Promoting Your Music Independently Part III: Streamlining Your Social Media
Welcome to Part III of our series on promoting your music independently. By now we’ve covered EPKs and social profile setup and strategy. If your social media wasn’t already up and running before this, you should be well equipped to kick off your channels now.
As your following starts to grow, you might find that you’re spending more time and energy on your social media than you’d like to be. This segment is all about streamlining your social planning, so you can spend less time on building your brand and more time in the studio.
Content Planning
The best way to consolidate the time you spend on social media is to plan it out ahead of time. This doesn’t mean you have to work a month in advance, but working at least a week ahead will give you a chance to look at what performed well earlier in the month and set yourself up for the week ahead. As a result, you won’t have to stress throughout the week about what you’re going to post or when, plus it will likely increase the quality of the content you do post.
Even putting aside an hour on the weekend or at the beginning of the week will make a big difference. There are lots of free project-management apps and websites designed for this purpose. We reviewed a couple of them back in January as part of our Back-To-School Prep Guide.
Trello is a great platform for content planning because it lets you create different lists for each platform and includes a calendar view (great for visual learners). Add cards to the calendar for each day you want to post, then drop in the photos or videos to accompany each post and write your copy ahead of time. Once the post has been scheduled or gone live, check off the due date box and move it to a scheduled folder.
Grid Planning
Depending on how invested you are in the aesthetic of your Instagram, you may or may not want to use a grid-planning tool to help you see exactly what your grid will look like as your posts go up. There are tons of apps available for exactly this purpose, most of them with free versions that should be more than sufficient.
Planoly is one popular platform for this. Available as an app and on desktop, the tool makes it easy to upload photos (or screenshots of videos) from your phone to see how cohesive they will appear in the feed. The scheduling feature is another plus, because you’re definitely going to want to schedule your posts when possible. Which leads us to…
Scheduling
Besides Planoly, there are a variety of other scheduling platforms — which one you choose will depend on what platforms you’re active on and what types of additional features you’re looking for. Unfortunately, Instagram currently doesn’t allow third-party platforms to schedule carousels, so you will have to publish posts with multiple photos live.
Here’s a breakdown of two popular scheduling platforms:
- Allows you to link up to 2 social profiles (Instagram and Pinterest)
- Allows you to schedule content
- Allows you to reply to comments within the app
- Includes basic analytic features
- A good choice if you’re looking to post across multiple platforms. Later has scheduling capabilities for Instagram (30 posts/month), Twitter (50 posts/month), Facebook (30 posts/month) and Pinterest (30 posts/month).
- The free plan also includes basic Instagram analytics and the option to search and repost UGC.
With a scheduling platform on your side and a little forethought, organizing your social media should be a breeze! Have fun with it.
