“I’ve tried everything and nothing is working”.
I’ve received this message regarding social media at least three times this past week.
Creatives are getting more and more frustrated with lack of results, and many are on the path to quit altogether.
I used to have this problem. I was convinced I was doing all the right stuff, but nothing was moving.
I’d literally say to my partner “something is definitely wrong with my account—my content is good! I’m 100% sure it’s not that”.
She—somehow being years ahead of me in her understanding of social media despite having no online presence—knew I was being an idiot, even if I didn’t.
“Alex, this is literally what every big account says they had to go through. You’re not special, you just can’t see the answer yet.”
She would have worded it differently, but this was the message.
I rejected this for ages. I found a way to justify my perceived lack of progress at every turn and stuck to my argument that the world (at least the social media world) was against me.
Now that I’m on the other side of this problem (not a big account, but moving in the right direction), I know just how wrong I was.
There is always an answer—but that doesn’t mean you’re ready to see it yet.
When nothing is working and you can’t see the answer, it truly feels like there is no answer—I have plenty of empathy for creatives still on that side of the wall.
And social media is no easy thing for a lot of us. To get to the other side of the wall can take a lot of learning, experimenting, and perseverance.
But it can be done. And if you accept that there is an answer, you open yourself up to find it.
Take your frustration as a sign that this is important to you, and as a test to see if you’ve got what it takes to break through the wall.
If you get yourself in this headspace, you’ll be primed to get real value from this letter—because we’re going to talk about how to get yourself out of this social media hole.
The hidden piece… or the hidden combination?
Second only to the struggle of finding a way to demonstrate their unique value, the biggest problem I’ve identified for creatives on social media (relating to their growth) is a break in their operating system.
What does this mean?
There are three major levers responsible for your success on social media:
- Art / content (there needs to be a steady stream of posts that communicate whatever you want to communicate)
- Traffic (there needs to be a reliable and repeatable way to drive people to your profile)
- Sustained connection (there needs to be some form of ongoing engagement between you and your audience—you could also call this relationship building)
For your operating system to work properly—to be consistently making progress on social media—you need to be always pulling all three levers.
Unless one of these applies to you…
- Your content is so good you’ve got consistent traffic and engagement, and a fanbase who loves you (in which case all your levers are being pulled as a result of pulling one)
- You’re already so loved that people are actively seeking out your socials to follow you
…pulling one lever at a time is just not going to move the needle enough for you.
When I work with musicians who are struggling, I always look to see if all three of these levers are being pulled—and in almost every case at least one of them isn’t.
A break in the chain usually (not always) looks like:
- Infrequent posting—you don’t have to post every day, but less than a couple of times per week is not great
- Lack of initiated engagement—if the content isn’t pulling people in yet you need to get out there and manually bring people in
- Not replying to comments or messages—deceptively simple, yet so many people don’t do it.
If you’re rolling your eyes at this and thinking “I definitely pull all three of these levers and still nothing is working for me”—hold on.
Because although that might be true, 99% of the time when I hear this from musicians… it’s not.
Assuming these three levers are being pulled correctly, you should be seeing measurable external growth (numbers going up, engagement increasing).
Of course, the better the stuff you’re sharing on social media, the better (and likely faster) your results will be.
But this framework has been tried and tested even on beginners whose stuff isn’t all the way there yet.
I’ve now got enough evidence to confidently say there are people out there who will willingly and genuinely connect with you regardless of where you’re at.
Let’s take a closer look at each lever. While going through this, see if you can identify gaps in your current approach.
If you can find and fill them, you shouldn’t have any problems.
Lever 1: Art / Content
I’m going to call whatever you post ‘content’ for consistency—you can see it as simply sharing art if you like. I find the two are often heavily entangled (or at least I think they should be if you want to enjoy social media).
Content has all powerful potential. In an ideal situation, your content is so good that you can simply post it and it attracts large volumes of people—like a big magnet.
In this case, if you’re posting often enough, simply posting on social media would pull all three levers:
- You’re sharing your stuff, of course
- Your posts are driving enough traffic to your profile
- You’re creating sustained connection with an audience through the engagement on your posts (assuming you reply to all your comments & the messages that result).
