Hey guys, welcome to electronic dance money, your number one business resource for making money as electronic musicians and producers.

Hey everyone. Welcome back to a brand. So the other electronic dance money, I’m your host Christian. We’re going to be hanging out, talking about some Instagram engagement or just engagement in general, social media, but really focusing more so on Instagram in the past few episodes go, we talked about social media.

Whether you should be focusing on just one platform or multiple platforms and really how to reach a bigger audience, uh, and, and start to get some of those eyeballs on you. Once you start getting that audience that. There’s a process. You need to go through to try to get them engaged with what you’re doing in your content.

Now, depending on how you go about this, or even, even sometimes how you go about getting the reach and reaching the right audience, depending on how you go about that, they may already start engaging with you. But if you feel like people still aren’t engaging, or you just don’t know how to get others to engage.

Then this is going to be kind of the perfect introduction episode into how to get that audience to really start engaging with your content. And also this kind of ties into that episode on social media reach, because this is not only just going to get people engaged with your content, but you’re going to reach more people as well.

So it’s kind of a double whammy. As some of, you know, I do have an episode on shadow banning and what that looks like in my own personal experiences with shadow banning. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been under the impression that my account was shadow banned for the use of using the hashtag hashtag EDM.

For those of you who are EDM producers, I strongly suggest you don’t use that hashtag it is still a band hashtag. Some sense of the term. Um, if you go on different hashtag research websites, they’ll claim that it’s not a band hashtag, but if you go look up the hashtag, depending on what your, what device you’re looking at up on for Android users, if you look it up, you’ll probably just get a white screen with no posts.

If you look it up on your desktop or laptop, you’ll probably see the top nine. Popular posts with it, but you can’t scroll through anything else. You can’t look at recent, uh, for iPhone users. I’m assuming it’s the same as if you look it up on desks. But I’m not 100% sure. I don’t know if they see similar things that Android users see, but I don’t think so.

Now it was back in 2015 that Instagram ended up banning that hashtag the reason why they ended up banding. It is because people were using the hashtag to go against their terms and conditions with nudity on the platform, which is. Which is kind of ironic because there’s a lot of, a lot more other stuff they should probably focus on with nudity.

And I just, I don’t see that anymore. It’s a bit ridiculous why they can’t just ban the content and have an algorithm ban it. I don’t know, but it’s kind of gone unnoticed. Uh, the, they haven’t done anything to fix it. I use that hashtag so much without knowing that there was an issue with the hashtag that I was under the impression that my account ended up getting flagged by Instagram, by the, by the algorithm.

And they stopped showing my posts to people through hashtags and all sorts of different stuff. I did an entire episode on this. So if you want to hear more about my story and about that, That issue. You can go listen to it. I’ll have it in the show notes. But recently I w when I found this out just a couple months ago, I said, okay, let me see what I can do to try to fix my account.

Cause it’s been years. And I haven’t really done anything to try to fix it recently. I’ve tried stuff in the past. So I went through and I spent a couple of hours just mass delete it. A bunch of posts using that hashtag. And I was under the impression, well maybe if I delete these, this will help revive my account and then we’ll see what happens.

So I did that and I didn’t really know. Many changes. Um, I’ve also been doing this playlisting weekly, weekly playlisting and tagging artists and record labels, which has helped a lot with my engagement, but more so recently I’ve been noticing that I’m actually starting to reach people with hashtags that I never was before.

Whenever I would use these hashtags, I would never show up for people. I would never reach accounts that aren’t following. So I would suspect that there’s a combination of things going on with my account right now that is starting to revive it. Now, I don’t know if deleting the post did anything it’s, it’s possible that it did, but I’m not sure.

I I’m ma I didn’t test that well enough. You know, maybe I should have let that sit for a few weeks and just test it out and see if that actually revives it. And I start reaching people that don’t feel. But I didn’t want to sit around, not starting this new Instagram strategy, that it’s not something I came up with.

It’s through lot of research that I decided to go about this, but I, I felt like I needed to keep making moves on Instagram to try to grow my account and whatnot. So I’d like to talk about this strategy with you because. Created so much more engagement for my account, my posts, and it’s opened up a lot of opportunities.

So I want you guys to know what’s what I’ve been doing and see if you can start applying this. And I really think it’s going to help with a lot of your engagement and reaching people that you never reached before. So let’s talk about these three specific steps that were involved. With increasing your engagement on your social media accounts, more specifically for Instagram, but I would not be surprised if this translates into other social media algorithms and platforms in the past, we’ve discussed what is so important with social media algorithms and the main, the main takeaway for a lot of this stuff is.

Social media algorithms, social media platforms. They want you to keep users on their website. So if you keep users engaged on their website, you keep them engaged with your profile. Or you’re not sending links, sending them to links to go off of the social media platform. The algorithm is going to favor you over the others that are sending people through YouTube link or a different social media platform lead.

Now with that in mind. It’s important to understand that they want you to stay engaged on the platform as well. The more you stay engaged, the more they are going to favor you and whatever the algorithm is actually doing. And this brings us to kind of the first step in increasing your engagement on social media sites.

