Researching Social Media Feeds - Album Releases

In today's class we used the search term "up and coming UK artists" to find an artist in our genre and see how they marketed their up-coming albums using social media. Initially I used that exact search term, however, it came up with a lot of rock and pop bands, consequently, I changed "artists" to "indie bands" as it would be best if I found an indie boy band as it would be closer to our groups campaign. 

I came across the British band 'KAWALA', looked at one of their music videos and found their linked social media - specifically Instagram and Twitter. I scrolled to 4 weeks before their album 'Paradise Heights' was released on July 23 and scrolled through 8 weeks (4 before the release and 4 after) to see how many posts they had, the type of post and what they included. I created a timeline with these screenshots to visually see the development of their social media.

Click Here to see the timeline

It is interesting to note that they had more posts on Twitter than Instagram (28 original tweets + 26 instagram posts), perhaps it is preference or the unspoken idea that Twitter is more informal and casual whereas Instagram is ordered and all about appearance and the post as a whole. 

Advertising Songs/ Projects:

Media Appearances:

Posts about the Album itself:

Performances/ Recordings:

These posts seem to have the most engagement, perhaps because people feel directly involved from being there and want others to see their experience.

Other - Tour, Merch

The amount of posts increase within the week of the release and/ or on the day of the release. Additionally, both captions on Instagram and Twitter follow similar language of English slang or common phrases such as "you cheeky lot", however, the captions on Instagram are often longer than those on Twitter - perhaps this is why they use Twitter more as, in nature, it is more informal. In general the band post daily on twitter and leave a few days between instagram posts (at least 2 a week). I feel as though this works well as if they posted too often it would 'clog' people's Instagram feeds (which can get quite annoying) yet this way they can keep up with the band enough to feel involved. Whereas on Twitter is common for someone's feed to be busy as Twitter is used often for people to tweet their different opinions or stories throughout the day. The advertising picks up closer to the release, I feel as though this works well, especially for smaller artists, as you don't want your audience to loose interest. If it was well-known artist such as Rex Orange County, people would wait for his songs for months, however, as a smaller up-and-coming band, there are not as many 'die hard' fans that would stick around making this method optimal for them.