 So now that we've gone over both how to think of social media and some advanced theory on how to see Instagram, we can now get into all the fun secret techniques on how to do cool things with Instagram that can help you build a fan base. So in this video, I'm going to give you eight secret tips that help you build a fan base on Instagram no one else is showing you. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon. This is MuseFormation. So I don't think I need to tell you that musicians love to imitate the things that they see famous Instagramers do, but so much of what you can do on Instagram needs a little bit more explaining to do it totally right. So in this episode, I want to talk about what I've seen work for building a fan base to 10,000 fans on Instagram. So let's get on with it. First, I'd be a total asshole to not reiterate this point first, since so many people miss it. And honestly, if I were you, I'd spend so much time thinking about how you do this within your music. And what I'm talking about is telling stories around your music on Instagram. The greatest currency that can get your music to grow is always going to be making connections with people who see your posts by telling stories around your music. If you didn't watch my guide to social media, it's linked now and below in the description and you need to understand that if you want to do real work on Instagram. But in short, stories weigh more than everything. There's a reason Instagram named their feature stories after this. If you tell stories, you build bonds. Think of the times in your life and what you're going through and write them down and tell them into the camera. Anyway, you can do this to get it across that shows vulnerability and allows connection that helps fans build these bonds is worth doing on this. So I want you to think of every time you are promoting something that it's a story. New song, tell the story about it. New tour, talk about the bonds and the fun you had on the last one and why this is going to be a unique experience. Just saying you're playing a show isn't enticing. Telling why it will be special is. Tell stories and have conversations with your audience. Don't talk at them. Okay, number two. So we talked about that the other problem you have with Instagram is people will follow you, but they have no awareness of what your music even sounds like. So let's address how we changed that aside from the stories we just talked about. The way we do that first is to actually put music on Instagram. But the problem is most people are scrolling with the sound off. Here's how I like to get around that. So let's assume you're following my releasing a song every six to eight weeks planned for your music. Here's how I would post songs around your music each time after you put them out. The first day you release your song, I would put up a strong image from your video or your artwork or whatever and put them both in a carousel and put them in your story and tell a story around this song in the caption. Use your strongest images and try to engage with your fans around the story you're telling around the song as much as possible. Try to invite curiosity to get people to go to the streaming sites and listen to make sure you've added a song.link link to your link tree so people can listen to the song. Next let's put up that video from your single screen video with a sound on which we can hope will gain some curiosity. Maybe if you're posting this a day later you change the color scheme a little bit. Take advantage of the one minute length you can use on Instagram feed and make sure to share it into your story. After this for the next six to eight weeks drop some vertical videos that you hopefully captured during your video shoot. I would try to get as much imagery as possible for vertical videos since stories are so easy to be shared over and over again and whether you need to gather in a post or from your video or capture it on the filmic pro app on your phone while you're filming things I would do whatever you can to add your video shoot to get as much of this content as possible. I would then stick it to the various points of the song's hook as much as you can. Turn.audio is a nice way to present your song in the first week of release when you only have a single screen of artwork for your song out. If you drop your song on a Friday I like to drop this on a Tuesday as another easy way to present a way people can get a visual clue they can listen to your song since the spinning like vinyl image clearly spells out to this mindless fans scrolling through their feed that you can hear the song here. I feel like this is often a helpful nudge that gets a listen and most of all it's free and easy to make in about two minutes. Next I would put up your lyric video and more image stills from your music video for the remaining weeks. If there's great imagery from your video with the hook at different times feel free to post it as much as the video is worth it in different pieces over different days. Let's remember what we're trying to do here we're trying to remind fans to keep building their bond with this song. You can later delete the less amazing posts you made from this from your feed once they've served a purpose. In fact right before I release each new single I like to clean up any other posting done to promote a song so it's easy for someone who's new to your page to look through and get a vibe that's not too repetitious. Whatever day you drop your music video let fans know you're going to go on instagram live and be sure to invite anyone who's in the video and do chats with them and tell stories around the music video. This ensures that the people in the video will share the video and this will put some pressure on them to do so frankly and it will also make their followers more likely to hear about it. Hell invite the director the producer of the song and just tell stories so fans know more about it to blab to their friends about. There's seriously few better exploits on IG right now than to go live since it sends alerts to followers and populates first on stories. Take advantage of this it's not going to last forever but not too often. But once every two weeks is great the last kiss of any campaign should be to post the whole video to IGTV. You are small enough that your numbers on YouTube and Spotify are going to suck anyway and you need all the favors you can get so I know a lot of people don't like that IGTV takes away streams from there but it also can really help a fan bond with the song and is totally worth it at the end of the campaign. So when your single is out on its last breath and you're about to release another put it up on IGTV and it's full glory. Wow okay so I guess after that essay in itself we're on to number three. So speaking of Instagram live and how much it can help people get awareness of you here's an idea. The most low rent easy way to create content and grow yourself on Instagram right now is if you're following what I talked about in my building community video and you're reaching out to different musicians who are similar to you you can do this with all the musicians you have a positive interaction with. I would start a series and call it something like you know calls with whatever your band is and for 30 minutes every week promote it for one day before that that you're gonna do it. Then go live with that person you met from your community research and get to know each other. It will introduce you to the audience of another group and it will be fun. If you don't know what you talk about go back to my video on social media and choose one of the categories have conversations around one of them. At the end of every video pop up your latest singles and talk about them with the fans while they listen to the chat. Number four let's talk about stickers. I personally think stickers don't have enough weight put on them for what they can do for you. Now for whatever reason most people seem to not know that there's