Growing your Instagram followers with Facebook ads

Author

Andrew Southworth
June 12, 2023

Hey friends!

Welcome to the 2nd edition of the Music Marketing Monday newsletter!

Before we dive into the main topic of the week I want to mention that we have a referral program for this newsletter now. If you refer 3 people that sign up you’ll get my Spotify Algorithms E-book for free! Check the bottom of this newsletter for your link.

If you’d rather just purchase the e-book, or physical book or audiobook you can do so here.

Enjoy!

Andrew Southworth

Main Topic

One of the most frequent questions I get from artists is “how can I grow my Instagram followers with Facebook ads?”.

I’ve covered how to super easily and affordable gain Facebook followers here, but nowadays most artists care more about Instagram than Facebook pages.

The reason I haven’t covered it yet is because there isn’t a direct campaign objective to grow Instagram followers. Despite that, I have several methods you can follow. Here’s a summary:

  • Boosting on Instagram

  • Retargeting traffic campaigns

  • Cold traffic campaigns

Generally I don’t recommend people spend money to grow on social media as the main goal. Personally I let it happen naturally as a side effect of running Spotify campaigns or something else. However there are valid reasons to grow on socials too.

Lets talk about the first option, the one you should try first…

Boosting on Instagram

This is the only time I ever recommend using the Boost button on Instagram. For some reason Instagram allows you to run a ‘profile visits’ objective when boosting, and this feature was never added to full Facebook Ads Manager.

This gives you a Call-To-Action button that says ‘Visit Profile’ directly on your ad.

First, select your video on Instagram and click that boost button!

Now choose the ‘More profile visits’ goal.

Some people see great results with Automatic targeting. If you have a couple thousand Instagram followers that have been grown organically and are relatively engaged, consider trying it.

Otherwise create your own audience. Here I would stick with a safe country like the USA, UK, CA, AU, NZ, DE etc. This type of campaign can be quite volatile, all traffic campaigns are. So stick with the safest country possible.

Additionally i’d define your age range decently tight, and use as accurate artists as you can find.

Lastly pick your budget and duration. I’d recommend something like $5/day for 7 days.

Let it run, look at your Instagram analytics as it goes and try to quantify what impact it has on your total follower count.

To avoid this newsletter becoming a mile long, i’m going to summarize the next two methods. Reply to this email and let me know if you want more content on these topics!

Retargeting Traffic Campaigns

Traffic campaigns are very hit or miss, but one way to make them useful is use them while retargeting people that have already engaged with you in some way.

In the Audiences area inside of Facebook Ads you can make Custom Audiences of people who have interacted with your social media pages in any way, watched certain lengths of videos, or converted on a Spotify campaign and a whole lot more.

Here’s the approach to the campaign:

  • Create your retargeting audiences. Choose something with high-intent like 50% Video Views or Instagram profile visitors.

  • Create a traffic objective campaign with link clicks as the goal

  • Add the custom audience into the ad set level of the campaign.

  • Stick to safer countries

  • Use IG Feed, Explore, Stories and Reels

  • Use the Learn More Call-To-Action on the ad and use your Instagram page as the destination

As with all of these campaigns, use awesome video content in your ads. The video is crucial for any ad campaign.

Cold Traffic Campaigns

This is functionally the same as the previous campaign type. However instead of using a custom retargeting audience you’re going to use a cold audience.

This can be incredibly risky due to the unreliability of traffic campaigns.

To mitigate that risk consider using more localized markets like your state, or multiple cities you want to grow in. Doing that can increase the chances of this working.

Final Thoughts

Make sure you try each of these methods in isolation so you can track which methods work the best. As with any ad make sure your video content is great. For this one also make sure your Instagram page is great.

  • Have a good profile picture

  • Have your bio setup

  • Have your link in bio setup

  • Post regularly

  • Keep something in your IG stories at all times

If your Instagram looks boring no amount of ads will improve it.

Also prior to doing any Instagram growth strategies with ads you should have an organic content strategy. If you aren’t posting organic content you should ask yourself why you even want these followers in the first place.

Followers that you never post content for may as well not even follow you.

New Content

In case you don’t know, I have a podcast! Currently there are 41 episodes and it has about 20,000 downloads.

New episodes!

I made a new YouTube video covering massive recent changes to the iOS14 setup for Facebook ads.

Recently i’ve been posting some pretty detailed threads on Twitter, here’s one!

News

Here are some music industry news highlights from the past week.

  • DistroKid is facing a potential class-action lawsuit over takedown requests

  • There is a new investment ETF to offer a convenient solution for investors looking for exposure in the global music industry

  • The EU is asking tech giants to label AI-generated content

  • Spotify cuts 200 jobs as it restructures its podcast division

Quote of the Week

❝

Find someone who has a life that you want and figure out how they got it. Read books, pick your role models wisely. Find out what they did and do it.

Lana Del Rey

If you aren’t familiar with Lana Del Rey, she has 51 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Now we just have to figure out what she did and how to do it!

Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:

  1. My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads.

  2. My ad agency. Forbid Media specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.

  3. Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels is the best all-in-one platform for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels and build their mailing list.

  4. 1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or Alex Bochel here.

My Links:

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