4 Tips to Grow Your Following

Growing your following as a musician is one of the most important aspects in order to attract labels, booking agents and overall engaged people to your music. Without a following, you will have no one to inspire, motivate or connect with. Unfortunately growing a fanbase is easier said than done. It is a marathon, not a sprint, but these four tips can help you not just gain followers, but highly engaged followers.

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1. Provide Something of Value - For anyone to follow you, they need value! This value could come from your beautiful voice, your amazing guitar playing or your incredible songwriting, but you need to understand, the value for everyone is different. It may not always come directly from what you offer. It could come from whether you include them in that offering. For example, if you take song requests from your followers and post it, it is no longer just your post, it has their impact on it. They are now connected to that post and ultimately to you. It may take some trial and error to determine what value brings in the biggest following for your demographic, but once you figure it out, your growth will be exponential.

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2. Be Unique - There are millions of musicians out there and millions struggling to form their own path, maybe you’re one of them, but don’t worry, we’re here for you. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “what do I offer that other musicians don’t?” Maybe you struggle to answer this, let’s rephrase it, ask yourself, “how can I differentiate myself from the ‘crowd?’”

Still tough to answer? Let’s put it this way, when Alicia Keys puts out a new single, several people listen to it because it is new! Covers of it will be made and posted to platforms such as instagram, which will also receive views, but those views are from people not looking to see someone sing it exactly how Alicia Keys did, because Alicia has already done that. If they wanted to see that, they would listen to her take again. They’re searching for it for other reasons, such as:

1 - To hear people’s unique take on it with their own style

2 - To see what other musicians thought of the song

3 - To see what people in the comments thought of the song

And many more reasons, but all revolve around being unique.

But, you said there are millions of musicians, how can I stand out with that many people doing similar things? Your opinion cannot be duplicated, your talent cannot be duplicated, your personality cannot be duplicated. Everyone is made different and it’s the reason you have probably heard “just be yourself, people can tell when you’re being genuine.” People want to see your style, not Alicia Keys’ (in this example), because they have already seen hers. Be unique.

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3. Properly Utilize Hashtags - Hashtags are a great way (and definitely one of the best free ways) to grow your following, but almost no one uses them right. For this tip, Instagram will be referred to, but it is similar for most social platforms. You’re probably using super popular hashtags because you want to try and get lucky with the algorithm or get your post on the explore page, remember the first paragraph of this blog, building a fanbase is a marathon, not a sprint. There is no doubt about it that popular hashtags definitely have their perks and if you have a substantial following, they can certainly help you grow even faster, but for the majority of us, there are better ways. Popular hashtags receive new content every second, what that means is when you use a popular hashtag, your content is only in the spotlight (top of the feed/hashtag) for seconds before it is ultimately gone forever from the public eye. So what hashtags should you use? It is important to use hashtags based on your goal. Of course you want more followers, but what do you want those followers to do? Stream your song? Watch you perform live? etc. If you’re wanting your followers to watch you perform live, then hashtags towards your city and/or venues in your city that you would perform at are a great option. An example of such hashtag would be #NashvilleMusician (if you lived in Nashville). Going back to the first tip in the blog, it is easier for people to follow you when they are connected to you, such as having something in common, even if that is just being from the same city. It seriously works wonders.

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4. Be Active with People that interact with Your Content - The last tip is definitely one you already know, but may fail to do to the extent you should. Liking comments and/or saying “thank you” is great, but you can do much better. One of the best things to do is to take an interest into the person that interacted with your content by asking them about themselves. Why do you care though, you’ll have too many followers to keep up with after implementing the first three tips in the blog, right? WRONG! People love to talk about themselves and it gives you an amazing opportunity to learn about your followers and want they want. Remember the first tip about value? This gives you an opportunity to see first hand what type of value your followers want. To put it simply, knowing your followers provides you inside data of what content they want to see. Providing them content they want to see will increase your engagement. Increasing your engagement will increase your followers. Increasing your followings will increase your streams, ticket sales, merchandise purchases, etc. Take the time to learn who your followers are so you can best provide them what they want to see.

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