a way to put a sticker on your story even if it's not listed in the Instagram directory and that's to simply go into your photo editing app and then export any image you'd like as a PNG and then send it to your photo album and select copy and paste and put it into your story just like I did on the screen now. These stickers can make you look fancy and like your band has its own sticker if you make it to promote your latest single and write the day it's out or it's streaming now. I think it's a cool touch to do on other content and keep pasting the sticker into the corner that reminds fans to stream your latest single even when you're not talking about that single in your story. Let's also remember one of stickers best attributes are that they can hide hashtags behind them so you don't seem like a cheesy bastard as you put up 40 hashtags in your story to try to appear in search. But what about actually getting your stickers to appear on Instagram in that sticker directory so you can have fans help promote you. But let's say we want to get wild here and make these stickers fancy gifts. In order to do this you need a giffy account and from there you just download the gifts into your photo album and copy and paste like you did with that picture just now. But if we really want to get wild again so your fans can search your name and use the stickers around your music you need to get a branded giffy account which takes an application but if you have a fancy distributor for your music above like the tunecore district level they can easily get you hooked up with giffy most of the time. And while they aren't stickers I will say on a recent campaign we made a custom filter to help promote the single and for how little we spent and how much use it got out of it it really is amazing how well those work to get engagement from fans so if you have a great idea for those the developers to make those filters really don't cost that much money compared to what most people thought they were in fact everyone on the marketing call I was on was shocked how cheap we got it for. Okay number five okay let's be honest here people one of the hardest parts of keeping up with the big budget major label aris is keeping up with their budget to get a million photos retouched and angled that are nice and edited highly so that they look amazing and all the photos so I highly suggest getting good at making good content yourself. If you are the type of person where image is everything and you want to go hard on instagram I suggest investing the relatively little money you need to doing it right here's a few suggestions grab a good photo editor white room and vsco are amazing for the money if you want to be that person use face tune or lensa and tons of others that will make your pictures look better in posts pick monkey and fonto are also cheap and have tons of design tools to get writing on your photos and do all sorts of other graphic design functions if you need to do video editing davinci resolve is free and has just as good tools as premiere or final cut simply choose the right aspect ratio you know like nine by sixteen works well for stories and then use its amazing color tools and effects to make better content with the latest version resolve many of the experts are saying as long as you aren't doing tons of motion graphics that resolve is better than all the other options that are paid for video editing so take advantage of the fact that this is free do you look at other people on instagram and wonder why their lighting and makeup all look so good let me tell you what they're using every time I was at the eladic lecture of records offices I'd see these little ring lights on everybody's phone while they were instagramming away that they were there as well joya makes this tripod everybody uses to get the camera further away from them it's really high quality as well if you're trying to do higher quality audio this boy a microphone for the phone is insanely cheap but if you really want to up the quality use the road smart love which will do you a world of good of getting better audio if it's lacking there I use road mics for everything I do in content creation whether it's youtube podcasts or instagram since they have an amazing value for how quality their product is number six speaking of keeping up with the amount of content you need to make to be able to keep up with the amount of stories you need to tell around your music there's tons of apps who can help with that there's also these new apps that will take your existing photos and put animations on them as well as other cool effects to make your stories more eventful after the end light like photo fox quickshot and video leap all of crazy effects to jazz up your photos and videos and recontextualize them other apps like scene and prequel will also do similar things whereas the app cartoona will make your photos into cartoon like images and prisma does similar like alterations and I'll also say oftentimes the free functions on these apps do more than enough that you can use to repurpose your images that you already have and make them fresher bring them back to keep telling stories around your music okay number seven the next tip is to vet your content one of the secrets I saw in my time at warner music group was all the content done by the huge groups I worked with was vetted by their team to make things better make sure you're getting other people's eyes on your most important images and you're getting people to pro free the stories you tell what makes sense to you doesn't always make sense to outside eyes and you're not always saying everything with the context people need to understand it so make sure other people look at your important content and show them multiple options of things you make so that you know that you vetted them thoroughly now for number eight our last tip if you really want to invest in instagram this is what all the pros are doing is an app called later which allows you to see the best times to post when your followers are on so they get the most engagement and you can then schedule your posts to go up when it's going to be best for them to be up to get all this engagement if you're really going to invest in instagram and doing it right I recommend software like this so you can plan and make sure you get the work done of posting whenever is easiest for you so you can choose the best times to push your content so is the best chances of getting spread and my last tiny bit of advice here is unless you're going to be using heavy analytics don't call yourself a creator or a business until you have to on instagram let's remember instagram's owned by facebook the same company that told you to send all your fans there and it started charging you to let 85 percent of your fans see the audience you built and talk to them this company is the scum of the earth so don't ever trust them and give them what they want which is for you to become a business profile to push your content out since trust me that's common that's it thanks so much for watching if there's any cool tricks you know that I should know about stop by my forum and tell me about them or comment below thanks so much am I missing anything is there any other way you would have done this I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post I hope you like this video and if you did please like subscribe and get notified and I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future I have a facebook group linked below that is only helpful information no playlist or con artists only artists having helpful discussions allowed if you want to learn more about me work on a record with me or check out any of my books podcasts or anything else I do go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials one last thing there's two playlists here one is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans and the other is specially chosen to match this video or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians