 Hey everybody, what's going on? It's your man Kory. Welcome to the Digital Dash where I'll be giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now, for those of you who don't know who I am, I'm a digital marketer myself. I specialize in helping artists like you guys get their songs heard through platforms like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, and a bunch of others. Now, what I want to talk to you all about today is how you can go viral on Instagram or better yet how you all can hack the Instagram algorithm so that you hit the explore feed a lot more often. Now, with certain distribution services offering the option to monetize your songs through Facebook and Instagram, I'm sure there's one of those things that a lot of you guys will be looking into doing more often and wondering how you all can really do it anyway. With that being said, I want to give you all three easy tips on how you can get started. Now, one of the first things that you'll want to make sure that you're doing is posting more video content. It's pretty obvious by now with the recent updates like IGTV and just the way that the overall platform is built is that Instagram definitely favors video content over regular photographs. So with that being said, what you guys will want to do is to start posting more high quality, engaging video onto your feed and you'll see yourself in the explore page in no time at all. Now, one of the next things that you guys will want to make sure that you're doing is actually boosting your engagement to your posts. Now, Instagram typically looks at the first 45 minutes of engagement to any post. So how many likes and comments that you're getting within that first 45 minute window. And there are a couple of tips that these bigger Instagram pages are definitely using to boost there that you can use also. Now, one of the first ways that you can use to boost your engagement is by using what is known as power likes and power likes are typically exactly what they sound like and their likes from accounts that are much larger than yours. You usually will want to find accounts that have at least 50,000 followers or higher. And the way that Instagram sees it is that this much larger account is engaging with your content. It must be something that the rest of the platform would like and then take that into account when they're pushing your content out to the rest of the people using the explore page. And if you're lucky enough to know some people with larger accounts, you may want to use them in this next tip. If not, I recommend you just kind of dig through Instagram and find some pages that make sense for your niche and ask those guys how much would it charge to get you to like each of my posts or to engage with my content. Now, the next thing that you can use to boost your engagement is to use what is typically called an engagement group. Now, how this works is you get a group of people together that make sense for your niche. So for you guys, you might want other artists, producers, or anyone that's related into the type of field that you're trying to get into. And then you will create a group where you all share posts with each other and you like and engage with the post as soon as it's posted. So let's say that you make a post about your new album that's coming out or a song that you just dropped, you will put your post in the engagement group and everyone that's a part of it will instantly go and like the picture and comment on it. Now, the way this helps you all out is Instagram will see that you're getting a lot of high quality engagement within the first 45 minutes of you posting. And Instagram will start to recommend your content to all of your followers, followers through their explore fees as well. And one of the last things that you'll all want to make sure that you're doing in order to boost engagement to your posts is to post their optimal times and include call to actions within your content posts. So if you haven't went and set up your Instagram business page, I highly recommend that you do so. Being able to see your analytics will allow you to figure out at what times you should be posting on Instagram. It'll basically tell you at what times that your community is most active within the platform. And like I said, you'll always want to include a call to action within your content whenever it makes sense. So you might say something like 300 comments and you'll unlock a new song or 500 likes and I'll do this. What it does is it encourages your community to actively like your posts and actively engage with your posts causing the posts to be picked up by the algorithm and spread into the explore feed. And tip number three, use hashtags. Now I know a lot of you don't like using them because you think it looks uncool in your posts or it makes you look spammy. But trust me guys, Instagram puts a lot of weight into that hashtag so much weight that in fact within the past year, they've allowed you to see relevant hashtags to the ones that you're using and they now allow you to actually follow hashtags. That's a big step. Now with Instagram, you can use about 30 hashtags at a time. So what I would recommend you do is make a list of hashtags that relate to your niche and the community that you're trying to hit so that you can switch them out from time to time with your posts. Doing so will allow you to bring people from outside of your own following to your content so they can engage with it by liking and commenting, therefore boosting your engagement even more and giving you a much better chance of hitting that explore page. Alright, so just to give you all a nice little recap, tip number one, make sure that you're posting more video. Like I said, Instagram definitely favors video content over the more traditional photography style content. So posting more of it will give you a much better chance of actually hitting the explore feed. Tip number two, boost the engagement to your posts. Now like I said, Instagram tends to pay attention to the engagement that your post gets within the first 45 minutes. So you'll want to boost the engagement by using things like power likes, DM groups and by posting at the optimal time for your page and by including a cause of action in your posts whenever you can. And tip number three, use hashtags. Like I said, I know a lot of you guys tend to find them spammy but Instagram really does put a lot of weight into its hashtags and by using them you'll bring more people to your content and increase the chances of your content hitting the explore feed. Now as always guys, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video, hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. That being said, once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.