SHUVT.resonance // Artist Social Media Guide

THE SOCIAL BOARDING GUIDE

Welcome to the SHUVT.resonance family. This is a small guide on things that you might already be doing, but if you aren’t, these things will help you expand your presence as an artist.

SOCIAL PROFILES

As much as social media can be a toxic place sometimes having a social presence as an artist in 2020 and beyond IS VITAL.

If you don’t already make sure you have accounts or pages under your artist names set up on the following:

• Instagram [Vital]
• SoundCloud [Vital]
• Facebook Page [Reasonably Important]
• YouTube [Reasonably Important]
• Twitter [Less so but useful]

The next thing to note is having consistency across your socials. Stick to a certain aesthetic across the banners on each and consider sorting a good headshot or artist image that you use across all your socials.

OUTBOUND LINKS! Your profile is what people visit when they like your post. From here you need to get people directed to your music and other profiles. The best way to do this is via something called a LinkTree. It’s a mobile friendly link people can click to find your other content. https://linktr.ee/ is free to use and does this super well!

Linktree example: https://linktr.ee/frederick.ansgar 

Make sure you have one of these in ALL your social media ‘website’ fields.

SOCIAL POSTS

Arguably one of the most important ways you will grow as an artist along with your productions. The great music you produce needs to find its way in front of your existing and potential new audiences.

Post regularly across your accounts:

• Instagram [2-4 times a week]
• Facebook [1-4 times a week]
• SoundCloud [1-2 times a month minimum.]
• YouTube [1-2 times a month minimum.]
• Twitter [If you do use it, try a daily general or music related tweet]

Content ideas for your social media:

• Instagram / Facebook

• • Studio Photos
  • Track Artwork Previews
  • Track Previews
    • Out your DAW directly
    • 30/60 second preview videos of visualiser
  • Update Posts (Image of you as artist, description of what you’ve been up to, keep it relatable)

• YouTube

• • Full track videos.
  • Basic music video edits. Edit some footage to go with beats etc. Not vital though.

SOCIAL STRATEGY

• 10 Big hashtags [#housemusic #techno #dj #producer] etc.
  • These are hard to compete in but you’ll be in the new explore feed a few minutes on these.
• 10 Medium hashtags1 [#housemusicproducer #ukproducer #minimalhouseproducer] etc.
  • This is where you can land if a post takes off breaking through the lower hashtags.
• 10 Small niche hashtags [#deepundergroundhouse #ukproducergang #deeptechmusic] etc.
  • This is where you’ll initially have the higher chance to make an impact and land on the explore page and feeds with.

A great tool to research some #’s is www.displaypurposes.com. Below is an example of making use of this tool. Make sure you pay attention to the relevancy and the popularity to get a good mixture of the above mentioned. Begin typing a few relevant #’s in and it will generate 30 varied hashtags for you to use. 

On the side once it’s generated 30 hashtags, change it to ‘manual’ removing any non relevant hashtags such as #EDMfamily #PARTY #clubbing or any other less relevant hashtags that appear. Then replace them with relevant hashtags of various sizes.

You also do not need to have 30 hashtags every time. Anywhere between 20-30 is fine.

When making a post you do not need to put these into the post directly. Instead you can comment them on your own post and it will still put the post into these hashtags keeping your post description clean.

Make sure that YOU DO NOT use the exact same #’s on every post as Instagram will think this is bot behaviour. Change them up but start a document to save your variation blocks and look at your insights on post to see which of your # combinations perform well. Make sure you vary the amount sometimes too as mentioned above.

I’VE POSTED, NOW WHAT?

Coming up with the content, description and #’s is only part of the work. Instagram/Facebook and any social network is really all about Engagement. This means you want to ensure your post has plenty of engagement within the first hour of it being up. Get friends to:

1. Like the post
2. Comment on the post, a sentence, not just an emoji!
3. Hit the ‘Save’ icon on instagram.

These things all ensure instagram recognises your post as an engaging valuable post putting it higher in peoples feeds and higher on the # feeds with a chance to appear on the explore page.

NOTE: >DO NOT< directly send your post to people using Instagram’s messenger. Directly sending the post to mass people will flag it to the system. Instead message people telling them you have a new post up on your profile or copy the post URL to send on other messaging platforms.

Remember to make use of the SHUVT.resonance community. When you have a new post up let us know in the group chats and we will support each other helping with initial engagement boosts.

CONSISTENCY & REFINEMENT

Congratulations on doing the above, if you weren’t doing any or some of these things you should see a near instant improvement of your online presence. 24 hours after a post has gone up make sure you have a look at the ‘Insights’ tab on the post to see how it performed, if certain posts seem to be doing massively better than others, take a moment to analyse your post, description, #’s etc. and work out why this one might be doing better, then apply the positives to future posts. Keep up the regular content and you should see what might be initially slow, but consistent growth. The first 100, then 1000 are the hardest though after this you should see faster consistent growth.

INCREASING YOUR REACH & AWARENESS

So on top of regularly posting what you’ll want to do is get your name appearing in places more. To do this we will use a variation of the Garry V $1.80 Strategy. That might sound a bit confusing but basically what it means is giving ‘Your 2 cents’ on a lot of posts every day till you have $1.80 worth of comments. (This is just a guideline you don’t have to comment that much on stuff)

You do want to regularly look at relevant ‘#’s to you and then look under their ‘new posts’. Leave comments on these posts but make sure they are genuine and constructive comments. Leave track feedback, someone’s studio look cool? Tell them in the comments. Leave a like, leave a comment. Doing this means that at least some of those people will check out your profile and posts too, maybe even follow you and start interacting with your posts. You’re building a network on your social accounts of both artists and listeners. Getting other artists to interact with your posts increases the likelihood that their listeners might check you out too!

Is this a bit confusing? Take a moment to watch the video below that explains this in some detail. Again you don’t have to do this much interacting if you don’t find the time but it will massively help.

QUESTIONS?

I’m by no means a full expert in social media but over the last few years have spent a lot of time both independently and as part of my employment working on social media strategies. I’m always happy to discuss and analyse your profiles as part of being a SHUVT.resonance resident and talk you through anything you might be confused about.

Either shoot me a DM on Instagram or Messenger,

Alternatively if you want an easy to refer back to log of our conversation email me at: daniel@shuvt.com