13 Tips on Getting the Best Out of Twitter

I don't how often i have heard people say "No i don't use Twitter, it's just a bunch of people saying where they are, what they are doing and what they had for breakfast" and "What can I do with 140 characters?" Well, it has proven it can do a hell of a lot more than that, from distributing news, social and political commentary, to marketing, distributing not only short bursts of text but also pictures and videos. It has now been around for 6 years, and has pretty much become the leader in spreading information across the world, becoming the social barometer of our times.

It is now an essential tool in any musicians marketing strategy, and there is a wealth of techniques you can use to get the best out of twitter in keeping your fan base informed and engaged.

Not only can you use it as a news service, it also has great potential for you to find new fans, and get them to discover you.

Since its inception, there has become a wealth of third party utilities to help you exploit the potential of twitter to the full. Two i have been using the most over the years are Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. They give you the ability to monitor the 'twitterverse' and search for keywords and hashtags (twitters own keyword system that allows users to find tweets on certain subjects such as #art #photography #ladygaga etc) that could be relevent to you, your music and your goals. They allow you to join in the conversations and connect with people discussing things that could be relevent to you, and in turn, you might be interesting to them.

Chris Singleton over at Prescription PR has put together a list of 13 top tips for musicians and bands using twitter which i think you should take a look at. Here is my favourite peice of advice from his article...

By all means post links to your band's new videos and MP3s from time to time, but do not get too fond of doing so; otherwise you’ll just look like a jerk. Believe me, when it comes to overcommunicating about my own music projects, I’ve been there, done that and bought the t-shirt…and despite waxing endlessly about the importance of musicians keeping schtum for five minutes, I still see artists (who should know better) bore their friends, family and remaining fan to tears with hourly Facebook updates about their latest creative endeavours. Nobody cares after a while (if they ever did in the first place –geddit?). Instead, post links to great content from other sources – whack links up on Twitter to scintillating articles which don’t happen to be about your music (and rest assured, there are a lot of them). Or make witty observations about cheese and/or the credit crunch. In short, get a reputation for being an interesting dude, not a self-obsessed bore.

Check out the rest of his article here.

We also have an article on our Make It In Music site on twitter for musicians here.

 

Links

http://www.prescriptionmusicpruk.com/the-prescription/2012/5/1/using-twitter-top-tips-for-musicians-and-bands.html

http://www.makeitinmusic.com/twitter-for-musicians/

 

Finding a community on SoundCloud

SoundCloud is pretty much a must for any aspiring musician these days - and it's obvious that a community of musicians and creatives ought to be somewhere that you can find support and fans.

Now they are getting to be really helpful in advising musicians on best practice tips for their own service.

We wrote about their overall guide here - definitely check this out - but they keep adding to it.

The latest posts are this one - How succesful SoundCloud users build meaningful connections in the SoundCloud community.

This comes with lots of bits of audio interviews (naturallly....) from those users.

And the other is their guidance post - How to build your SoundCloud community. This is full of great usable suggestions.

If you're not on SoundCloud, you should be and this will help you get started.

 

How Turntable.fm will change music forever

Will it?

I don't know, but I have heard a wall of noise about this new site, Turntable.fm, this week and I've logged in and had a look around - and I was hooked - a bit.

Go and check it out. It's in a 'Beta' mode right now so you might be able to log-in if someone you know (i.e. a Facebook friend) is already a member or you can sign up to their invite list.

I'll point you to this article for the full explanation, but in essence this is a social newtork that allows you to play music to others in self-selecting groups (rooms) and as such it could be the much vaunted 'music recommendation engine' that so many people have hoped for.

On the other hand, it might just be a fun way to play records to people.

I did enjoy it and found myself listening to records that I had forgotten I liked and discovering new ones.

Will this change music forever? - maybe, or maybe not. But I have an odd feeling about it! One thing I do really like is that the way that people vote on each song in the room as it plays could give real feedback on whether people like a song - an unbiased opinion that is otherwise hard to come by.

Check the article here.

Go to Turntable.fm here.

How to use Instagram to promote your band

What - not another social network to update?

Well, actually, no, not really as Instagram is easy to deal with direct from your iPhone and can now be linked to all your other social networks including Twitter and Facebook.

If you recall, in our Twitter music marketing series, we point out how much fans love to see photos of the band doing .......anything!

So, Instagram ought to be a no-brainer addition to your ways of keeping them engaged.

