What is the BEST Social Media Platform for Music Marketing?

In this video we're going to talk about the best social media platform for music marketing for you and specifically we're going to do it backed up by an actual study / experiment that I ran tracking data for my band across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook and how we figured out which was the best social media platform for us and what I think you can take away from this. Andrew [singing] Southworth, [music] the music marketing guy. So, first let me walk you through what we actually did for this test. So, what I have is these different pieces of social media content that we're going to zoom in in a moment and we're going to walk through this whole thing and I'm going to show you all the social media platforms, too. Um here I'm tracking the video that was posted and then I have all the data for TikTok, views, likes, comments, and like rate. And then I have the same data for Instagram, the same data for YouTube, and the same data for Facebook all tracked in a per video basis. It is worth noting that the content wasn't exactly the same across every platform, but it was mostly the same. For example, uh these videos, these videos, and this video were all the same across every platform and then some platforms had more overlaps, but uh essentially I ended up skipping some posts on certain platforms really just accidentally as I went along. So, it's it's mostly an apples-to-apples comparison. You'll see once we get through the data. It's good enough for this test by far. And I want to give you an idea of the types of content that we're doing as well. So, I I did name these as good as I possibly could. Uh performance verse one screaming, screaming verse one screaming with text, Kashi nostalgia same town, perforce two screaming nobody home from a visualizer, Kashi sent back. So, it's kind of like performance videos and Kashi footage and a promo visualizer. And let's go take a look so you can see exactly what that means. Let's do it on uh Instagram, I guess. So, this is the promo visualizer and I'm not playing the audio. If you're into alt- alternative metal music, check out my band Ever Reign A Moment, but um I don't want to blast your ears. I'd rather just explain this as we go. Uh let's look at a comment. Let's see. I'm Dev on Gameboy, metal singer. Of course it speaks to me. Sweet. Glad you like it, Bad Skull Audio. Um so that was the post. That was the the visualizer promo thing. And then this is the performance singing stuff. So this is um I don't know what part of the song this is, but this is one of those perf ones screaming or perf ones singing posts. And then the Kashi ones, this is the Kashi staircase liminal post. And then this is one of the screaming ones. So just to kind of give you an idea about what what the different type of content that we had here. One with her fans of text. And I believe that one was the perf first one singing with text. Um and these are mirrored across different platforms. So over on Facebook, if you go to Reels, these were auto posted from Instagram to Facebook Reels. Of course Facebook's not going to load right now. There we go. Um and they're down a little bit further down. Facebook's apparently going slow. There we go. Uh this post screaming when nobody's home. We go over to YouTube. We did the post on YouTube Shorts. This one for example. I guess it will auto play there. And then TikTok, we have the same thing as well across these posts. But you can see there's slight differences between the platforms. Um I wish I did a little more evenly. But originally when I started in this, I I wasn't going to track it like this. And then I was like, oh, this actually would be a good time to track this and see what this data shows. Um now diving into it a little more granularly, let's go into the spreadsheet. The first thing you'll notice, um and by the way, down below we have averages across all these platforms, is we have views, likes, comments, and then like rate. So, the like rate is just the amount of likes divided by the number of views. And then of course the likes and comments are just the number of likes and comments on each video. One thing you'll notice immediately is there's way more data for certain platforms. Facebook had effectively no comments and also TikTok had effectively no comments. Um Instagram and YouTube had way better comments than the platforms. When it comes to likes, uh TikTok for the number of views it had had a good amount of likes. And you can see that reflected in the like rates here. YouTube had some of the lowest like rates across the board. And that brings us to the averages that I have down here. So, all these numbers down here are taking the averages of everything. So, um let me walk through these numbers just so you understand. I do this because I I want you to do this for yourself so you can figure out like kind of the answer for your own music. And actually one thing I'll I'll I'll note here um if you were part of my newsletter, marketing monday.com, you would have gotten all this information like way earlier. So, it's free, no strings attached. Uh link in the description if you want to join my newsletter. Um a lot of Mondays, not even every Monday, I send out some type of educational useful music marketing tactic thing that I'm playing with or I'm thinking about. So, it's it's it's good. I think you'll like it. Uh but going back to the chart here, uh for each