Photo: Nicole Mago

In the last post, I went on a bit of a rant about social media. I warned you… and then I did it. Unfortunately, it’s a necessary part of growing your brand & maintaining interest from your audience. To recap briefly - you need to be discoverable on all social media platforms and keep them updated. There are lots of handy scheduling apps if you just want to maintain a basic level of posting to keep people informed. In today’s post, I’m going to take it one teeny step farther & tell you to follow your fans.

First of all, I’m definitely not suggesting that you creepily stalk individual people on the internet (and God forbid, not IRL). I’m also not saying to do a follow back campaign. I’m saying pay attention to where you see the most engagement or where the action is. Your fans will show you if you just watch! This is the place where you can have the most impact and where your message can reach the most people in a meaningful way. Plus, once you understand where they are, you can figure out how to optimize your message to each platform. You can do this in a few ways -

1. Literally look at the action. Maybe you have more fans on Facebook, but your Instagram posts are getting 15x the likes and comments. Especially if this is happening without much effort on your end, you know that your fans are more tuned in on Instagram.

2. Test the same message on different platforms. Have a tour announcement video? Put it literally everywhere and watch what packs the most punch.

   1. THEN try a different versions of the same message on different platforms. Facebook notoriously sucks for artists these days, but live videos are still doing pretty well and have a lot of organic reach. So maybe the regular video lives everywhere else, but you make Facebook go live.

3. Peek at your analytics. Maybe your fans are there, but you’re posting at the wrong time of day. Totally possible. We started posting more Facebook messages at night and saw engagement shoot up a ton.

4. Try something new. Even if you hate Instagram stories, you need to figure out if your people are into it. If they are, STAY THERE.

One of my favorite artists on social media is Jason Isbell. Somehow he cross posts his Twitter posts onto Facebook and they get wayyyyy more of a reaction than just normal posts on Facebook. I mean, it could have been out of laziness and only wanting to post once, but who cares? It works. Like, that doesn’t work for anyone else. Ever. The format is all junked up and the tags don’t tag anything. It’s a mystery. The point of this story is that you have to find what works for you and your people and then do that. Then don’t stress about the other places that aren’t working quite as well even if it’s necessary to keep them updated (it is).   

REASON TO IGNORE THIS ADVICE: You are Beyonce. You can post 5 times on social media over 3 months and people will share that shit for you.