And I think we’ve mentioned this in the past before, but specifically engage with the community that you’re trying to be a part of. I know we’ve briefly mentioned this, but it is. Way more significant than you could possibly think. If you are trying to grow an audience, you’re trying to grow a fan base.

And when you make a social media posts, you want people to see. Follow through with your call to action. So if you want them to stream your track on Spotify and that link is in your bio, you tell people on a post to go to that link. Most people are going to ignore that, especially if you’re not engaging with their content or the community that they’re involved with.

If all of your strategy is on social media is to get people to follow you and look at your profile. No, everyone’s going to ignore you. No one wants to fucking pay attention to you. No one cares that may become a little bit different as you get bigger. If you start getting more strings, people might just happen to follow you on social media after finding her on Spotify or a different platform that might happen.

That might be the case. And surely that does happen. However, for most of us, you can’t just keep making posts and expecting people to find you. It’s the idea that if you build it, they will. That’s not the case. We’ve talked about that in the past as well. If you build it, people will not come. You need to let people know that you are there, you’re in, you’re engaged and you’re wanting to be a part of the community and better it, whether that’s through music or production or mixing a mask or whatever it is you need, you need to be a productive member in that community.

Once you start becoming a more productive member in that community. And you’re gauging, engaging with other people’s content. That’s going to get other people to want to reciprocate the same engagement that you’re giving to the community. And this is where Gary V’s dollar 80 strategy really comes into play.

And we’ve talked about this dollar 80 strategy in the past, but I feel like there’s a better way to go about it. Where as EDM producers, we can adjust the strategy a little bit. And start engaging with more people and. Uh, and reach smaller accounts, which a lot of those smaller accounts are more likely to become a super fan of yours.

If you’re engaging with their content now for EDM producers, there’s a number of ways to go about this. Let’s just briefly talk about the dollar 80 strategy and what that looks like. Basically what the dollar 80 strategy is is you leave 10 comments on the top 10 posts and nine different hashtags. So this basically equates.

90 comments, you’re leaving your 2 cents. So multiplied by two it’s dollar 80 is kind of what the idea is. You start to rack up a lot of comments, engaging in quite a number of communities. Now, these, these hashtags needed to be relevant to you and your brand and your, in what you’re doing. And it actually, it works.

People start noticing your name a lot more, who didn’t before you start getting more likes, you start getting engaged. People reply to you. You start replying back. Next thing you know, you’re having full conversations and comments. A lot of those people will click on your profile. Start looking through it.

Go. This is interesting. Start following you. Now you start amassing this audience that starts falling in, in, in, since you were engaged with their con. When they see you post something, they’re going to want to leave a comment as well, because they know that your engaging with what they’re doing. So now you’ve got the engagement that you’re looking for.

You’re reaching more people, you’re reaching new people and they’re starting to follow you in and be engaged with you now to take this idea a bit further. Yes. It helps to comment on those. Nine posts within that hashtag. But a lot of the times those accounts are, can be really big or there’s a lot of people engaging in that content.

And so not always will people pay attention to you? Like your stuff, comment, you know, reply or whatever. So we can take this a step further. And instead, I think it’s best to maybe find one or two hashtags go into the most recent posts and find about three to five in each hash. And comment on those. Now it’s going to be much less than the 80 comments that you’re going to leave, or I should say 90 comments that you’re going to leave, um, on the top posts and these top nine hashtags.

And that’s okay. Really when you’re looking at the top nine, you know, if you’re doing over 90 comments on nine different hashtags and the top. You’re getting the reps in more than anything. It’s very easy to flip through those. You can do it all within 10 minutes. It takes no time to go through one hashtag and do nine comment or 10 comments.

However, it’s a lot more difficult to go into recent posts and find ones that you enjoy. Uh, you can engage with whether it’s a producer or a fan of me. Yeah. And a lot of the times those most recent ones are, it’s going to be a plethora of different people, smaller artists, medium martyrs, big artists. When you get to those smaller and medium artists or those smaller, medium accounts that are just fan accounts, it’s going to be people that probably aren’t engaging a ton.

So when you engage with their content, they’re going to reciprocate that. Much more. They’re going to be excited that other people are engaging with their content. It’s, it’s important to keep in mind that you should only engage with content you want to engage with too. It’s it’s not that it’s not a numbers game with this strategy when you’re going into the recent post.

Really what it is is you’re looking for people that, that, that are either your ideal client or your ideal fan or someone you might want to work with someone who you actually are interested in. Cause you don’t want to just leave these bullshit comments and engage with people that you don’t actually give a shit about.

Or that you’re just trying to use. That’s not what the point of this is. The point is that you’re trying to get engaged in a community of individuals who are also wanting to engage in this community and, and build some, some sort of audience or share something with people that provides value. So playing the numbers game on the.

10 posts in nine different hashtags, very easy. You can get those reps in a, it gets you in front of people, but going into those recent posts, you can engage much more in and get more personal with those people. Now, this takes us over to step two, which is actually starting conversations with some of these individuals.

