Why do so few of my followers see my posts?

A myth on Instagram, and in marketing in general, is that your number of followers equals your engagement, so if you’ve got 7,000 followers, 7,000 people are going to see and like your posts.

It’s something you’ve got to warm up and build over time. If you’ve had a phase of not posting, or you’ve moved, say from Perth to Sydney while your audience is in Perth, Instagram knows that, and it doesn’t know who to show your content to apart from the people who are most engaged with you, which most of the time is around 10% of your following, depending on how good your engagement is.

The natural thing for musicians is to stop posting once the album’s gone off to get mastered, and then start again because they’ve got to tell people it’s coming. Having an engaged account year round is best practice, because it reads better for your audience, and you’re showing up even when you don’t have anything new to talk about.

So post regularly and see what works. You might post something that gets a lot more engagement than something else, or get some followers from a collaborative post with someone else, or from a gig where someone shares your story.

Audience growth gets missed when people rely on labels to market their releases, because you’ve got this milestone, this amazing tour, this record coming out, and then why do I only have maybe 200 more followers than I started with? Scale those moments and build up to them, with year-round plans and ways of always engaging people.