Personally, I think Twitter is right up there with YouTube
as the most effective marketing tool, especially when you are trying to find an
audience whom you may not know personally. Sometimes it’s even easier to market
to this audience since they are usually not family or friends.
“Twitter is a very simple and immediate broadcast
platform. Facebook is very personal when it comes to friends and when it comes
to fan pages, (but Twitter is) a little bit less but still somewhat personal
way to communicate.” - Mark Cuban
Also, you can hit Twitter way
harder on a daily basis than you can Facebook, as the Twitter feed goes by much
faster and is less intrusive than Facebook.
So here are three basic
things to know about Twitter for the artist or songwriter trying to get it
working for them.
1. It’s a
Numbers Game
The way I think about Twitter
is that there are two kinds of people on Twitter: the kind that read their
stream, and the kind that don’t. The first kind look through their stream like
we do our Facebook feed. They look for interesting things people say or post,
more for entertainment value than because they personally know that person.
The problem is they aren’t
looking at their feed 24 hours a day, and you can’t depend on them to see every
post. And the folks that never check their stream or only look at it once in a
while, are even harder to reach.
So it’s not out of bounds to
post throughout the day to Twitter, like 4-6 times, maybe more. Mainly because
someone might see a tweet they would have missed an hour ago.
I usually do 4-5 posts to
Twitter a day. This ensures a good coverage of people will at least see one
tweet I put out.
This random viewing of streams
also means that we need LOTS of followers. The more the merrier.
2. Getting
Followers
The way to get followers is
maddeningly simple. You follow people, and hope they follow you back. My usual
practice is follow people but only up to the amount of followers I have. So if
you have 100 followers, don’t follow more than 100 people. After about a week,
use a tool like Crowdfire and unfollow those who didn’t follow you back. Then
rinse and repeat. Every week.
Following this method, you’ll
see a rapid rise in followers - but there is a caveat to this. In order to see
people retweeting, liking, and following links on your tweets, you need to make
sure they are people who would WANT to follow you in the first place. If you do
Contemporary Worship, don’t follow someone who would hate that format. Or
someone who you don’t know if they even would want to hear music in the first
place. Read their description and see if you think they might you and your
music, even IF they are followers of an artist just like you.
OK, so once you have
followers, how do you reach them?
3. How to Post
to Twitter
Many people don’t get started
on social media because the thought of logging in each day or hour to post to
Facebook or Twitter seems ridiculous. Where would you have the time? What if I
told you that I post to close to a dozen Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
accounts every day and spend 15 minutes? Better yet, I do it the night before and
don’t even have to do it through the day.
The way I do this is by using
a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule to my various accounts each night
before I go to bed. This is very easy and free for artists who only have one FB
and Twitter account. Also these tools offer a weekly summary of who clicked on
links, which posts got the most likes and shares, and much more.
The secret to posting to
Facebook and Twitter every day all day is not to sit there posting all day!
Using Twitter may seem
daunting, or perhaps you’ve used it but didn’t see the reward to the investment
of time, but using these tips may help you. And Twitter is a unique way to
quickly get people’s attention and get them engaged with your music brand.
Have a great week!
EC
--
Eric Copeland is probably tweeting
right now to one of the dozen or so brands he runs, including his Christian artist
and songwriter development company Creative Soul. To find out more go to http://www.CreativeSoulOnline.com
Some other good resources for
Twitter Tips
3 comments:
Thanks for the tips, Eric!
Eric,
Good word, but a quote from Richard Dawkins makes me go, hmmm.
Good call Bill. Quote has been replaced.
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