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 going to talk about why that matters so much in just a few so let me give you a brief example my name is Jan Hunter 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 you know 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 reals 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 want to shoot this way okay now we're going to talk about the content I know you've probably heard this or if it's your first time hearing it well I'm going to 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 alright 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 going to be something funny something entertaining or if you're like me where you get right into it with [Music] 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 something that needs to be cut out you want to keep people engaged but not only engaged you want to raise the bar within your own video so what I'm saying is 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 you know 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 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 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 going to label this video making eight Shield five 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 want to 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 going to be music producers shared sessions low five but you want to get more specific and especially if you're a smaller Creator that's trying to grow then you do not want to use hashtags that have like 71 million views you want to use smaller hashtags that are closer to you and closer to your niece so you can be discovered hashtags do not make creators go 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 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 have we might start out posting to other musicians but if you want to expand
then you might want to 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