Read exactly how to do it in this excellent piece from Mashable.

Tour diaries: They are the satisfying sustenance required by every hardcore music fan to feed a band addiction. A glimpse into the backstage, on-tour-bus life of one’s favorite band. Now, thanks to the marvels of modern technology, it’s easier than ever to create a highly visual tour diary to sate the appetite of your friends and followers. One word, my musically inclined friends: Instagram.

Read it all here.

Why Google +1 will be good for musicians

You've heard about Google +1?

Google's answer to the Facebook 'like' button which appear in search results in the next few days as they roll it out and later on third party websites. Including yours if you have any sense!

You know how it works, as you're used to clicking the 'like' button already, but I think that this will be great for musicians as people will get social proof about a band right in the Google search results.

So what does this mean for artists, record labels, promoters and ticketing companies? First of all, Google's +1 gives artists and music companies added incentive to integrate social media into their online projects and properties. Think about it: If your competitor has added +1s and has facilitated the discovery of their artists amongst fans' social networks, you would be giving up an advantage if you ignored these social features. Think of music as a zero-sum game. Awareness and sales for one artist takes away from another artist's potential. And by allowing people to +1 an item, you're creating a popularity measure that can be seen by all viewers of Google search results.

Read the full lowdown in Billboard.

And get the mega detail here.

Failing that, and if you couldn't care less, watch the chatting babies discuss it here.

Social Networking for musicians - Quality counts

New guest post on our main site - 'Social Networking for Musicians'.

Simple guidelines for what to do to make your use of social media as a musician effective.

Social Networking No-No's!

2 great posts from Laura Marie and her refreshingly honest site - Nerd Alert 4 Musicians.

What you shouldn't be doing in your social networking efforts.

Part 1

Part 2

The key point - why do you want to add all those people on Facebook and Twitter if they aren't going to be a fan? What's the point?

Some fans are worth a fortune - even if they never buy from you!

Image by MoneyBlogNewz

I liked this article because it forced me to stop and think.

Not every fan is going to buy your music and other stuff - merch, tickets etc.

But they can still be very valuable in monetary terms - because their social network spreads your music.

Once upon a time, being a "diehard fan" meant buying a band's album, show ticket, T-shirt, limited edition signed LP — anything your earnings would allow. Today the term can have a very different meaning. You can be a "diehard" by blogging about everything the band puts out, posting links to your Facebook wall, re-Tweeting the band's messages, and commenting on its Soundcloud page, all without paying a dime.

Engaging with music in this way doesn't mean you're hurting your favorite band, either. Recent studies suggest quite the opposite: they show that fans who actively engage in social media bring more cash to the artists they love. Liking something on Facebook or re-Tweeting a favorite song can generate real world dollars.

Read the whole piece here.

 

Musician's Social Media pyramid

You may well have heard of Ariel Hyatt and her company, Cyber PR - she's been a leader in musician advice for some time and has some great detailed ideas.

In her latest blog post she looks again at a graphic tool that she has used to teach people best practice to follow in their use of social media to promote their music.

Obviouly, we have covered a lot of this in our guide to twitter music promotion as well, but I do like the graphical representation to remind you to mix it up.

You can also check out all her other training and well respected courses here.

Watch her video here or below.

 

Share music on all your profiles from one place

You might've seen this mentioned on Mashable the other day, but I was just checking it out as it fits in the last part of my now delayed but mammoth series of posts on 'Twitter for musicians'.

Bln.kr allows you to upload tracks and then spread them across all your social network profiles with one click. The Pro version (currently free for 30 days) has some additional functionality.

Mashable had this to say:

Bln.kr is kind of like Hootsuite for bands — a platform that allows musicians to share a song across Facebook, Twitter, etc, as well as track how fans are digging their jams.

The service is rather simple to use: Sign up for a Pro account ($10 per month), and connect Bln.kr to social accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube). Upload a track, add a title, cover image, category, tags and download setting (it’s also possible to enable a “Track for a Tweet”-esque feature, which is pretty cool), add a custom message to one’s share and go for it. One click lets a person share the track to all of his or her networks.

Read the whole Mashable post here.

And here's their video explaining the service.

You might not need MySpace or FaceBook but you do need a mailing list

This is a great piece on HypeBot about how Robin Davey's band have given up on social networks as a way to reach fans.

