Here we look at why, as in independent musician, Twitter can often be a better starting place than Facebook when it comes to DIY online promotion, owing to its easy accessibility and, unlike Facebook, a notable lack of paywalls.
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Guest Post by Daniel Hartnett on CD Baby’s DIY Musician Blog
In this video/blog post, I will discuss why you should begin with Twitter over Facebook when you first start out promoting your music online. Just before I begin the lesson, I will just share some interesting facts about Twitter. Since it launched in 2006, Twitter has grown to over 320 Million active users.
Twitter is one of the Internet’s go to sites for quick and current information. And has become the death for old forum websites that used to cater to specific niches. This is due to its quickness and ease of use. Also Twitter is perfect and adaptable for mobile devices.
With a quick search of popular music keyword terms like “Hip Hop,” “Rap Music,” and popular hashtags like #rapmusic, we can now partake in ongoing music-related conversations in real time.
This means that we have a huge target market to sell our music too. There are tons of people looking for new hip hop music on Twitter. It’s up to us musicians to create it and sell it to those that want to consume it.
It’s important to note that when we create music for a specific audience, we are creating a solution and serving that audience when we sell that music to them. Just like any other goods or services that are sold online. Sometimes we forget about the value that we create when we make music.
Why Do I Feel Twitter Is Easier For Musicians To Begin With Over Facebook?
The main reason why I feel that Twitter is easier to start with concerns the way in which Twitter is built around engagement. Anyone can partake in live conversations about certain music topics.
From my experience, every day it seems that Facebook is starting to limit your free ability to reach other people — thus, in my opinion, killing the SOCIAL side of this social network.
For the casual user on Facebook, it’s fine. You can message you mum, dad, and friends. But for the entrepreneur or musician I feel Facebook tricked us with a ‘Free Trial period’ and now we have to pay for its services.
There was a time where I could comment and like and share other music pages’ posts with my business The Corporate Thief Beats Facebook page, but now Facebook only allows me to like and share photos as my Daniel Hartnett personal page.
This completely limits small-time musicians trying to growth-hack their way to the top on a budget. The only real way to interact with your Facebook fans it to have a following on Facebook in the first place. The only real way to do this by purchasing targeted likes from Facebook.
Facebook’s Limited Reached
Even once you have purchased a large following from Facebook using their own internal ad platform, you need to pay again in order to access this following each time you post on your Facebook band page.
Has Facebook Become Too Personal For Music Business?
I feel that Facebook has become too personal for music business use. When I have to reach out to other bloggers or music websites, it seems that most people don’t want to be bothered or don’t know you and find it kind of rude to be contacted this way. Facebook is a very personal thing for some people.
To me, I feel that it’s really only meant for friend and family. If you are not friends with them in the first place, your messages might end up in that OTHER message window in Facebook. (Yeah I know. I forgot about that other message inbox too).
Facebook limits your engagement level with your musician pages so that you will get frustrated and end up boosting that post. And that boost button on Facebook has very poor specific targeting options for you to get a decent return for your hard earned dollars.
Comparing Facebook To Twitter
From using Twitter on a regular basis I find that it’s acceptable to Tweet a lot in one day. Compared to Facebook, where people don’t want to see any musician posting more than twice a day.
It’s much more easy for you to start to build a following or a fan base for FREE on Twitter. And most people use the ‘follow for follow’ strategy on Twitter.
This is where you follow a bunch of targeted users on Twitter and hope that certain percentage of them follow you back. From my experience, I have found that 20% of the people you follow will follow you back. This doesn’t work on Facebook. That’s why most people just pay Facebook for likes and followers.
But this is what makes Twitter so easy for the DIY musician. You find hip hop music influencers (@stopthebreaks, @djbooth, @2dopeboyz) and follow their followers.
You could also follow followers of famous rap artists that you create similar music too. Like for example, if you make music similar to J Cole, start following his followers.
On Twitter, it’s more acceptable to approach music bloggers and/or join music conversations. People use Twitter for business in a different way compared to that of Facebook. Twitter is there to engage with others that have similar interests with you.
In my experience with Twitter, I have found it to be a much easier tool compared to that of email to connect with more influential blogs, to help build my brand online. I tend to find the Twitter handles {@} of those hip hop bloggers that actually write the content and reach out them. Then I share and promote their content so that I provide value for them in the hope they will provide value for me.
Engage and Connect With People — DON’T SPAM.
