The Ultimate Guide to Improving Online Presence for Artists & Musicians

The strategies artists use to showcase their music and promote their brand on the internet are continually changing. Whether you’re a singer/songwriter, rapper, DJ, or producer, social media plays a big part in raising awareness for your brand. The better your online presence, the more likely you are to achieve your goals, express your artistic talents, and get your music heard! To help you with this endeavor, here are 20 ways to improve your online presence as an artist.

As a recent addition to the PSS team, I’m looking forward to applying many of these principles to our own company!

---

Reach and Followers

Use keywords

Using keywords in your bio or profile can make it easier for people to find you while looking for relevant content. Having a solid bio can let people know who you are and what you’re doing. Use descriptive keywords so your target market will find you more easily.

Use hashtags

Use hashtags to appear in followers’ (and soon-to-be followers’) searches. For example, if you’re a singer, you can hashtag singer, artist, songwriter, pop (or what genre you’re in), vocalist, or basically anything that’s relevant to what you’re posting. You can also create a consistent hashtag that you and all of your followers can use to make it more familiar.

Create relationships

Social media is all about creating relationships! Making sure you have great engagement (which we’ll talk about in a minute) can help you appear on more peoples’ timelines, even if they aren’t currently following you. You should create an environment that fosters relationships between followers.

Post Frequency

Post at optimal times of the day

Posting when your target market is online is the best way to get the right people to see your content. Here’s the best times to post for different social media platforms that I researched:

• Twitter: The best times to post are 12pm, 5pm, and 6pm. Tweets only have a life of 24 minutes and usually reach 75% of their engagement within the first 3 hours. Try to post at least once a day.

• Instagram: The best times to post on Instagram are 1pm, 5pm, and 8pm

• Facebook: The best times to post are 9am, 11am-12pm, or 3pm-4pm. The best days to post to have more engagement and reach are Thursday through Sunday.

• YouTube: Post between 12pm and 5pm to reach the most people.

Look at successful posts

Take a look at your past posts to see which ones have been successful and why. Look at what day and time they were posted then experiment with a new post to see if it gets a similar result. Think about what your target market is doing during those times (are they working? On lunch? Just getting off work?).

Create a schedule

One of the biggest keys to increasing your online presence is being consistent with your posts. Creating a posting schedule that includes all of the social media platforms you want to use can really help create consistency, which will better your odds in finding new fans. This way, people know what to expect and can even be looking out for your content, which builds anticipation. You can utilize different social media management tools to help create a content calendar.

Content Quality

Post a variety of content

Think about all the different types of posts you can create for each platform. There’s so many kinds of content that work well depending on the platform; don’t just stick with one type of post. For example, Instagram alone has stories, highlights, video posts, boomerangs, multiple photos, single photos, a mix of photos and videos. You could even repost other artists content to show your support for them. Whereas on Twitter, short, concise text posts probably would do a lot better than a bunch of multimedia content. Don’t just share your post to all the social media accounts without thinking about how you can take advantage of each of the platform’s unique strengths.

Use the 80-20 rule

80% of the posts should be to inform, educate, and entertain your followers; 20% should be used to promote the brand. The more you post to inform, educate, or entertain, the more people will begin to trust you and appreciate the content you are creating. When the post comes around to promote your brand, they’ll be more willing to engage with it.