I’m going to show the 5 ways that artists like you can manage social media so it’s less stressful, negative, and overall, less of a burden on your daily life and your mental health.
(while STILL using it as a tool that grows your artistic career)
I personally use social media quite a bit to promote my music, but there are several key things that I’ve learned along my journey of getting to 5 million Spotify streams like automating this process and systematizing it.
Although it can seem like I’m using social media a lot, it’s set up in a “set and forget” way which is very useful in making sure that I still get the benefits of social media in my artistic career without being stressed out and worried about it.
Because the negative effects of simply using social media a lot are clear:
Using social media more often, though, increases FOMO and feelings of inadequacy, dissatisfaction, and isolation. In turn, these feelings negatively affect your mood and worsen symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress.
Social Media and Mental Health – Helpguide.Org
I believe that these negative effects are heightened even more when you’re an actual creator – particularly if you’re putting out a bunch of content that’s about something that you’re passionate about like your art.
Obviously, it’s too easy to say “just don’t worry about the likes”…
So to truly help you out with all this, I’m going to give you 5 really useful tips that you’ll start actually being able to use today. 🙂
1. Social Media Is NOT For Discovery, It’s For Nurturing
The very first thing that I want to talk about is using social media as a method for nurturing your fan base, as opposed to a method for “discovery” or getting new fans into your world.
Although it can definitely happen, the idea of going viral is BS and only happens to 1% of artists. Not everybody can do it. It’s really irregular for that to happen.
Trying to go viral and have that piece of content that absolutely blows up is just not good for your mental health for normal artists like you and me.
It’s important to set better expectations for both you and your content by reframing it in your mind as “nurturing” content, as opposed to “discovery” content.
On top of this, organic social media is very difficult to scale – if you don’t have a team behind you it is very difficult to have more than 2 or 3 content pieces out per day.
Artists like us have a day job, a family, and all sorts of other obligations that we need to deal with…
Social media should NOT be dominating our lives and our mental space.
Simply reframe the idea of social media in your mind as something that’s for nurturing current fans, as opposed to finding new fans.
It’ll be a lot easier for you to develop content because you know that you’re creating it for fans and listeners that already know you, like you, trust you and accept you for who you are.
Since you’re not creating content for strangers and trying to convince them to like you, there is less stress and pressure on you as a creator.
2. Batch Create Your Content To “Optimize” Your Time
The second tip is to batch-create your content so that you can greatly free up and optimize your time.
Laser focus all of your time and all of your effort on one task at a time (like creating lots of content) as opposed to creating 1 piece of content then editing it and then posting it.
All you need to do is choose 1 day out of the month to dedicate to creating all of the content that you need for a minimum of 1 month – and then ONLY create content on that day (no editing or scheduling allowed!).
You can then select another day to batch all of your editing, your scheduling, etc.
You will find that this makes it a lot easier to convince yourself to get to work – it’s only 1 day (instead of EVERY night) and you are creating an entire month’s worth of content which is very much worth your time.
3. Use Content Batching To Get More Help From Bandmates
So just like how I mentioned earlier that it’s a lot easier to convince yourself to get to work when content batching, it will also make it a lot easier for you to convince your other bandmates to get involved with “content creation” with batching.
Asking your team to work on content every night with you is a major ask, however, asking them to work on content with you for just 1 day out of the month isn’t as bad.
…what sounds better to YOU: every single day or just 1 day?
By making it as simple and efficient as possible to create “content” you’re doing yourself, your fans, and your bandmates, a favor.
4. Multiply Your Content With “Bang For Your Buck” Content Types
The fourth tip is to multiply your content with “bang-for-your-buck” content types where the idea is to not just kill 2 birds with 1 stone but to get “multiple birds stoned at once”.
You can do this by developing “long-form content” like filming a 30-minute live set or DJ set so that you then have the full set, multiple song snippets, full song clips, teasers, etc.
Essentially, you can replicate the tactic that several podcasts do (ie: filming the full podcast then using clips for social media) so that you are getting a lot of “bang-for-you-buck” out of creating content instead of just creating 1 single-use clip.
You can also do this by creating content that services your ultimate goal as an artist as opposed to simply making “content for content’s sake”.
For example, if you wanted to create cover song videos, you could create this type of content for 3 reasons:
- You think the style of content would do well on social media
- You need to learn new cover songs for an upcoming show
- You want to practice learning other people’s songwriting styles to improve your own
In this example, sure, you would be creating “content”, but you would also be servicing your artistic goals for preparing for a show and improving your songwriting at the same time.
When you approach the content creation process where it’s also servicing your ultimate goals as a creative, it can be a lot easier to get excited about actually creating content.
It’s simply a lot more fulfilling because you’re not just an artist posing in front of a camera who is creating “content for content’s sake” – instead you are working towards multiple goals in your artistic career.
5. Use Social Media Scheduling To Automate Your Music Promotion
The fifth and final tip that I have for you is to use social media scheduling to automate all of your social media and content promotion.
Out of all 5 tips, THIS is what everything has been boiling down to.
Once you are able to batch-create a back catalog of content that you can use, you can then simply use the social media scheduling features in whichever your social media platform of choice to schedule it all to post automatically for you.
Ultimately what you’re doing here is “automating” your social media so that you can free up your time to do whatever the heck it is that you want to do.
You want to make more music, you want to do graphic design, you want to spend more time with your family or kids or your friends…
You do NOT want to be spending all of your free time on social media.
Once you have the batch content, you can automate it by scheduling it out, and then you can just relax for as far as you schedule it out.
All I would recommend is that you jump into your social media from time to time so that you can reply to comments and messages and all that kind of stuff as well.
With that said, I can’t explain to you how relaxing it is to have that much content filled out so that you can dedicate your time to things that are a lot more important than social media. 🙂
BONUS TIP: Automate ALL Of Your Music Promotion
If you really liked the idea of scheduling and automating all of your social media, I’d definitely recommend checking out the free 7-Step Release Checklist that I’ve created for you.
These are the only 7 steps that I go through every time I’m releasing music – it includes things like automating social media, automating ads, and really just automating the whole music promotion process in general.
Automation is key here because, again, you can further free up your time for the more important things in life, and teaching you how to do this is really the best way that I can help you hit the next goal in your music career. 🙂
