How can you effectively promote your music on Instagram?

Instagram is the 3rd most popular social network in France, after Facebook and YouTube.

By 2022, the Meta platform will have over 22 million monthly users in France alone, representing almost a third of the French population. Many artists, musicians and non-musicians alike, have used it as a springboard to grow their communities.

But is it really that simple?

The 22 million monthly users also include a significant number of artists who are active on the American social network. And that’s enough to take on some very tough competition.

To help you get the most out of promoting your music on Instagram, we’ve put together a list of the most important tips and steps that anyone can take.

Here are the 13 tips (+1) revealed by the Red Label Agency team for effectively promoting your sounds on Instagram.

Submit an optimised Instagram profile

Filling in your Instagram profile correctly is a priority if you want to project a professional image.

You need to create a bio that is original and descriptive of who you are, what you offer and that reflects your temperament. If you wish, you can be enigmatic, but it has to fit in with your image as an artist.

Don’t forget to add an original profile photo that is easy to spot, so that you stand out from the other profiles on the platform. On Instagram, communication is very visual: you need to capitalise on this visual aspect to improve your follower base.

In terms of additional textual content, don’t forget to add links to your various social networks, music profiles and even website in your bio. In terms of additional textual content, don’t forget to add links to your various social networks, music profiles and even your website in your bio.

Also remember to choose the hashtags (#) you insert in your bio carefully, so that it reflects your temperament and identity perfectly rather than just your job as an artist.

Turn your account into a pro

Creating a pro account is a must for you, because you want to invest in Instagram as a music creator and not just a content consumer.

To create a pro account on Instagram, you need to have a Facebook page, as the two platforms are linked by this feature.

Applying to Instagram is pretty straightforward:

Go to your settings
Click on the “Switch to a professional account” option
Select the Creator account
Select the “Musician/group” category and confirm to become a professional!

From then on, your various posts will be visible to everyone, as your profile will automatically become public.

From then on, your messages will be visible to everyone, and your profile will automatically become public.

From then on, your messages will be visible to everyone, and your profile will automatically become public.
Gives you access to the statistics for your Instagram page.

The sooner you do this, the sooner you’ll be able to see the evolution of your statistics (followers, likes, etc.) and study the impact of your musical communication.

Highlight your identity

As a singer or a band, you have your own identity. Put it forward according to your strategy: you need to be original, embody your character perfectly and create an Instagram page to match.

Be original, and make your posts and profile stand out from the mass of artists on the platform. Be original, and make your posts and profile stand out from the mass of artists on the platform.

Depending on your musical style and the colours you use, your listeners will find it easier to relate to your posts. The important thing is to think coherently from start to finish.

Look after your visuals

Instagram is a very visual social network, perhaps more so than others. That’s why it’s important to focus on high-quality photos and images: you’re not a photographer, but you should act like one. Don’t publish a concert poster, for example, but rather publish a more authentic photo, more specific to this situation, which will encourage Internet users to look, click and read the description, while staying within the theme (i.e. promoting your concert).

Look after your feed

Your publications must be consistent with your image. Based on this principle, your feed should be well thought out and organised according to your published and forthcoming posts. Instead, focus on the quality of your posts and the fact that they are pleasant to look at, rather than the quantity of repetitive or uninteresting posts.

In your situation, and if you want to make Instagram a powerful lever in your communication strategy to promote your music, you can create an editorial calendar to plan your publications. This is a great way of thinking about your content creation as a project and forcing you to publish your posts regularly.

It's an excellent way of treating your content creation as a project and forcing you to publish your articles regularly.

There are several social networks that use hashtags, but not all of them are equally useful. Hashtags are important on Instagram because they are one of the easiest ways to appear following a user search or in recommendations, depending on the user’s preferences.

To get the most out of your hashtags, we recommend :

To get the most out of your hashtags, we recommend :
not too complicated or too technical for your speciality, unless it corresponds to your identity as a group or artist
quite general and at the same time quite targeted… So avoid the #music but also the hashtag #musiquedoucepourdormir
Use enough hashtags (#), but not too many either. We reckon that 6 to 10 per post is a good average.

It’s not always easy to find the right hashtags for your posts. There are a number of free tools available to help you, such as tagsfinder, which gives you suggestions based on the hashtag you enter. This makes it fairly easy to find hashtags that are little used or that are key to your visibility strategy.

Vary your posts

Being consistent, regular and original quickly has its limits. And often these limits are linked to your creativity. You may be singers or musicians, but you are not primarily creators of textual or visual content.

Although it’s a hat you need to wear, it can be tricky to come up with new ideas throughout your communication on Instagram.

So, to help you, you can vary your posts according to other designers: make collaborations, and above all, go and see what the competition is doing, not to copy what they’re doing but to inspire you.

This could help you come up with new concepts, or reproduce a concept seen in other artists (not necessarily musicians!) in your own way.

This can help you come up with new concepts, or reproduce in your own way a concept seen in other artists (not necessarily musicians!).. This trick allows you to expand your potential audience and promote your music on Instagram on other creators’ profiles.

Create interaction with your followers by creating proximity

One of the best ways of building a solid, long-term fan base is to make the most of proximity.

From time to time, create a more open post about your private life, your passions outside music or your other activities. This will give you a more human side and voluntarily immerse your listener in your private life, giving them a more sincere insight into who you are.