platform we got the the total number of views and likes and comments added them up. I took I counted the number of videos that had data uh because TikTok we had the most and then we had we had seven for TikTok and then six for all the rest. And then I took the average of the views, likes, comments, and the average like rate as well. So, now we have it for every platform. So, we can directly compare across the board. And you'll see again like rate, we kind of saw this when we looking at the individual video data above, the like rate for TikTok was about double all the other platforms, which is interesting. So, I don't know if that's me and my band's music or if it's that TikTok has is likely to to like more than other social media platforms. Now, I didn't calculate comment rate, but the average amount of comments was zero. Obviously, there are three comments in every video, so effectively, it's under 0.5. I'm rounding down to the nearest uh even number here cuz 0.4 comments is silly. So, it was closer to zero than one. And there were two here and one here and zero there. So, Facebook and TikTok were kind of dead in terms of comments. And Instagram was the best. Now, one thing that's worth noting, which you may have noticed if you're if you're an astute observer, but our Instagram has 6,000 followers. It We've kind of been doing really good follower-wise in the last week. Um and our TikTok only has 69 followers, but also we've gained a lot of these in the last couple weeks. You can see we've posted a I've posted a good amount of content on here since this initial test back here that we're talking about today. So, that is a factor here um of course, but one thing that's worth noting is that with Reels and TikTok, most of the views you get are from new people anyways, but it does impact these numbers, of course, right? We have more of an audience on Instagram. And it might be the case of our followers are the ones commenting on Instagram. And on TikTok, we don't have followers. So, it's like people are seeing us for the first time, so they're less likely to drop in and leave a comment. Now, on YouTube, um we have a similar size of our call, or maybe not. 2,600 followers or subscribers to 6,000 here. So, we actually have double on Instagram than we do on YouTube. And on Facebook, I don't actually know. We have about the same that we have on on YouTube. So, just to kind of give you an idea proportionally all this data, um I'm not trying to like pull a fast one on you. We definitely do have the most on Instagram. Which is part of the equation, but YouTube Shorts is about the same as Facebook. So, there's a few observations that I can pluck from this. Uh one, it seems like for us at least, Instagram is the best platform. But, YouTube's not that far behind, right? The average views was 1,200 here and 864 for YouTube Shorts. Part of that, like Tik Tok was by far the lowest. By far, right? It was even under Facebook. Um but, it is a little unfair because Tik Tok has by far the least amount of followers. It's the platform that I've I've effectively posted on the least over the years. So, that's definitely a factor. Now, I will say, if you're looking for a reason to subscribe, I'm running a bunch of social media tests right now. Because my band has dropped an album and we're doing a super aggressive social media strategy that involves like 300 posts in the first month across all of our platforms. Um so, that's going to be a banger and there's probably going to be a few other social media music marketing uh videos about that. So, make sure to subscribe if that's something interesting. A lot of crazy Tik Tok experiments as well. So, hopefully it'll be fun. I'm in the middle of running all those tests right now. But, that's worth noting. Tik Tok's the probably our weakest platform and it's supported by the performance of these videos. But, a lot of people talk about how Tik Tok is the platform that even if you have no audience, it's the fastest growing one. And I I can't really say that definitively, but I can say that the videos perform pretty poorly across the board here. And that continues to be supported with with new stuff that we post on all these platforms. YouTube and Instagram continue to do the best. Facebook and Tik Tok end up being about equal. But, that does kind of mean that Facebook Reels for us is pretty poor because we have a similar amount of following on Facebook. But the views are way less than YouTube. So, even though the followers are about the same, the views are way worse. So, Facebook big fat negative from us. Um that being said, I want to point out a few reasons why I ran this test. One, I've met a lot of artists who do way better on Instagram than TikTok, even though they've been posting the same content on both platforms for a long time. I mentioned how we haven't posted a ton on TikTok, but we also haven't posted a ton on Instagram, either. So, the fact that our Instagram is so much more is partially just because we've always done better on Instagram. It's also because we run ads driving people off platform to streaming, but you end up with a spillover effect of followers. So, I want to just kind of point out every advantage we have on each. But I know a lot of people who don't run ads who just naturally do better on Instagram. In fact, I know a few people who do significantly better on Facebook Reels than any other platform. And it's not just one person. It's you It's probably six