How To Find New Music Fans With Twitter
It’s no secret that in order to be a successful music artist, at some point you have to attract fans. There are many ways to do this. However, there is one tool that will allow you to pinpoint a very targeted audience, as well as engage in one on one conversations. It’s a little tool called, Twitter.
I am sure many of you at this point have had some sort of interaction with Twitter; Whether it be following your favorite artists or blogs, interacting with friends, or promoting your music. Love it or hate it, if used properly, it can be a great source (possibly the best) to attract and interact with new fans.
I know for many of you, that might be tough to believe. Although it is one of the best tools, it might be the hardest, and most time consuming to gain traction. For starters, Twitter has less users than Facebook. Although still over 300,000,000. And it’s a little more difficult to grasp the concept of. I mean, are you even really sure who you’re tweeting too?
Don’t worry, we are here to help you start using twitter to find your new super fans.
Out of all the social media platforms, Twitter might be the best at enabling you to not only find your perfect fan, but to interact with them as well. All of which we should mention is free.
To start, what you’re going to want to do is identify some influencers that you think your super fan has interest in. From popular DJ’s and producers, to the bigger blogs. Pick these wisely though. If you’re a techno producer you want to pick DJ’s and blogs that focus on that sound. Chances are if they are following them they will very possibly be into your sound as well. I am sure you already have some influencers in mind but if not Topsy.com is a great tool you can use in order to find twitter influencers.
Start with 3 to 5 influences who have large followings and write them down. You are going to want to consistently use these as a reference. Now that you have them, go to their profiles and click on their “followers.” Right away you have an entire list of fans who could potentially like your music.
You can either start following them so they hopefully follow you back, add them to a list for future interaction, tweet at them, or do all three. If you decide to follow them, I would suggest only following those who have a profile and banner picture, not the default egg and blue background picture. It shows that they are a little more involved and have a higher likely hood of seeing that you’ve followed them, and either follow you back, or interact with you.
We also suggest creating a list for them. To do this, simply click on the gear icon and click “add or remove from lists…” If you have never created a list, hit create list, enter the name and check the box of the list. If you have created a list already, just check the box and close out of the pop up.
I will cover why you should create lists and how to use them later in the post.
If you want to tweet at them, I would suggest having a genuine interaction with them. Don’t just tweet at them and say “Hey, check out my music.” That is not very engaging. Instead, go to their profile page and look at some of their latest tweets. Given that you have the same taste in music, you probably have some other things in common. Reply or retweet a tweet that you can relate to and genuinely contribute to the conversation. Once you interact with them a little bit, then you can refer them to your music.
This also helps because now that you have created that connection, when you do a normal tweet they will probably recognize your name. So, instead of just scrolling past it, they will probably check out what you’ve tweeted.
If you follow these users, the goal is to have them follow you back. If they don’t, unfollow them. There are a few reasons for this; One, to keep your numbers proportionate and two, twitter has a following to follower ratio that you can’t surpass. There are free tools you can use to get stats on your followers, for example, who is active or who follows you back. Use these tools to clean up your list and unfollow anyone who fits this criteria. One that we like to use is Twitonomy.com.
Also, once these users start following you, it is a good idea to message as many of them as you can. There are some tools that will allow you to auto reply to new followers, but Twitter discourages that so do this at your own risk.
Once you get this process mastered you will need to repeat it over and over. First, cycle through all of the followers of your initial influencers that you’ve identified, then move on to the next. I know this sounds like a lot of work but it’s something you can do in 15 minutes a day. If you want to be successful in your music career, 15 minutes a day is not asking much. Take 5 minutes to follow and create lists, 5 minutes of interacting and retweeting, and 5 minutes of messaging new followers. Do this for 6 months and see how impactful it will be.
There are two things you should do to make this process a little easier. One, use a Twitter management tool like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, and two, take advantage of the lists that I previously mentioned.
Tweetdeck is beneficial because it allows you to get a birds eye view of twitter, amongst other useful features like scheduling tweets. If you take a look at the image below, it’s a screen shot of our Tweetdeck. In one screen we can see our notifications, our scheduled tweets, EDM DJ’s, Hypeddit Artists, and Music Software companies. In five minutes we can get a quick view of what’s happening in our little world of twitter. From who is mentioning us in tweets, to what our users are saying, to what other music software companies are doing. That is extremely powerful.
Hypeddit Tweetdeck
This is why creating lists you can utilize on tweetdeck is very important. This will cut out much of the work when looking for possible super fans to interact with, simply because you don’t have to search for them. In 3 minutes you can retweet and interact with 10 people.
Last but not least you need content. Now that you’re creating a fanbase and community on your Twitter, you will need to stay in front of them with engaging content. What good is creating these relationships if you’re not going to interact with them. So make sure you’re keeping your timeline filled with interesting and consumable content. Everything from your music, to funny pictures and videos. Offering free downloads with Hypeddit to your new found fans is also one of the best ways to keep them engaged.
We hope this helps you open up a whole new world of twitter and puts you on your way to creating a community of super fans.
