Social Media for Composers: Engagement Rate

One of the most “annoying” parts of being an artist or musician in 2025 is the over reliance of the world on instagram and other social media platforms. It can definitely feel at times that you need to be more of a “content creator” than an artist, and for many people this can become quite frustrating. You are making high quality art consistently and constantly and sharing it to the ‘gram, but it feels like nobody is noticing. Or are they?

Let’s take a deeper look at this.

First off, a major issue for anyone on social media is the levels of success we are comparing ourselves to is unrealistic compared to what the actual rate of success is. These posts we see in our algorithm are often getting millions of views with hundreds of thousands of likes yet our posts may only get 40-50 or even just 10-20. Does that mean our stuff sucks?

This is why it is important to understand how social media works and what these numbers actually mean. 10 likes on a post is average or even great - if you have anywhere up to and or around 1,000 followers. That sounds incredibly low, but the general engagement rate we look for is between 1 to 3%. This percentage is calculated by adding the total number of interactions (likes, comments, shares etc) and dividing that by your total number of followers. 3-5% is considered really strong and anything above 5% is usually considered quite exceptional!

So if you are only getting 10 likes, but you have 100 followers you are doing amazing! The more engagement a post gets, the more the algorithm tests it against new audiences so the first step to building a following is to increase and improve your engagement.

To increase engagement rate, there are various things you can do. The easiest is a call to action. Remind people to like or share the content. Ask them a question, let them answer (or even debate!) in the comments. Pay attention to how other reels are getting you to like or share something. Maybe it’s a controversial take and youre voicing your opinion in the comments, or perhaps it’s a more relatable piece of content and says something like “now share this with someone who likes baseball!”. Keep a catalogue of sorts where you can keep track of all these ideas and tools. In that sense, it’s very like composing and analyzing scores and songs!

The other great way to increase engagement is to use a hook. These are the quickest and easiest ways to get someone’s attention. If you remember in the early 2010’s when every article ever posted was a clickbait headline, this is a very similar idea. Scroll through your feed. You’ll hear many posts that start with “Did you know that…” “Am I crazy or….” “What happens if….” You almost want to start like a clickbait article! Give them a headline, tell them what you are talking about, talk about it, then tell them again and ask for an action. This is a great and easy to use strategy that should help a ton.

Lastly, the other type of hooks is visual. There are tons of examples of this - be it using a metrocard as a microphone, interesting framing or more. If you open your app and scroll however, you’ll notice one of the most common visual hooks will be just basic text on the video. This might be “POV: youre a….” “Day 1 of….” My Secret to…” or “Send this to someone who…” . Any of these sort of things might catch your attention as you can read them (or at least their keywords) quicker than the speaker might get the sentence out and grab your interest. Even if 2 words “Success” and “Composer” cause you stop for more than a second and read the rest of the hook, you’re now getting (ideally) served with a visual hook, a text hook, and an auditory hook to keep you interested and engaged. Just think: most people swipe through content within 1-3 seconds of being introduced to it. So how you package your content and get people interested in it in the first place will drastically increase your engagement rate.

In a future post we will look at analytics for engagement and some types of content that will help you increase your follower count, but for now focus on getting your engagement rate up! Better content makes growing your account much easier.

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