Speaker 1: The real way to grow on Instagram as a musician. Step one, knowing who you are. Now, this is so important. I feel like it's the most vital step of all because if you don't know who you are, then how will Instagram know who you are? How will the algorithm know who you are? Yeah, you're a musician, we're all musicians, but it's time to niche down. And I wish this was something that someone told me like five years ago. So niching down means simplifying what it is you do and being able to turn that into value for the viewer, whether that's something based on entertainment, education, something funny, and you can have an umbrella for sure, but it has to be specific. And we're gonna talk about why that matters so much in just a few. So let me give you a brief example. My name is Yonhunter Jr. What's up, guys? I'm a music producer. That's great, there's like a billion of those. And I do chill music. Oh, okay, that's pretty specific. All right, now I kind of got a feel of who you are, what you do, and your style. So you can take that as a template for you guys to figure out, hmm, if I'm a guitar player, if I'm a singer-songwriter, if I do all of these things, how can I combine all this together to make sense? Well, hopefully this can spark some creativity for you. Once you figure out exactly who you are and how you want to brand yourself, because this is what we're talking about. We're talking about full-on branding at this point. Then you'll be able to move on to the next step, which is filming your videos. So yes, I said videos for Instagram. We all know that Instagram was natively used for photo sharing, but now they have hyper-emphasized Reels. So if you're not posting Reels, then unfortunately you're not going to grow at a very rapid rate. Since we're talking about Reels, we need to understand the Reels format, especially in the musician's community. Now, I know because I've been doing this for a while now, and in the last two years, I've been able to grow from 10,000 followers all the way to over 80,000 followers, and we're on our way to, you know, that big old 100K at the time of filming this video. Let's go. But I want to show you guys some things that I've learned along the way and how I've been able to grow so fast. So in terms of Reels, the first edit that I made that made a very huge impact in my videos is shooting my videos vertically, which is this way instead of this way. Now, I know we're used to shooting this way because in our studios or in our rooms, we can capture so much of the room horizontal like this, but we need to be able to see how creative we can get in a tight shot that's like this, because this is how people are consuming content, believe it or not, and it opens you up for so much more engagement when you shoot your video vertically because your content consumes the entire screen. If you shoot your videos horizontally, you're going to have a blotch at the top of the screen and at the bottom of the screen, and what we typically try to do is fill it up with text, and I'm telling you guys that strategy is outdated. Instagram is way more refined now. I know that they are still trying to find themselves, but they are way more refined in terms of your baseline things that you need to have, and if you're using a DSLR camera, it's the same principle. Instead of shooting this way, you wanna shoot this way. Okay, now we're gonna talk about the content. I know you've probably heard this, or if it's your first time hearing it, well, I'm gonna put you on game, which is you need to have a hook, and that hook is that thing that grabs people's attention as soon as your video comes on. It's been proven that to have a human in the video always seems to perform well, that we are more likely to get more engagement, all right? So you want to make sure that you're actually in the video. That's the first step. Then after that, then you can figure out a hook, whether it's gonna be something funny, something entertaining, or if you're like me, where you get right into it with. That's honey. So after you have that hook, then you want to keep your viewer on that video. So as you're shooting and editing your own videos, ask yourself, like, am I losing interest right here? Well, maybe it's something that needs to be cut out. You want to keep people engaged, but not only engaged, you wanna raise the bar within your own video. So what I'm saying is, once they have the expectation based off of what you said you were going to show them how to do, maybe give them a bonus step in that educational video. Or if you're a musician and you're doing a vibe, okay, start with something, but maybe on the second time around, switch it up a little bit, you know what I'm saying? And get jiggy with it. Did I really just say get jiggy with it in 2022? But you get my point. And then after you do that, then you have your opportunity to do a call to action. Now, this is what you specifically are trying to accomplish, whether you have a product, whether you just want people to like and follow you, then say that at the end of the video, you can just use text to do it. There's so many creative ways to edit your videos. But the point being is, is you definitely need a hook, and you need to keep people engaged with the retention, and then you need to have a good call to action. Or you could do like me, where you just let the video loop. Just set up the video where as soon as it ends, you can cut the video in the way where it loops right away, and people won't even know that the video started over again. So this is why we need to eliminate random videos, because we see it happen all the time, especially in the musicians community, we repost memes. But reposting memes isn't how the algorithm works anymore in 2022, going into 2023. Reposting in general has gone down in performance. Instagram is favoring smaller creators. So again, this is why I'm stressing to post reels, because they are really emphasizing reels for smaller creators to get out amongst the masses of people. But you have to lock in on who you are first. So speaking of knowing things in terms of algorithm, let's talk about tags. So the first thing I want to do is debunk a few things. If you use hashtags in the comments of your video, after it's already posted, those hashtags will not count towards more searches or more views. And you will not rank for those tags if they are in the comments. You want to put your hashtags in the description of the video. And we're at that final point of where we're getting ready to upload. So your description needs to describe what the video is about. Instead of having an ambiguous title, or in this case, description, you need a very specific description of your video. So for me, I'll give you an example. I'm a music producer, cool, but I'm in this video, I'm making a chill vibe. So I'm gonna label this video, making a chill vibe. Or in this case, let's get more specific, making a chill beat. And then use hashtags, chill beat, chill hop. And you get the, you follow the pattern, but you don't wanna use a million hashtags. So you need to use tags that resemble what the video is about, and maybe one unique hashtag to yourself. You do not need 30 hashtags. I wouldn't recommend any more than five solid hashtags. Maybe one specific to you, one to your niche, and three specific to that video. So in our case, popular hashtags is gonna be music producers, shared sessions, lo-fi. But you wanna get more specific, and especially if you're a smaller creator that's trying to grow, then you do not wanna use hashtags that have like 71 million views. You wanna use smaller hashtags that are closer to you and closer to your niche so you can be discovered. Hashtags do not make creators go viral. Your content and the engagement of that content, people sharing it, people liking it, people commenting, people reposting on their stories. This is how your videos go viral. Here's a bonus tip to think about. Instagram is an AI-based platform, right? So when you're uploading your videos, it's important to be so specific because you're telling a machine-based algorithm who you are and what you do and what the video is about. You still need to have, while you're shooting the video, the mindset of, I am posting to people. I am not posting to an algorithm. I am posting to people. I am just uploading the video via an algorithm-based process. But the video is for people, if that makes sense. So there's no need to fight and beat the algorithm. No, it's just having in mind that you're posting to people and that you're being very specific in your video and in the description and in your tags about what your profile is about. That's the algorithm process. But we never post to machines. We post to humans. So in our case, we might start out posting to other musicians. But if you want to expand, then you might wanna shift the content to expand outward to general people instead of just posting to musicians. And speaking of music, if you're trying to get your music out there and showcase your talent, then I would recommend performing your music in your reels. And if you want that to convert to Spotify listeners, you need to check out this video right over here.