There is a fine line between engaging and connecting with people on Twitter. And I feel that too often on Twitter, some misuse this valuable resource with spam. This is where some musicians just bombard tons of people they don’t know with unsolicited links to their music.
This is a waste of time as people will just block or report you. This will ruin your brand, make you look desperate, and nobody important will take notice of your music. Please follow the ‘influencer growth tactics’ that I provided in the video above, or the ‘follow for follow’ method.
Just before I wrap this social media debate up, It’s important to note that there is an array of great social tools for Twitter which will make your life as a music marketer easier. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer appare amazing content scheduling tools that just take a lot of hassle out music marketing on Twitter.
Building around a Twitter Persona
It’s important to note that when you are targeting fans on Twitter, you must create the ideal Twitter follower persona:
- what type of music do they like?
- who are they following online?
- what are they tweeting?
- what age group?
- what hashtags do they use?
- and what common keywords do they use in their biographies?
As a beat maker, my ideal follower is a hip hop artist. From my research I have found that rappers use the words “Booking” and “Features” in their bio’s all the time. Other times, they use the hashtag from popular mixtape websites like #Datpiff, #Audiomack and #Livemixtapes.
As an artist it’s up to you to carry out the research for the most ideal follower persona. If you create music like Drake, more often than not fans of Drake will have the keyword “Drake Fan” in the description area on their Twitter profile.
Also, active Drake fans will be using current hash tags like #viewsthesixth. Or #ovo. These fans are currently active on Twitter and if you create music like that of Drake, these fans might be the ones to start targeting.
Start using Twitter advanced search feature to help you with your research. This will make your search result much more specific. Make sure to watch the video tutorials in the blog post to see how I use Twitter’s advanced search feature.
Once you have identified your perfect followers, start using the ‘follow for follow’ method. That’s where you follow a bunch of targeted followers and a certain percentage will follow you back. As I mentioned above, around 20% will follow you back in my experience.
To make this easier, download a free tool called Twitter Mass Follow for Chrome. This little extension will enable you to follow/unfollow a bunch of target followers much quicker.
In order to build a following on Twitter, start using the resources that you have in the first place. This should include a website, other social profiles, Youtube Channel, an email list, and your blog.
Your blog/website is a great place to start directing your Twitter followers, since their whole attention will be on you — unlike shiny mixtape websites that have so many distractions, likes ads and other popular artists that have purchased all the virtual real estate on that website.
So adding a Twitter follow button on key areas of your blog is an obvious first step, but in my experience, just adding a button isn’t enough. This is why I would suggest you should start adding ‘pay with a tweet’ buttons or a social content locker on your blog. That’s where you hide certain content behind a social paywall and your readers need to promote your content in order to access it.
As a beat maker I give away some of my beats or PDFs of resources that will help other artists online. As a rapper, maybe you can give away interviews with your producer, interviews on how you made the song, tips for other rappers and songwriters, discounts on tickets to your shows, and discount codes for merchandise.
To get people to take notice of these incentives or to keep people on your blog a little bit longer, try adding a Twitter chat box under your music player. This way people can leave some feedback about your music as they listen to it. Also it will encourage them to share it their follower. Feedback like this from a Twitter chat box, creates a good positive buzz about your music, so when hip hop bloggers come to check you out, they can see all this social proof online.
Twitter Ads
Twitter has an ad platform that is pretty good at targeting followers or the followers of others. If you found some influencers online like coast2coastmixtapes, 2dopeboyz, or DJbooth, you can use Twitter ads to target their followers. You don’t have to stop there, though. You can go with interest-based ads using specific keywords like hip hop, rap, etc.
The main problem with Twitter ads is that it’s very a expensive form of advertising. {Facebook wins this round in my opinion}. But if you are clever, there are a few tricks you can do to keep the cost of Twitter ads low:
- Add a Twitter remarketing Pixel to the header of your website. This allows you to re-target any people that have visited your website within a certain period with ads to follow you on Twitter.
- Also uploading a CSV file of your email list to Twitter can enable you to target all those people who have subscribed to your website.
Finally to wrap this post up, If you want to learn more, check out my blog where I have other tips on how to promote you music on Twitter. I hope that this post has helped you out. If you want to ask me any question hit me up @corporatethief on Twitter.
Author bio: This post was written by Daniel Hartnett AKA The Corporatethief Beats. Daniel is is a hip hop beat maker and music marketing blogger from Ireland. Daniel has a passion for sharing music marketing tips with other DIY musicians online.