Interaction with your community is very important. FAQ sessions, whether they’re scheduled sessions or just answering a user’s question here and there, allow you to give your community a high profile. It also encourages interaction, as your subscribers see that you are responding to their requests, and feel more involved. So it’s a virtuous circle that you need to nurture throughout your musical career.

Exploit the video format

We’ve talked a lot about visuals and their importance on a network like Instagram, but another format that works enormously well is videos.

On Instagram, there are different ways to publish a video:

Via Instagram Videos, formerly IGTV, so that they appear in your followers’ feeds
In your stories
Dans vos Reels

Whatever your affinity with the platform, focus on all these solutions to maximise your visibility.

In the first two cases, you’re talking mainly to your own community, but in the third case, it’s a powerful and interesting way of getting yourself discovered by people who don’t yet know you.

Overall, favour a 4:5 format for videos, with a resolution of at least 1080×1080 (yes, video quality is also an important criterion!).

Be regular

We have already mentioned the possibility of setting up an editorial calendar to plan your publications.

In addition, you can test different publication times and days for your posts. In terms of timing, it’s up to you to decide, according to your results, your pace and your desires, the best time to publish your content, to see what works best with your audience.

Generally speaking, mornings (6am – 9am) and evenings (6pm – 10pm) are the best times to publish your content, because that’s when users are most available. On the other hand, this is also the time when most content creators on Instagram will be publishing their posts. It’s up to you to decide what’s best for you.

Connect your networks

Your objective, beyond creating a link with your community, is to grow that community. But it’s also about getting your fanbase to listen to your sounds and go to your concerts.

To do this, don’t hesitate to promote your latest releases (videos, albums), your latest tours or festivals, but also your other social networks and your streaming platform profiles, such as Spotify, Deezer and so on. This can be a great help in promoting your music on Instagram.

Instagram remains a tool that allows you to get conversions, new listeners and therefore improve your brand awareness.

Use your social media to communicate intelligently: tease your future video and encourage your community to listen to it via a spotify or deezer link.

Highlight your tour schedule, the preparations or anything else that might add an emotional dimension to the event, by promoting ticket sales on your website to attract as many people as possible.

Choose a stable, long-term audience rather than buying fake followers

One stage that is often a source of debate is the purchase of subscribers or fake likes.

Regardless of the platforms and social networks on which you may be tempted to buy likes or subscribers, such as Instagram, Tik Tok or Youtube, buying is not viable.

We repeat: never buy visibility when it’s fake.

There are several reasons for this:

Algorithms are getting tougher and tougher on these manipulative practices
Buying is mainly about boosting your vanity metrics, but it won’t grow your community.
They don’t represent a real, long-term audience that will grow with you and listen to your sounds.

There are many disadvantages to buying dummy views, and the penalties often kick in sooner or later. When you’re a musician, there’s nothing worse than being invisible on the social networks where most of your audience is.

At Red Label Agency, we’ve done our bit to combat this practice by offering advertising packages for YouTube Ads. This enables us to offer you real views, via sponsored videos that are displayed specifically to your target audience. This allows you to maximise your visibility, grow your audience effectively and, above all, invest in a reliable exchange solution with the platform itself without the risk of being penalised.

If you’re interested in improving your visibility on YouTube, click on the button below to consult our proposals.

Boost your visibility on the platform using advertising (Ads)

Advertising on Instagram allows you to reach out and find new followers.

Publicity is often a frightening word for budding artists, especially novice singers and bands.

Think of it as a initial investment to promote your music In an ultra-competitive market and in an economy of over-solicited attention, advertising allows you to be visible to your target audience quite simply, in order to grow your community more quickly or to showcase your album.

There are different types of advertising you can post on Instagram:

Explore ads: appear after a post viewed via the explore tab
IGTV ads: fairly classic but effective, they appear in the Instagram feed of your target audience.
Collection advertising: best suited to the sale of physical products
Instagram Shopping ads: Same thing, unless you have goodies to sell and interesting merchandising.
Publicity Stories: A great way to get yourself known, but also to boost your profile. It appears between two stories and gives the illusion of being natural and not sponsored, which is all the more appealing.

In all cases, think carefully about creating a catchy, non-invasive video ad, one that captures the interest of your target audience from the very first seconds and that allows you to promote your music effectively on Instagram.

Bonus: go further in creating posts

Thanks to the various applications available on the Play Store, for example, you can go even further in the creation of your publications and create more advanced and polished content. The most popular tools include :

Hyperlapse to slow down or speed up a video
Layout to create unique and attractive split posts
Unfold to create remarkable post and story designs
Font Studio to add a custom font to your posts
FontCandy, which has the same functionality as the previous application
InSquare Pic pour bénéficier de nombreuses possibilités de personnalisation de vos posts
Square Pic qui vous permet de gagner du temps pour les photos qui ne sont pas aux bonnes dimensions (vous permet de les publier sans les rogner !) ainsi que des options de personnalisation supplémentaires.
Framatic (iOS) for photo editing on Instagram (but not only).

Finally, there are many points to consider if you want to be visible on Instagram. The priority remains getting your name out there and promoting your sounds. The golden rules: publish on your various social networks and make yourself as visible as you can, but the golden rules are still active: regularly publish content that is consistent with your identity, what you want to convey, your latest news and your latest releases in order to create interaction with your community and promote your music and future releases.

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