the founder of flow stage recently that I guess I'll link up here. And I don't know if I have done it yet, but I'm going to be doing a big like walk-through video through flow stage, which if that is a thing, it'll be linked up here, as well. Um, but I also tried a whole bunch of other things with that. And a lot of our trial reels were this. I'm not going to show the trial reel data, um, because there's already a ton of stuff to show in this video. And later I might walk through everything, but it's it's still very much in flux. Um, so, yeah. Now, some of these hooks I think by the by the end of this or to the current day, I think I'm getting a little bit better at honing these hooks in. You know, POV you're working from home is a joke that like, "Oh, you're working from home and you're actually like recording music." Um, you know, you just found a band raised on Death Tones and Linkin Park and someone have to answer every comment. So, I think I'm getting a little bit better at it. Um, I gotten little better of an idea about what songs work now, and also what camera angles look better in my opinion, what filters work better. And I went to the studio to record some stuff. So, while I was there, I set up my my phone in a cool spot, and I think these videos look aesthetically better. We'll see how they perform, right? These videos are newer, so it's not unusual that they have smaller view counts. But that's that's Instagram. And that's also kind of like a walk-through the content and all the different things I tried on our channels. And you will see that repeated across YouTube shorts. In terms of view counts, it's very similar like on Instagram you saw we got generally between 500 and 1,000 views. I'd say 750 average. YouTube, it's pretty much the same. I think I think when I added up all the ones on Instagram and our TikTok and YouTube and Facebook, it's about 50 videos a platform. So, that that alone, right, is 200 videos. So, 50 videos over the course of 6 weeks um across four platforms is about 200 videos alone. Um which is a lot, right? But, it's it's not incomprehensible. Like I run a business and I have a 1-year-old and I'm insanely busy and I still was able to do this. So, I don't think I'm just like exceptional at at social media or anything. I mean, obviously I do this for a living on YouTube and and other platforms, so I'm kind of like a creator, but I'm not very good at like the music like filming, getting on screen, and doing lip sync content, and like coming up like that's not really my wheelhouse as much. So, if I can do this and I can find the time to do this, I think just about anyone can. And and I did a video recently that I'll I'll link up here as well where where I went through like more granularly what are the like how each of the platforms performed for my band and I made like a detailed table and calculated like average views per platform and engagement per platform. Um so, check that out. Like there's more nuances to this than just this platform got more views and this one didn't, but it is kind of a funny thing that no one talks about Facebook, but like you can get pretty good views and like I get decent comments from Facebook, too. So, like people people dig it. Maybe that's just my music. Um going over to TikTok, which we just saw briefly, like the views here are like 250 to 500 most of the time. They kind of all settle around this 300 view count, which is, you know, the one thing about TikTok though. This was our smallest platform from starting. So, even though the view counts are more modest, we started with 50 followers. So, through this process of posting like 50 videos, we quadrupled our followers. This wasn't an insane amount of work or an insane period of time. This is 5 weeks of time posting a a little more than a video a day over the course of a course of 5 weeks. Um and we quadrupled our followers. We gained 150 followers in that time frame and and generally our average view count went up. Like if I look back at the views we were doing before that, we had a lot of sub 200 view videos. Um and we had some lucky ones before, but we also had a lot of sub 100 videos. So, just posting more, you will grow on social media. So, looking back at this custom dashboard we made for internal tracking, um I realized I forgot a couple of accounts. We actually on TikTok in total including our 50 posts on our band page and all the other accounts we have like theme pages, burner accounts, theme uh fan pages, there's another there's 250 posts. Uh 247, I think it was when I added them up. And subtracting the 50 from our band is about 200. So, we had 200 on our accounts and then 200 on these like other accounts. So, it's actually a total of 400 posts we did in a month, which is actually kind of kind of wild. And I added up all the um the the views here and I think the TikTok I'm I'm already forgetting what the number that I said was or that I added up was, but the TikTok alone it was like 130 something thousand views. Um and if you do the math like on on Instagram where like we're getting roughly, let's just round down to 500 views per video, um that's that's what, 25,000 views and it's roughly the same on YouTube. So, another add another 50k, right? So, this is 200,000 views in 5 weeks for free organically um by doing this. So, this was a lot of work to do, of course, but it does show you that like you can make a lot happen by posting on on social media, right? Like you don't need to run ads to get views. You can just make content and grow. Now, the big question is was this worth it? And And that's a very hard metric to track. One thing, when it comes down to streams, this is very difficult to track. I I did a video, which I believe is coming up before this, which is how do Tik Tok views translate to streams, which I'll link here assuming it's out. And in this video, I come up with a way to track the percentage of views that actually translate to streams for Tik Tok specifically. So, in that I found it's roughly 5% for Spotify, 7% overall. Now, the thing with our band is like we did actually have an audience already. Um and we're running ads. So, it's very difficult to figure this out. Like it On one hand, if I go to monthly active listeners here, um this black line is monthly listeners, but this blue line is monthly active listeners cuz all the people finding us through socials are going to be active listeners, but also our ads are blended in that, too. So, this is the highest monthly active listeners we've ever had, but it's also we're running the most ads we've ever run. There's another way to analyze this. We could say, "Well, a lot of this stuff is going to be USA-based because when you post from the US, most of your views end up being from the US." So, in here, um it's it's also the same. Like no matter how I cut it, if I go to streams, we're just looking at streams from the US. I could just look at active streams from the US, and it is also the most we've ever gotten. But, also like we're running the more ads we've ever run. So, is this from the ads or is this from the social post? It it lines up exactly with both because as we started when the album came out, which we also started our ads at the exact same time. Now, another thing we could do is in that study where I looked at the how many streams result from Tik Tok views, uh the stream per listener was really, really good. 8.9 stream per listener from the song we were looking at in that previous video. And so, we do see the stream per listener dramatically shooting up. But, the other thing is we dropped an album. So that means our stream per listener would shoot up because we're marketing an album instead of a single. So every time I went to look at like how can I figure out how this is translating? I can look at US. I can look at active. I can look at active streams per listener in the US. I could think of another justification for how those streams would have happened. So I don't actually know for streams what happened. By every possible measure I can track, numbers are up. Numbers make sense. It looks like the social media stuff is translating to streams. But also it could easily be misconstrued as just ad stuff that's also happening. So um I'm to me it seems totally reasonable that the 10,000 number could happen just because of what I've seen with the other experiment I did in the same genre. And it makes sense that it would be lost in the sauce just be considering that we do in fact have um you know, 37,000 monthly listeners and 18,000 active listeners already. It is very easy for stuff to get lost in the noise when you're um when you have multiple marketing methods happening. So anyways, if you want to see more about that, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss a video and ring that bell. Um if you want to see how you can run ads to promote your music, check out this video right here to see a detailed video from start to finish that walks you through that process. Anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.