How to organically grow your following on instagram during 2019

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It’s a well-known fact that running Instagram ads and getting influencers to do sponsored posts are both great ways of growing your fanbase as a music producer. However, for people who are limited on money (such as bedroom producers), those options are totally infeasible. Growing on social platforms does not necessarily require thousands of dollars to become successful. However, it does take a lot of effort and hard work to achieve your ambitions. During this article, we’re going to discuss exactly how to go about growing your Instagram organically so that your audience is engaged, and wants to interact with your content.

If you want people to like and comment on your posts, you first have to do the same with others. With limited funds to get your artist brand more exposed to a wider audience, coming up with innovative ways to grow your audience is absolutely essential to success. Therefore, interacting with fans that could potentially like your content is the best way to get them to know about you. This could involve direct messaging a lot of people, or simply engaging in the comments with what they have to say.

Diving deeper into the commenting strategy, you basically have to find 9-12 hashtags within your niche that people are regularly engaging with. If you’re able to comment on 20 posts, on each of those hashtags, then you should have interacted with over 200 people per day. Although not everybody will respond or interact with your comment, there will be a few who notice you and decide that they want to follow your journey throughout the music industry. Whether it’s 2, 5, 10, or 30 people a day, your amount of followers on your Instagram profile will significantly increase over time. The remainder of this article shall discuss the exact details that you should follow in order to grow a producers profile on Instagram. 

Firstly, you have to find the best hashtags within EDM that are relevant to your audience. Generic ones such as #edm will be overused and not be relevant to what you have to say. After all, it’s a pretty broad term. Instead, more niche ones such as #dubstepnation or #deephousevibes will give you posts that will eventually result in more targeted followers on your Instagram profile. In order to find even more, simply type your genre into the Instagram hashtag search tool and it shall find dozens of related tags for you to follow. Every single day, spend 20-30 mins engaging with every single post in the top posts within a hashtag. Instead of commenting on something generic such as “cool”, say something meaningful that will evoke a response such as “This beat is really incredible. Where did you get those speakers from?”

Even if an account has just 345 followers on the platform, they are worth engaging with. Don’t let your ego get the better of you. At the end of the day, every single person is a potential fan that could someday listen to your music. If you want people to engage with your content, you have to engage with them first & provide value.

It doesn’t just stop with commenting on a random person’s post. It’s definitely worth following big producers & record labels within the music industry and engaging with their comments as well. If you know the answer to a question, respond. For example, somebody could ask the name of a song being played in the background of a viral video. If you know the name of the track & original artist, write it as a direct response. By providing value to the entire EDM community, it will help to establish yourself as a thought leader within the space.

Due to the sheer amount of great posts that you’re interacting with on a daily basis, it will also improve the quality of your own content as you’ll be looking at posts with a lot of engagement for multiple hours every single week. Once somebody follows you, sending them a DM and cementing the relationship even further is a great way to make them want to engage with you in future. 

If you’re able to grow by 20 people a day, then that is 560 new people per month falling in love with your artistic brand. If you’re able to accompany your growth strategy with regular content (stories and feed posts multiple times a day), your audience will be incredibly loyal as your name will always be engraved in their memories of what posts they’ve interacted with on a regular basis. For those of you who say that you have no time to do this, consider the 10 minutes in the bathroom before you head out to work, the train commute into the city, or simply whilst watching a film on Netflix. We all have 24 hours in a day. The question is what will you do with your time to progress your career?

Every single day, rinse & repeat that process for as long as you wish to continue growing your audience. As your audience gets much bigger, your posts will end up getting more likes. If you are using great hashtags and locations, this, in turn, can also help increase the exposure of your artist brand towards a totally new audience. By creating a community around your artist brand, your Instagram account will grow significantly. Of course, it is a time-consuming process. If you have no money, then at least you have time on your side. Nothing great comes easy.