Most artist accounts go quiet for months and then post the cover art, the streaming links and “out now” on the same afternoon. It is the natural way to work, because that is how a release feels from the inside. From the outside it is one post, seen once, by the people who already follow you. The artists who grow on social treat a release as three weeks of material rather than one day, and they lead with the song itself, fifteen seconds at a time, rather than with the artwork.
The practical problem is that a release is a lot of short vertical video going to a few places with different rules about length and size, usually on a day you are travelling, rehearsing or on stage. That is a scheduling problem more than a creative one, and it is worth solving once.
What to post
Before the release
- The hook of the song, fifteen to thirty seconds, over footage of anything at all.
- The same hook again a week later over different footage, since most people missed it.
- A lyric, written out, on a plain background.
- The story of one line: where it came from, what it is actually about.
- A pre-save or presave link, once, near the end, not at the start.
On release day
- The announcement, once, on every network, with the song playing.
- A clip of you hearing it in the car, at a venue, wherever it feels real.
- The full artwork, finally, now that people have heard the song.
- Thanks to the people who made it, tagged.
After the release
- The verse that was not in the teaser.
- A live or acoustic version of the same song, however rough.
- A duet or stitch invitation: the instrumental with room for someone else’s part.
- Reactions and covers from listeners, reposted with permission.
- The song again, three weeks later, for the people the algorithm only just found.
Live and touring
- Tour dates as a single image, and then each date again as its own post the week before.
- A clip from the last show, ideally the crowd singing rather than you.
- The setlist, after the show, for the people who were there.
- The venue, the van, the green room, the drive: the parts of touring nobody posts.
- A ticket link, when there are still tickets, with the date and city in the caption.
Between releases
- Studio footage, including the takes that did not work.
- Practice, warmups, a riff you are not sure about yet.
- A cover of someone else’s song, which reaches their audience as well as yours.
- The gear, only if your audience actually asks.
- Old songs, one at a time, on a slow repeating slot, for people who arrived after them.
How often to post
Around a release, daily for the two weeks either side of it, most of it short video. The rest of the year, three or four times a week is plenty, and it should be lighter: practice, live moments, the back catalogue. The trap is the gap. A month of silence after a release means starting the next one from nothing, and the between-release posts are what keep an audience from going cold.
Make the release-week posts in one sitting, when the song is finished and before it is out. Ten clips from one afternoon, each with a caption and a date already on it, is a release plan. Ten clips made on ten separate mornings usually turns into four.
Which platforms matter most
TikTok is where songs break, and it is the one network where a clip from an unknown artist can reach more people than the artist has followers. Post the hook there first and most often. Instagram Reels takes the same clips and reaches the people who already follow you and their friends, and it is where tour dates and artwork do best. YouTube Shorts is the third home for the same vertical video, and the full-length video, the live session and the lyric video belong there too. X is the smallest of the four for music but the best for the conversation: the reply to a fan, the setlist argument, the tour announcement people repost.
The same clip belongs on all three video networks. Each one has its own limits on length and file size, so check the file against each before it goes out, or let the scheduler do it.
Ship the release from one queue
A release week is the same batch of files going to a few networks on a schedule, which is exactly what a scheduler is for. BulkPublish takes the clips once, checks each file against what each network accepts, and holds the whole run in a queue with the times already on it. The bulk posting guide covers loading a batch, and the repeating slot is how the back catalogue keeps resurfacing without anyone remembering to post it.