Tough Social Media Decisions for 2022

Introduction

On the last day of 2021, I had the time to take a look at what went wrong with my social media strategy. I’m all for being active on social media, but I need to find out how to be more efficient or I’ll just abandon it for weeks at a time. What I discovered is that I wasn’t delineating between the two separate things I do, teaching and performing. Each needs to have its own strategy, and from there I need to develop easier tactics to manage content for each audience.

The Big Mistake

I’ve been prioritizing my performing content over my teaching content. Big mistake! Almost all of my performance income comes from my church job. My part-time paycheck isn’t going to fluctuate based on my social media posting. However, running good social media is one of the keys to gaining and retaining students. I have 20 or so piano parent families to please, who can put in their notice at any time.

Analysis – Overall

I looked back through my recent Instagram and Facebook history to see how I’m engaging. Since I stopped posting videos directly to Facebook, my reach has shrunk significantly, to the point where I had no likes from the last several videos I posted as links on both sides of my business. I always get a smattering of likes and the occasional comments on Instagram for identical posts. It’s clear that Facebook prioritizes posts with video versus links. That brings up a little side topic that I have to broach, as to why I stopped posting videos directly on Facebook servers.

Bot Blocking

I apologize for how that heading sounds, but it’s very appropriate to my argument! When you post a lot of classical performances, you will notice that you’ll get a message from Facebook that one of your recordings has been flagged and muted. Bots run by the major record labels, with the blessing of Facebook, are continually trolling to detect potential pirated recordings.

I understand why companies that have spent millions to build their catalogs would want to spend millions on bots to protect their assets. However, it becomes really annoying to get multiple notifications of possible violations of videos I’ve posted of Bach and Beethoven. At first, I took it as a compliment that my recordings were similar to Brendel and Barenboim. However, that wore out fast as more and more recordings got called into question.

If a human took a second to look at my recordings, she could tell I’m neither of those fine pianists! This has become a real problem for performers who make their primary income from performing, according to this Washington Post article. After an increase in this flagging and muting activity, it was time to switch to a paid host for my recordings. I pay for the lowest tier of Vimeo since the free tier is extremely limited. Even at that, it’s almost $100 per year. It gives me control over my own recordings.

Analysis – Teaching

Getting back to social media strategy now…When I did more digging, I found that most of my piano parents engage primarily through Instagram, not Facebook. I only know of one family that engages with Facebook only. I’d really like to consistently upload student videos to IGTV so that they get clicked and shared. In exchange for a bit of extra work to set up an IGTV video, I get a golden opportunity to market my studio with the help of my piano parents.

I don’t like the idea of abandoning users on Facebook, but due to the algorithm, it’s very unlikely they’ll see my content anyway. According to this article, organic reach on Facebook is currently 5.2%. That means that only one out of 19 followers will see the average non-promoted post. I really don’t like those odds, and am not going to pay to play to achieve a better reach rate.

Analysis – Performing

I’ll confess: Pretty much everything I post for performing is really vanity. I really enjoy performing and pride myself on being that teacher who can play every piece he teaches. However, spending so much time preparing recordings for social media is not contributing to the top line. So, I decided not to build my catalog on Vimeo instead of making IGTV videos. Anyone truly interested in hearing me will hopefully click through the link in bio.

I get it, most won’t! It takes maybe 5 to 10 seconds to click through three extra links on Instagram, and a bit less to click through one link on Facebook. Those folks were probably were only going to watch for 5 to 10 seconds anyway. So why bother? I want to show that I’m an active performer and that I take pride in what I play, which translates into my teaching. Tactically, it’s really simple to use a third-party app like Later to schedule to both Instagram and Facebook at the same time. I don’t have to abandon any of my current followers.

Scheduling

To keep things simple, I decided that I should batch each week, for the weeks that I will post. I’ll continue to do Music Monday for my performances, and add Teaching Tuesday (working title) for my studio posts. If I want to post for any other reason, I’ll choose one of the remaining weekdays, possibly Thursday, so there is some space between posts. I tire of some folks who post for posting’s sake, and mute or unfollow them accordingly.

In Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, bravo. I tried to keep this as short as possible, but of course, social media strategy is not a simple one. If it were, I wouldn’t be writing this blog post about it. Does this approach make sense to you, at least for my rather unique situation? How do you handle planning your social media? Have you taken the time to look at what you’re doing, to see if there’s a better way?