Mastering the ‘gram – 5 Instagram Tips for Showing the World What You Do

Whether your a DJ, Producer, Band, or Visual Artist it’s likely that you utilize social media as a platform to share your art. If you aren’t then you should! If you are using Instagram as one of your core platforms then we have 5 tips to share with you so that you can up your Insta’ game and enjoy from the potential influx of business you get.

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1. Engagement

Anybody who has any social media with the goal of attracting attention should understand engagement. I say ‘attention’ and not followers for a reason because the quality is more important than quantity in this game. Engaging your followers is important in order to cultivate a community of people that actively support what you do, and you can do that by actively supporting what they do so. You will benefit from a smaller but actively engaged community over a larger uninvolved number of followers. Unless you’ve already made it big then it will take some work to get your followers engaged by going through their profiles then liking and commenting on their posts (aka engaging them). Once they are commenting on your posts then it is important to respond in a timely manner and authentically, don’t fake interest, these are your fans and your appreciation will pay off.

If you’re wondering what to do in order to supply constant content just remember that your social media is about WHAT YOU DO. In order to get the most engagement, you should lean towards what you are doing or create during your daily life, start off by asking yourself if you’d be interested in seeing it from someone you respect.

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2. Instagram Stories

Instagram added this feature recently to compete with Snapchat and satisfy our need for impermanence, the Instagram Story. With this feature, you can upload photos and 10-second videos that run on a 24hr cycle and are deleted forever following that period. Here you can quickly upload daily content that doesn’t require much thought or as much polishing as a normal post. Commenting on your followers’ stories is a great way to engage them and your posts go directly to their inbox, creating a more intimate conversation than posting publicly.

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3. Instagram Live

This is a relatively new feature as well but offers a different thought process behind sharing with its live component. This feature is raw, unedited, and real-time. You can use this to live stream videos of you practicing, performing, or whatever else gives your fans a behind-the-scenes look into your process. If you choose to share something more abstractly related to your creative process (like grocery shopping?) then this is the place to do it as the streams aren’t imprinted on your feed. You can allow commenting for live engagement and even add another person to the stream as if in a video-call.

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4. Promote Your Shows

If you have an event coming up then this could be one of the best places to notify your fans. Got a cool poster or flyer that was made for your show? Post it here, tag the other artists and let your fans know how they can get tickets by including a link in your profile bio; don’t forget to put “Link in Bio” in the post description. If you are performing a lot then make sure to post in between shows, you don’t want to oversaturate your feed with your self-advertising and turn it into a flyer collection.

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5. Hashtags

This may be the most underrated but effective way of garnering attention from your fans and potential new followers, the hashtag game has got to be on fleek. It may not be intuitive to you at first but hashtagging is simple, it is a way to index your post with other Instagram users’ posts of similar content. Whatever your photo or video contains in imagery you want to support textually with your hashtags and relates back to you. Make sure the majority of your tags are related to what is actually seen in the post, the key is striking a balance between super niche and general audiences. You’ll be able to see how many people have used a hashtag before when typing it in which will give you an idea of how large that audience is; if you’re a producer then throw in a #producerlifestyle into most of your posts for broad appeal and then get more specific. A good habit to get into is placing your hashtags in a comment immediately after posting, that way your description isn’t cluttered up.

Whenever utilizing social media it is important to remember that content is king/queen, but your craft should be first. You don’t want to sacrifice practice/performance for tending to your posts otherwise you defeat the point! The reality of our interconnected world today is that no matter how awesome you are and dope your content is nobody will know who you are unless you tell them. It only takes 15 minutes a day to think about posting something, writing the description and delivering so start to get into the habit now. Is it dope? Would my biggest fans want to see it? If probably, post it.