Instead they've made their artist site and their email list the core of all their fan interaction. I'm not sure that I'd abandon social networks - I'd rather maintain a presence on all platforms and focus people back to a great and regularly updated website - but I can't fault the data.

Last week one of our artists made two posts to the blog on their site and then emailed their list. The traffic to their site jumped exponentially (1000% the day of the email, 500% the day after and 250% the third day). As you'd expect, it takes a few days for people to open and read email, but, also, over 40% of the people on the list clicked through and spent over a minute on the site.

You NEVER get that kind of traffic and conversion from social networks - it's just not possible across all the noise!

Read our posts on building a fan mailing list and start one now if you haven't already.

No matter how many fans you have on a social network, it is the platform itself that dictates how you can communicate with them, how you can post updates, how many words you can use – the connectivity with fans is limited.

When MySpace crashed, we lost that connectivity with 40,000 + legitimate fans and our 1 million or so plays became meaningless, it is nothing more than a number. When it comes to your next release, it means nothing unless you can reach those fans again. It quickly became apparent that we could not communicate with our fans the way we wanted through these means.

We have always maintained an email list and we realized that the majority of our traffic came from posting direct to our fans through this platform. We decided to stop updating our social networks and exclusively use our email list last year. The overwhelming response from fans was fantastic. To make it a successful two way tool, when we send emails we are not just plugging our latest release, we mainly communicate our feelings and thoughts on topics we feel our fan base would like to talk about. We openly encourage people to reply and we feature the best replies we get. It's not actually that groundbreaking an idea, and I have to credit Bob Lefsetz email list as an inspiration, but it works very well for us.

Read the HypeBot piece here.

 

Do we need a vetted MySpace?

Roostie has appeared on every self respecting music industry blogger's radar today.

Have a look at these pieces on the Guardian site and HypeBot.

It's a social network / artist promotion site that aims to restrict itself to a maximum of 3000 artists chosen from submissions by a panel.

Quite what happens when they hit their 3000 limit isn't clear - although I have asked them to let me know! If they do, I'll pass it on.

I'm not against another place for artists to upload a profile and maybe reach new fans, but I'm not sure that it's the future either.

The recipe for building your fanbase is to get your own site and the key social networks (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and MySpace) plus music sites like Last.fm, Pandora and ReverbNation. That's where the traffic that may like your music is....in droves. So that's where you need to be.

If Roostie can become a hot destination for music fans then we can add it to that list but it's a very big challenge for them. Remember Ooizit? Me neither!

That said - I would have a profile everywhere one was available if I had all the time in the world - but you need to prioritise.

Quantum events can lead to success

This is a slightly odd one for us to pass on as it is in some ways at odds with what we usually preach - that you can develop your own success.

That is very much what I believe but this is an interesting article since I can't argue that a quantum event - or as the English would say, a 'leg up' - will clearly speed up your journey to success.

Can you seek out these kind of opportunities? Yes. Hence why we advocate widespread and judicious online and offline networking to boost your following and chances of happening across someone who can really help you promote your music and build your career.

Talk to any successful artist, producer or songwriter, and you’ll discover that each of them struggled at one level until a breakthrough happened and their career took a quantum jump ahead. Just like playing a video game, artists “level up” when a quantum event happens. Quantum events include things like meeting the right producer, getting feedback on your songs from a master songwriter, being signed to a development deal with an indie label, releasing a great single, having your homemade sex tape “accidentally” leaked on YouTube, etc. Everyone’s quantum events are different.

Read the whole piece here.

Flowd - a mobile Social Network focused on music

Do we really need another Social Network that we have to keep up to date with and feed with music and content for our fans?

Probably not is what I fear for this new service - Flowd.

Because I like the idea of this on the move fan engagement, but how is it going to rise above the competition and catch on?

Flowd is a cross between a status update site like Twitter and a location network like Foursquare - allowing people to vist locations and interact with other users. It runs as an app on a Smartphone but also can be accessed on the web.

It's big difference is that it aims to help music acts get even closer to their fans.

The app allows acts to talk directly to their fans, share their latest news and tour dates, and it uses location-based tools so artists and fans can check-in at venues and events, and artists can then reward their closest fans for attending their gigs.

As well as the dedicated app, Flowd also allows you to automatically push your updates and content straight to Twitter and Facebook, so artists can manage all their social networking from one place - either online at www.flowd.com, or through the app on their iPhone or Android handset.

