How to Balance Time Spent Growing Your Community on Social Media With Making Music

I was looking over my social media pages recently and comparing them to artists with bigger followings to see if I could find some inspiration to help continue growing my musical community.

I fairly quickly came to the bittersweet conclusion that the difference between my pages and most of theirs was the amount of time I’m investing in them.

The great news with that is that it’s not going to take some stroke of genius that I don’t have access to in order to keep growing my community — the not-so-great news is that extra time is an asset I don’t find myself with a lot of.

I’ll be blunt — it takes a shitload of time, effort, and well-thought-out content to create an engaged community on social media. As of now, I probably spend about an hour or so each day on social— consistently thinking of things I can say that are interesting and that help my friends and followers, posting new content, responding to comments, responding to messages, commenting on other people’s posts, posting to Facebook groups, and just generally trying to interact with as many people as I can.

I realize an hour a day isn’t a lot, and that’s the main reason why my pages aren’t growing as quickly as I’d like. I could up that to two or three hours a day and see much faster growth, as I’ve already proven to myself in the past.

But at this point in my life, between my day job, actual time spent writing and producing music, regular responsibilities, and relationships with people I love, those 2–3 extra hours each day have to come out of one of the other parts of my life.

In short, I can’t work less at my day job, so almost inevitably if I want to spend more time on social media then I’m spending less time on music, or with people I love.

I won’t pretend I’ve found some perfect balance with this, but it’s something I’m constantly working on. Since I do love nourishing relationships with people, and want there to be awesome people who care about my music and who listen to it when I release it, I spend a good amount of time on social media fostering those relationships.

I also hold the mindset that I don’t want to release songs that I think are “pretty good” — I want to release songs that meaningfully connect with people, that make them feel powerful emotions, and that resonate in their hearts and minds in the most beautiful of ways — songs that people listen to and say,

“Holy shit, that was amazing… I want to listen again!”

That’s what I’m going for when I write songs. So I can’t afford to take too much more time out of writing songs and producing music, because without it, I won’t have the time I feel that I need to really put what I consider to be meaningful songs together, and since that’s the part of this whole thing that I love the most, sharing music that I’m able to create with other people, I’m definitely a believer in the “music-first” mentality when it comes to which is more important, the music, or growing the community.

I also think that once you have a community that’s a pretty decent size, if you’re releasing music that’s truly hitting hard in a special way, it will eventually, though possibly more slowly, make its way out into the far corners of the world, and grow your community even more as more people hear the types of jams you’re putting out there.

I wish I had answers for the aspiring artists out there trying to balance the million-and-one things it takes to build something from scratch. The thing that works okay for me is consistency — I may not be growing my communities as fast as I’d like, but I damn well want to make sure that when I release music to them it’s something that’s gonna rock their worlds.

For me the answer has mostly been balance — I spend what I consider to be “enough” time on social media, and try and spend more time than that on music each day. Some days things change — I might spend 3 hours on social one day and only 30 minutes actually making music. It all depends on how I’m feeling, but that’s at least how I try and think about it, and I try to be aware and take stock of this.

Anyways, I know lots of artists are having a hard time balancing everything, and my best advice is to find and focus on the things that you find most relevant to your goals, and work out some decent, long-term balance with them. I see way too many people posting 15 times a day for a week, and then nothing for 3 months because they got burned out.

Find the system that works for you, even if it’s 15 minutes social a day and 15 minutes music a day, and then go from there. Also, don’t be hard on yourself — it’s natural to feel overwhelmed when on top of everything else in life you have to worry about music videos, live shows, writing songs, producing songs, taking care of yourself, paying bills, day jobs, taking care of a family, staying in touch with people you love, cleaning your home, cooking dinner, doing dishes, etc., etc., etc.

Find the balance that’s feasible for you to keep up over the long term and work with that. Stay amazing people, sending my love!