Social media can be either a huge asset or a recipe for disaster, depending on how it’s utilized. Here we look at ten quick tips for musicians on Twitter that can help them up their social media game and transform their Twitter presence.
____________________________
Guest post by Ashlee of Wysidio
As a musician, social media can either be your best friend or your worst enemy.
Having an online presence is crucial, but it takes more than simply setting up a Twitter profile for your efforts to really count. In this article, we’ll go over 10 quick tips to help you make the most out of Twitter.
1. Brand your profile.
Social media provides artists with the ability to brand themselves and their music through multiple online touchpoints. It’s a smart move to keep your look and message consistent across platforms and to tie them all together with a related look and theme. Use inspiration from the design elements in your logo, album artwork, and artist website, and tie it all together in your Twitter profile.
2. Write a good bio.
A good bio is important. Twitter allows you to feature a short bio directly on your page, which will be one of the first things people will discover when they come across your profile. Be witty and descriptive; explain your sound, who you are, and where you are. A little bit of help from a freelance writer can go a long way if you’re not comfortable with talking about yourself. In the music industry, it’s incredibly important that you put your best digital face forward, so it’s okay to recognize your own strengths and limitations and ask for help when needed. You can also take a look at the Twitter pages of artists who inspire you to get an idea of what your bio could entail.
3. Build your audience, start a following, and network.
Once you’ve created your Twitter profile, it’s time to find your audience. Start off by following friends, and then expand to fans and related artists to grow your network. It’s a smart move to follow musicians who your fans are also listening to; it’s an easy way to start conversations and source collaborations. Follow a mix of music industry professionals and publications that you look up to and pay attention to how they use their Twitter profiles. You know what they say: this industry all about networking, networking, networking — and you never even have to speak face-to-face for it to count.
4. Engage with your followers.
It’s an important to reply and retweet your followers (and don’t forget to @tag them). Some ideas to get your tweet engagement rolling are to host a contest, ask questions, or start a conversation about a recent musical or social event. Your followers are interested in you and it is important that to show you’re interested in them as well.
5. Use hashtags.
Using hashtags regularly will “brand” your tweets and increase their viewability (if they’re relevant). Use the website Hashtags.org to research a hashtag and its trend history. Another helpful Twitter tool is Twubs, which lets you search a hashtag, see its stats, and populate data on related hashtags.
6. Post at peak times.
Check out Sprout Social’s guide on the best times to post on social media. For Twitter, the afternoons, evenings, and weekends are most often peak activity levels. However, every platform and user is different, and therefore your content strategy needs to be different for every platform you’re on as well. It can be a lot of work, but there are experts in the social media field who can make creating a multi-platform digital marketing plan a piece of cake (pst: that’s us!).
7. Keep it consistent.
Don’t bombard your followers with tweets and then go silent. You want to maintain a regular tweeting cadence and don’t ever want too much idle time to go by. In today’s world of short attention spans, you have to keep momentum going or risk losing it entirely. If coming up with quick and clever self-promotions just isn’t in your nature, hire a social media manager to help pick up the slack and keep your content flowing, your social profiles relevant, and your fans engaged.
8. Share your music (and works in progress).
Of course your fans want to see your finished work — but they’re interested in the behind-the-scenes of your music, too. That’s what makes social media so popular and full of potential for musicians. Not only can you use your social media platforms as a place to promote your completed work, but you can also use it to post works-in-progress and ask for feedback too. Your fans may have some valuable input for you to consider — or at least will be begging to hear the full version.
9. Make the most of Twitter lists
On Twitter, you can create “lists” of people that you can group together based on commonalities. Creating lists will keep your Twitter organized and make it easier to reach your Twitter goals. Lists can be public or private and they make it easy to contact and engage with some of your favorite Twitter users in a semi-mass way.
10. Utilize multimedia.
Tweets are insightful but so are photos and videos. Sharing multimedia posts on Twitter can show multiple facets of your music and engage your fans with visual content. Additionally, tweets with some form of multimedia nearly always have better engagement rates than those without. Since images are powerful, they need to be done right. It makes a huge difference to have your press photos, music videos, and graphic design be done by a professional and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg — we can help you out here also.
Maintaining your online presence and social media personal as a musician is almost as important as maintaining your stage persona. However, it’s not always an easy balancing act between being an artist and your own PR agent.
Wysidio offers a range of services to up-and-coming artists from graphic design to social media management to help lighten your load and let you focus on what matters most: making music.