This is ideal, right? A good goal to work towards.
But many musicians who decide to go down this path—as in, they decide they’re just going to focus on creating great content so they don’t have to do the other stuff—don’t realise what they’re getting into.
The content game is no joke. If your goal is to use content alone to do the job of all three levers, know this:
The standard for creatives is high. Depending on where you’re at you may be working for little to no reward for quite a while if this is all you focus on.
Musicians are often quickly frustrated by the barrier to entry into well-received music content, and it can be disheartening to get such little reward for such high effort.
It’s why I recommend you stay open to manually pulling the other two levers (traffic and sustained connection), at least while you’re working on improving your content.
This way you can start making connections and getting people interested in you almost immediately.
Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it with content. It can change your life.
Here are three bits of advice I’d give to a musician who wanted to improve their content with the least amount of wasted time and energy possible:
- The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get to the good stuff. You don’t have to immediately start posting, but immediately start practising. Your content will likely be not so great in the beginning. Accept it and work through it asap.
- Go for irreplicable. The musicians whose content really stands out is hard to replicate for one of two reasons: The musicians’ skills exceed those of the average musician and/or the content is highly personalised (drawing on unique and authentic storytelling, perspectives, beliefs, quirks, personality, etc.).
- Look to the greats. There is no faster way to understand the inner workings of effective content than by studying high-performing content. That doesn’t mean you have to make stuff like that but paying close attention to it will teach you a lot.
While you’re working on this, don’t do nothing.
If you’re simultaneously:
- posting a steady stream of content
- driving traffic to your profile in some way (more on this shortly)
- and ensuring there’s constant communication between you and your audience
…you can 100% still get people interested in you and your work with less than perfect content.
Lever 2: Traffic
If you want to grow consistently, you need to have new people seeing your stuff consistently.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, your content may not be able to do that job well enough straight away.
So to ensure this lever is being pulled, you need to take control of your traffic instead of posting and getting intermittent—or worse, no—results.
How can you do this? Well, there are a few ways, and it depends on what you can and are willing to do. Here are a few examples:
#1: You could take the most reliable starting approach, which is to go and find other similar musicians to interact with on the platform.
Practically, this looks like finding musicians similar to you in style and audience size (whether on your FYP, your recommendations, explore page, relevant hashtags, or through accounts that would have an audience of these people), engaging with their posts and perhaps following them.
#2: You could drive traffic from external sources, such as playing shows, other platforms, real world interactions, events—anywhere there’s people who might be interested.
#3: You could have you stuff shared by others to expose you to new audiences. Ideally this is organic and shared on pages that make sense for your music / brand, but there are paid options.
I’m not overly keen on recommending paid options for this because a lot of the opportunities aren’t as good as they seem. But if you can find a way to get your stuff shared by pages that will reach your target audience and it seems legit, it’s an option.
#4: Paid traffic—ads. The ‘best’ way (the way I think is most effective for long term growth) is: ad for your music > link takes people to a landing page > landing page takes them to Spotify.
There are other paid approaches you could take such as boosting posts or running traffic ads directly to your social media profile—but to say this is a good idea without discussing it in more detail would be misleading.
Whichever approach you take, make sure you’re able to get results consistently.
The last thing you want is to take a path that results in intermittent traffic—it will feel clunky, unsustainable, and unbelievably frustrating.
Generally, I usually recommend primarily either the first or last option in the above list—or both at once.
The reason for this is you have more control. You can decide on the amount of time or money you put into it on a regular basis, and over time you can roughly predict what kind of results you can get from that time or money.
Personally, I’m a ‘spend money over time if I can afford it’ guy because the older I get the more I realise how precious time is.
You might be in the position where it’s better for you to spend time rather than money, and that’s fine.
Do what will work for you now—it can always change in the future.
Lever 3: Sustained Connection
One of the biggest problems musicians have on social media is the lack of sustained connection between them and their audience.
Once people are in your world, they need to be constantly taken care of.
Before you roll your eyes at this and think ‘why should I have to do that?’—remember: This is exactly what you want from them.
You want them to bring you enough value in the form of support, engagement, listens, whatever. And so they want that from you—just maybe in different ways.