Sounds good and in this article at MacWorld they like the idea too:

Flowd offers many of the standard features found in popular location-based social networking apps like Foursquare and Gowalla; you can check in to local hangouts, broadcast your location to friends, view a list of places most frequented by your friends, and so on. But what sets Flowd apart from other apps in this genre is its inclusion of artist pages, where can check in to view and comment on an artist’s latest activities, and take part in competitions and contests.

Antti Viitanen, Digia’s Director of Product Management, walked me through a brief tour of the newly released app; here’s a hands-on first look.

When you first run the app, Flowd asks you to create a new user account—a quick and painless process. Once created, your account can be synced with Facebook Connect and Twitter, letting you share your activity on Flowd with those networks.

Read their in-depth review here.

Social Media Marketing - 5 business leaders to learn from

These 5 business leaders covered by Mashable all have something noteworthy to teach you about using social media marketing to promote music online.

Whether it's their use of YouTube to go behind the scenes at their sports club to bring fans closer to the action or tweeting their most interesting daily events - these are tips that you can model.

We scoured the socialverse for business leaders utilizing social platforms effectively and in innovative and valuable ways. The folks at Klout.com provided a list of the most influential CEOs, founders and business leaders in the social space based on Klout Scores, a measurement of true reach, amplification probability and network influence. This enabled us to compile this roundup based on Klout’s quantitative reasoning alongside our own top picks based on proven quality.

When it comes to social influence and value, these five business leaders outperform their peers in both quantitative and qualitative tests, proving that they have a grasp of how to use social media effectively.

Read the piece on Mashable here.

Successful Social Media strategies for musicians - case study

Great real-life study of how one aspiring artist used her nerve and hard work to find the seeds of success.

Jennie Walker is building towards a major label distributed release in early 2011 and this piece is about how she used online music promotion to get discovered - and what particular mix worked for her.

On a recent Saturday night, independent recording artist Jennie Walker talked about the powerful impact of social media, which led to her getting a record deal with Maddie Records. She explained how social media could be successfully used by sharing her own experiences as a new artist in her 40's, and talked about dropping her debut album "Night Flight to London" in February, 2011.

Read the whole piece here.

Too much social media?

This video makes a point that is very close to my heart - you can spend as long as you like on online music promotion, but if you forgot to learn how to be any good it won't get you anywhere!

I do this for a living and I don't know some of these sites!

2010 Social Networking Map

This idea was originated by XKCD in 2007 but this is a 2010 update inspired by the original.

Not just useful for musicians but for everyone using social media to promote their wares.

Just by looking at the size of Facebook in comparison to the other sites is enough to make you realise that facebook music marketing is where you should concentrate your onloine effoirts.

It's aamazing to see how much it has grown since the 2007 version.

Oh, and it's just a cool map too!

Flowtown - Social Media Marketing Application

Where to build your online fanbase

We talked about exactly this issue in our article on how to build your fanbase and declared that having your own site, built in Wordpress, is a key part of every musician's online marketing.

This article from DJ Tech Tools is brilliant - it looks at the whole issue of promoting music online and where you should build a presence to reach out to potential fans.

Some of the comments make great reading too - pointing out (which I agree) that spending all your time online shouldn't be at the expense of real world networking and time spent making great music!

Recently it came time to update DJ TechTools founder Ean Golden’s artist website. Since the last update was more than three years ago and a lot has changed since then, he was wondering: Does anyone even need a website anymore? Why not just focus on Facebook/Twitter and ditch the .com altogether? Since you’re probably wondering the same thing, we scoured the net and asked industry professionals for answers.

Read it at DJTECHTOOLS.

Ping - best practice guide for artists

Ping - is it the essential future or another waste of time?

It seems that the artists featuring most heavily are seeing an increase in sales but, given that they are so far the megastars that we all know - is that a case of chicken and egg?

And how do you, as an indie artist, get your artist profile up and running and get some attention from your online music promotion efforts?

Well, Apple has decided to help you out with the release of their own best practice guide, which has been posted by the lovely folk at Tunecore.

The first hurdle is getting an artist profile set up, which is currently best done by getting your digital distributor (whoever that may be) to contact itunes and request your artist profile - there are millions of people doing this, so it may take some time!

Once you are set up, go and download the guide and follow the rather dry suggestions!

Get the Apple artist guide to Ping here.