How does Social Media Growth work, actually?

If you're an Artist who wants to utilise Social Media to amplify their Career, you need to be aware that Growth doesn't happen by itself.

Growth happens as a result of having a comprehensive Strategy and ongoing Social Activity: creating and posting relevant Content, building a Community around your Brand once this Brand has been created, engaging with people, creating regular Conversation Points and building and keeping up a Following, having a regular Release Schedule, with - optionally - some Paid Social thrown in to prop it all up, increase Brand Awareness and possibly provide some additional Touch Points.

I speak to a lot of people and a lot of them come to me and say: "I want Social Growth". You *can't* really just pick one and ignore everything else. It's a resultant of several components, rather than being detached from everything else entirely.

If you're interested in Follower numbers and numbers alone, then there are services that will give you those, usually you can get a few thousand Followers for a few dozen dollars, it's that cheap.

Keep in mind, however, these are fake accounts. Even if a seller tells you it's "High Quality" Followers or "Real Accounts", it's not. I've tested that and it's nonsense. You'll never see a Comment or a Like from those Accounts beyond the initial Engagement. It doesn't matter if it's a slow drip or a massive drop you've paid for, they don't know your brand, don't actually like (or even know) your Music, are disengaged, won't engage with your Content and Music, and will ruin your organic Reach in the future: Algorithms will serve Posts to those Accounts organically behind the scenes, while they won't be engaging with those Posts, as there are no actual people logging in and using those Accounts.

Social Media Management is an investment and not something you really should be cutting corners on, because - when you look at it - the person you're speaking to could half their rate, but then it wold also half the work, they'd spend half the time growing the Account and working on it, so Growth would be at half the pace, as things would be happening at half the speed, and so on.

You need to put the time in each day ideally (or have someone put the time in for you) to get the momentum going, and even if it's not flat-out posting they're doing, things that need being done quickly add up:

• Content creation
• Adjusting and tailoring Content for any given platform (resizing images, resizing and reediting the videos, adding captions or correcting automatically generated captions etc.)
• Metadata and Alt Text to make it more accessible and findable amongst ton of other Content posted by others on a daily basis
• Community Management: responding to Comments and DMs and engaging with your Audience
• Creating regular Reports
• Fine-tuning the Strategy
• Keeping track of the latest developments on Social Platforms and utilising new opportunities whenever they become available
• Paid Social
• Regular tweaks, reviews and adjustments to hit the ROIs…

…and so on.

As you can see, it quickly adds up to a lot of work being done every day in order to maintain a good pace and avoid drop-out rates. Those do happen and will happen if the Audiences aren't constantly engaged: they just go elsewhere to someone who's giving them more.

There's a lot of competition for people's attention spans on Social Media, and the only way to win this game is to keep people busy, focused, engaged, so they don't even have the time to think about jumping ship to somebody who's possibly giving them more time and feeds them better/more engaging content.

At the end of the day, you get what you pay for - so be wary of people who will say they'll do Social Media Management or Marketing Campaigns for you for suspiciously low fees, as they might not provide Services that are comprehensive enough, and devote enough time for your Socials for them to actually grow at a reasonable pace.