people that I've met that do better on Facebook than any other platform. But usually those people have a demographic where it makes sense. Like they're doing hair metal, or they're doing adult contemporary kind of family-friendly music content. Um that is is the difference, I think. And I think my biggest takeaway from this experiment and from what I know from all the other people that do good on different platforms is there is no such thing as the best platform. It's different for everyone. Overall, across the board, um I would say that I see TikTok and Instagram most often for what's the best platforms for people. But I have seen it be every one of these platforms, and occasionally a different platform like Threads or Snapchat or whatever, right? The Moral of the story is when you're doing your own content, you should post on every platform and you should do a structured test like this. It doesn't have to be this granular or could be more granular, but I think it's worth posting and maybe doing a test like this over the course of not just a month or so which which I did for this, but maybe several months and track your data and try to figure out like well which platform I'm getting the best results on. Not so that you will just abandon the rest. Like we're going to continue posting on all these platforms because the way we do it is is YouTube shorts you schedule, Instagram reels auto post to Facebook reels and TikTok is fairly easy to post on manually. We could schedule it, but you have to tag the audio and all that. Um we're going to continue to post on all of them, but it's kind of like which platform do you prioritize? What do you What do you film natively in? Which platform do you post on first and which platform do you look at the comments the most in? I think that's what you need to find out, right? You don't have to be maximally present on every platform, but you should be kind of present on every platform. Pick one or two though that are the those are the ones you check your DMs, those are the one you check your comments, those are the ones that you do your stories on, etc. And for us, the clear answer is really Instagram and and YouTube at this moment because of what I do on this channel, I'm doing all these other crazy wild experiments, but you're probably not going to do that. You're going to find your winner and you're going to double down on it because that's the smartest thing to do. Now, I have another big takeaway from this which if I go down here, what I did is I I added up all the views and all the likes and all the comments. So, we posted seven eight eight videos, right? These are eight videos, but it averaged out to six or seven per platform. But let's just say it's eight videos. We posted eight videos on not very big accounts. And we had 15,000 views and this I I I up these numbers like 2 weeks ago. So, this is probably higher. This is probably now like 16 or 17 or 18,000, right? Views videos keep getting videos afterwards. They just get most of your their views early on on these short-form platforms. So, 15,000 views, 367 likes, 24 comments for posting eight videos. Uh I'm a huge fan of running ads. I talk about running ads extensively on this channel. But, think about all these views we get for free for posting eight eight videos, right? Eight. This is not like 800. This is eight. This is something you can film in an hour. All the videos that I showed you there, most of them came from one recording session. I recorded my song I lip-synced it once standing here. And then I made some Kashi videos, and I think it was less than 30 minutes of work. Honestly, I think it was less than 15 minutes of work to make those eight videos. And we got 15,000 views. So, it's a lot of artists talk about how much they hate social media and how they don't do it. But, I I think the biggest problem with it isn't the actual amount of time and work it is. It's how much we get in our own heads about doing it and how we want to make everything this art project. I just did a lip-sync shirt in a in a lip-sync video in a Fallout shirt. And I made a couple of low-effort videos on Kashi, which is a platform that you can make very simple videos on. I got 15,000 views. And I'm doing some tests recently where it seems to be like a good conversion from social media, at least for TikTok, to um Spotify streams. It's about 3%. So, that those eight videos, like mathematically from that, would be worth about 450 streams um across the music that's on them. And it might not be that good, right? It might be better though. Um and I I think I think a lot of you that I've spoken to that just don't do any social media, all of you can handle doing eight posts on a song. And if you're only posting two a week, that's a month of content. So, just think about that. I don't want to be the like tough guy, you got to go do this, um and and what's it called, the tough love person here, but this was not bad. This was very minimal effort, and if you can't even do that, I don't know how much of the other stuff in music you are going to be cut out for. Anyways, if you want to learn about other stuff you can do to promote your music that I have covered on this channel, check out this playlist right here to see a ton of videos, I think hundreds of videos that I have on music marketing. If you want to see whatever YouTube thinks you should watch, check out this video right here. Anyways, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.