Brick Blair, July 28, 2022

<aside> 🧱 Hi, I'm Brick Blair.

I'm an indie singer-songwriter who has been making music for many years but only recently started to take its marketing and promotion seriously.

I am not an expert. There are many people who know a lot more than I do about this. My knowledge is very incomplete. But I am happy to share my experience, research, and observations—for whatever they are worth.

I have other pages exploring other indie music marketing issues which you can find here.

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As you may have noticed (from the "make Instagram Instagram again posts etc.), for better or worse, Meta (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) recently rolled out a series of changes designed to help it compete with TikTok.

We need to pay attention to these changes as they represent both a threat and an opportunity for indie artists. It's too early to tell what the ultimate impact will be, but the most significant change is that both Instagram and Facebook are increasing the influence of the recommendation algorithm in relation to the influence of the creator/follower relationship.

In other words, Meta platforms are both in form (i.e., what most users are reacting to), and in function, becoming more like TikTok.

The TLDR for people who don’t like these changes: too bad.

Meta has little choice.

Despite its dominance, Meta is at a crucial juncture in its history. Today it announced, for the first time in its 12 years as public company, that quarterly revenue dropped. Despite the breathless coverage you will see about this, keep in mind that this is in large part because online advertising and online shopping ballooned to historic proportions during the pandemic lockdowns and are now falling back to a more normal earth. Also, inflation and a looming recession are not helping. However, some of Meta’s revenue problems (relatively speaking, i.e, they still made $4.6B in 3 months), are more material, including the rise of TikTok.

So, we should ask, for the purposes of this discussion, what is the most important difference between Meta and TikTok?

It’s simple: in deciding what content a users sees, TikTok prioritizes its recommendation algorithm over the creator/follower relationship. Meta is the reverse. That’s it.

The result of this difference?

More than 39,000 accounts on TikTok now have at least 1 million followers. That’s about 6,200 more than on YouTube and nearly 16,000 more than on Instagram. (The Information)

So, the real significance of Meta’s recent changes are summed up in this quote:

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the percentage of posts that Facebook and Instagram users view from accounts they don’t follow would double to around 30% over the next year or so. (The Information)

Deciding who sees your posts

So, let’s dive into this—by first looking at the problem Meta is trying to solve.

Many of us have at times complained that "none of my followers see my posts”—perhaps because we mistakenly think of Meta's platforms as subscription services, like signing up for an email newsletter. But, they haven't been this for many years. The fact that someone follows you on Instagram is only one of many things that determines whether or not that person sees your content, which is ultimately determined algorithmically using many different factors.

On Instagram that may result in very few of your followers seeing any given post. This is true for many different types of accounts and content. For example, on an Instagram meme account that I own (43K followers), the most successful post (11.8M views, 800K likes, 1500 comments, 48K forwards, 95K saves) was seen by less than 25% of followers—which is actually much higher than industry averages.

According to one analyst firm, the average organic reach on Instagram in June 2022 was 18%, meaning that if you had 1000 followers, an average post would be seen by 180 of them. These numbers vary significantly based on multiple factors, and much of the analysis you see focuses on reach for brands—which may generally be lower than it is for an indie artist with engaged fans. One firm estimated that organic reach for brands on Instagram averaged 9% and 2% on Facebook.