Engagement is increasing, but I'm not gaining followers.

I started using social media for my solo music projects about three months ago.

I began posting Reels on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.

Things didn't go very well at first—and I wouldn't say they're going amazingly now, either—but I've seen a significant increase in views on my Reels over the last month.

My primary focus is Instagram; as of writing this post, I have around 380–400 followers.

I am determined to keep this up consistently for the long haul—both to create a personal library of the songs, riffs, and solos I’ve loved playing over the years, and to build an audience before I start releasing my original music.

Regarding my content, I established categories like "Solo Library," "Riff Library," "My Riffs," "Tone Guides," and "What If?" Among these, my Tone/Plugin Guide videos garnered the most views and brought in the most followers; I’ve had Reels hit 17k, 18k, and 20k views with strong engagement.

However, videos where I play covers or riffs of existing songs (mostly metalcore) struggle to reach even 2,000–3,000 views and receive very little engagement.

While the popular videos did bring in followers, I don't want to turn into a page that *only* produces tone and plugin guides, as that isn't my ultimate goal.

I dislike cluttering the screen with text or jumping on every single trend; I want to grow naturally and organically. Yet, the fact that my guitar-playing videos bring in almost no followers gives me pause.

The situation is much worse on TikTok and YouTube; on TikTok, no content other than tone guide videos surpasses 500 views, and they generate virtually no new followers. Since I’m focusing on Instagram, my question is related to that platform: I’ve noticed that I gain followers when I create Reels that provide genuine value to people, but—as I mentioned before—I don’t want to grow a page that *only* posts tutorials on tones or plugins.

I try to include CTAs in my videos whenever possible, but the fact that average watch times tend to be short often renders those CTAs ineffective.

I still haven't figured out exactly what the issue is. I don't think video production or visual quality is the problem, as I see much more casual videos with lower image quality getting far higher engagement. One thing I don't understand is this:

How does one Reel covering a specific song get almost no views, while another reaches thousands of viewers? I know it’s an algorithm thing, but constantly churning out content in the hope that *one day* one of my videos might go viral like that doesn't feel like the right strategy.

Do you have any advice or suggestions that you think would actually work for building a lasting audience and gaining followers?

Here is my profile; evercirclist