This can be done by giving them a steady stream of high value content & art. But it isn’t a guaranteed thing.
The audience decides what’s ‘enough value’ for them, and your job as a musician who wants to build a loyal audience is to do your best to give them that.
That doesn’t mean creating content you don’t want to create, or selling out, or anything like that.
It means ensuring you have some way of making them feel like their investment of time and attention (and sometimes money) into you is worth it for them.
Here are some common (and simple) ways you can do this:
- Giving them lots of music
- Giving them lots of content
- Replying to their comments and messages
- Regularly shouting them out (maybe in Stories)
Remember, they decide what’s valuable to them, but these are good and common ways for them to feel like their investment is worth it.
How much you incorporate each of these approaches to sustained connection depends on your individual situation. Here are a few examples of what I mean:
— If you frequently release music, you may be able to just share that as a way to keep your audience happy (this is not guaranteed—none of this is).
— If you don’t release very often, you may need to create extra content outside of your released songs to keep them happy.
— The less engagement you’re getting when you share stuff, the more important it is for you to actually reply to comments and messages. You should do this as much as you can anyway, but it’s even more important when you’re not getting much.
I’m emphasising replying to comments and messages because it’s unbelievably easy to do, yet I still see / hear that so many musicians aren’t doing it.
If you aren’t in the position where you can ignore your comments (as in, you’re getting so much consistent engagement that it’s clear your content is amazing), ignoring them or simply liking them without responding is a terrible idea.
The bottom line regarding this lever is this: You and your audience both want the same thing—value from one another. If you want lots of love, give them lots of love in some way.
But Alex, this all feels like a lot of work…
You’re right, it is a lot of work. I have two things to say on this:
First, if you’ve chosen to enter the arena of music in this way (using social media to build a fan base who supports you in the ways you want to be supported), you’ve chosen a hard path.
You’d do much better to accept that than to try to find a way to change that fact.
I want to follow that statement up by reminding you that there is a lot you can do to make your life easier when it comes to this stuff.
But trying to avoid hard altogether is a game you don’t want to play.
This is something I’ve been seeing pop up a lot recently: Easy choices = hard life. Hard choices = easy life. Love it.
The second thing I have to say on this: In the beginning, it will feel hard—potentially impossibly hard.
But as these actions become habits, they get a lot easier.
Once something becomes a habit, it takes significant less energy to carry out. If you can work through the initial difficulties, you’ll find what was once overwhelming will become manageable.
Change over time
Something I notice with a lot of musicians I speak to is that they (consciously or unconsciously) reject certain approaches because they don’t feel or sound sustainable.
I totally get this, but here’s something important to know: You won’t necessarily have to approach social media in the same way forever.
As your efforts start to produce better results, you’ll have more freedom to approach it the way you want.
I built my audience to roughly 5000 people by pulling each of the three levers separately.
I created content consistently, but it didn’t bring too many people in by itself. So I proactively built connections and relationships with people largely by taking the above-mentioned ‘reliable start approach’.
Eventually I improved my content to the point where it started to drive traffic and I didn’t need to ‘go out and get it’.
Was it a lot of work? Sure, but it was undeniably worth it.
With a total audience now of roughly 75,000 (a large percentage of which grew in the last year alone), I’m glad I put myself through those initial difficulties.
And now I have a lot more freedom to do things the way I want.
Would you sacrifice some comfort in the short-term for a potentially much bigger long-term gain? Given you’re in the music world, I hope the answer is yes 🙂
Ok, let’s quickly recap and add a final note:
- To drastically increase your chances of success on social media, you need to be pulling all three levers: art/content, traffic, sustained connection.
- If your content can’t yet do the job of all three, you need separate approaches to each.
- The better your content, music, and social media skills get, the more freedom you have to do things your way.
- If you accept that you’re on a hard path (instead of trying to change that fact), you’ll make significantly more progress.
- You are capable of infinitely more than you let yourself believe. Choose to remove that upper limit cap and act as if you’re going further than you can possibly imagine.
Ok, that’s enough from me.
I hope you found this useful, and as always if you need some help you can check out your options here.
All the love and stay awakened,
Alex