Now, my rule of thumb is. I’ll leave comments on people’s posts and I’ll engage with their content. And I, I try to be, as I try to be as thorough as possible as I can. And if they reciprocate that with me or they reply to my comment, basically in Dane gauge back with me in a meaningful manner, usually that’s when I’ll DM them, because I’d like to start nurturing the relationship I’d like to see.

Talking with them more and getting to know who they are as a person, because I’m interested in what they’re doing. Like, you know, I, I like the, for me, it’s a lot producers and artists and being engaged with those producers or artists is very valuable to me because I have a playlist, right. I want to find new, interesting content.

And I was, I’ve been able to do that. A number of times we’re producing. Release new music right before my playlist. Right before I was starting my playlist search, I was like, sweet. I can add this to the platelet. Uh, not only that, getting to know who they are and becoming more personal with these artists allows for that relationship to extend beyond just a comment, more than likely we’ll follow each other.

And when they see my content pop up, they’re probably going to want to engage with that content as well. Now we get this like real life engagement going on where it’s not just some spam bot that’s posting promote your track here with fire emojis. Right. It’s actual, it’s an actual human, we know it’s now becoming a friendship and that person wants to engage with that.

Not only, not only would, will, they just want to engage with that, but they may even want to share that with other people. And this is where we start building a foundation for a true fan base in super fans of people who are going to want to share our content. They want to engage with what we’re doing.

And we establish our own community. And once we establish our own community, it starts to take off like wildfire. So step one is engaging with your community itself using that dollar 80 strategy, and then using the adjusted dollar 80 strategy for recent posts. It takes a little bit more time than that, but you, you might find people that are more willing to want to really engage with you.

Step two is going to be starting conversations with those endeavors. Step three is something I already mentioned nurturing those relationships. This is, we’ve talked about nurturing in the past, but when you nurture relationship, you just want to try to provide value and be someone there for them that you can talk to and have again, engaging conversations, one-on-one DM conversations, and then find places where you can stick some valuing, because including that value goes a long way for people.

Uh, most of you want are interested in providing value to people. That’s why you’re a musician for the most part. Some, some people are driven by ego, but you want to share art with the world that is inherent value. Taking that a step further and providing even more value one-on-one just goes in even on a much longer way, right?

It makes people really give a shit about who you are because you’re willing to help them as you start nurturing these relationships. People really do give a shit more, right. Once you start to learn who they are, once they start to learn who you are. And it just, it, again, it turns into more of a friendship, which, which ideally is the goal, right?

You, you do want to establish a lot of these relationships with people, especially fans at the beginning, because these are the people who will be sharing your music the most. If you can get, if you can get a general listener of electronic music to be your fan on Instagram, it’s just going to do so much more.

For producers, a lot of you, like if you’re reaching out to other producers, these could be, there’s so many opportunities. If you nurture and establish these relationships with other producers, it could be collabs. It could be record label signings. It could also be play listings. You could reach their audience, that they start sharing your stuff.

Like you can swap audiences and share, share different things that you’re promoting on each other’s accounts. And this just goes. So much further than you could even possibly imagine. So engaging with your community is the start to all of the engagement that you’re going to get on your account. If you can get, if you can start that engagement today, it is going to be the number one thing that changes and switch ups, your switches up your account from being a dead account where you barely reach anything.

To now people are engaging with your content going deeper into this and with engaging with your, in your community. I suspect that this is something the algorithm actually looks for. They’re they’re looking to see if you are engaging with other people, because the minute I started doing this and consistently doing this, engaging with my community is when my accounts, when I used hashtags, similar hashtags I was using before actually started reaching legitimate.

My numbers have never looked better than when they first dropped off a couple of years ago. So not only is this going to get those people that you’re engaging with, engage with your content, but it’s going to reach others far more than it would have. If all you’re doing is posting your content and not engaging at all in a.

This is also a really good way of finding new hashtags, because as you start looking through general hashtags, things that you come up with, you know, EDM producer, EDM production, EDM fans, EDM music, that those sorts of hashtags or specific genre based hashtags, you’ll see other posts where they are using hashtags.

You didn’t even think of. And there’s actually an audience for that hashtag. So it’s great. Hashtag. As well, you’ll get a lot of great insight into what you should be using, what you shouldn’t use and different areas where you can find even, even bigger communities that you can then try to be a part of.

That’s pretty much it for today’s episode. Guys. Believe me, when I say this, this is like the number one thing you can, you can do today. It’s free. It’s easy, only takes a little bit of time, but engaging with your community is going to give you the engagement that you’re seeking. And you’re hoping to get.

I do not sleep on it. Trust me, it’s highly, highly, highly effective. I hope to hear so many of your guys’s stories feel free to. Comment on the post on Instagram, or shoot me a DM. If this is working for you, as you’re starting to apply this technique, can’t wait to hear it. Guys. Check out the show notes at NBS audio.com/episode 77.

I had to postpone, um, what this original episode was going to be with a buddy of mine. We’re inter I’m interviewing, but I’ve got two interviews coming up next week. So the next two episodes are. Some just amazing episodes with some great guests. I mean, I’m super excited to share with you guys and I’ll talk to you guys next time.

Take care. .