How to kickstart and grow your twitter

If you’re struggling to get your social media’s growing, then this handy guide is perfect for you! Our tips will help you increase your twitter followers and optimise your posts, to ensure you get the best results…

There are thousands of musicians using social networks to launch their careers. You can almost guarantee that when you post your new track, other artists will be doing so too.

Music promotion is a tough game. In order to be heard you’ve got to break through the noise. By optimising your twitter strategy, you’ll soon be able to start trending and become a music influencer.

In this post, we have put together a handy guide that will help you kick-start your twitter. Before long, you’ll be able to increase your followers and appear in more twitter user feeds.

Make sure your twitter profile ducks are all in a row!

There’s one key takeaway here: Consistency, consistency, consistency.

Pick a twitter handle that is relevant to your artist name. In order to avoid confusion, set up the same handle for every social and stay as close as possible to your artist name. In short, if you have a different username on every platform, your audience will struggle to find you.

Then put a bio together that alludes to who you are as an artist. In fact, we just wrote a new blog posts about bios. So, be sure to check out how you can create a bio that appeals to your target audience here.

How often should you tweet?

The most important thing to consider when planning a daily number of tweets is “quality trumps quantity”. If you fall into the trap of tweeting for the sake of tweeting and spam your audience then they will lose interest in you. If you want to promote your music on twitter, then you will need to avoid this!

Setting a daily, or even weekly, number of tweets will encourage you to tweet even when you’re not contributing anything valuable. Ideally, you will be able to share content every day and interact with your followers. But, you need to ensure that the content you share is worth your audience’s time. Every tweet should elevate your brand in some way and create deeper connections with your audience.

Short and sweet!

When you start tweeting, you notice a big empty box with space for 280 characters. Now we know, the temptation to fill this space creeps in. You want to make the most of that space and share interesting content. So you max out the character count, right? Wrong! Using the maximum character limit is not the best way to tweet. In fact, studies show that tweets containing less than 100 characters receive on average, 17% higher engagement rates than longer tweets. Twitter may have updated the character limit from 140 to 280 in recent years, but this hasn’t increased the need for you to use them.

Are you wondering why short tweets seem to be the most effective? Well, every minute 350,000 tweets go flying out on twitter. You’ve got so much competition on social media and with 6,000 tweets a second, you need to find a way to catch attention and get noticed.

People don’t want to spend 30 seconds reading something that they could read in 5. The recommended optimum tweet length is 71-100 characters. Tweets within this range are found to get more retweets, replies and engagements. Getting a retweet, reply or mention is essential for getting content in front of new networks.

We recommend using the 71-100 count as a guide. The most effective strategy for you would be to use the analytics provided by twitter to calculate your own length range. By tracking your post engagement rate against your character count, you will soon start to notice some trends forming, and you’ll be able to see which range to use, and which to avoid.

Pay attention to the time…

When you’re using twitter to announce exciting updates and new releases you want to guarantee the best reach on your posts.

Social media algorithms are tricky! It’s essential to get engagements within the first few minutes of posting, in order to be visible to more of your audience. Given that the average lifespan of a tweet has been found to be just 18 minutes, being strategic with when you post tweets will offer the best chance at reaching more of your fans.

In order to get the best results out of your posts, you will need to find which post times work best for you. To do this, you can either pay for a service which enables you to monitor post time data, such as Buffer, or, you’ve got to get a little experimental! Try posting at different times to see how posts performing. Use your twitter analytics data to identify post times that work for you.

Avoid taking the lazy way out and google searching for the best post times. These post times will not be relevant to you and chances are the research was conducted on businesses, not musicians. Sure, the data will be comprehensive, but you have to work to your audience for the best results. You are a musician, not accountant! In other words, using unrelated insights will likely hinder your marketing efforts.

Add a splash of colour!

Simple text-only updates just fade away in a colourful and vibrant newsfeed. Pair up your updates with relevant imagery and videos to catch more attention. Use the cover artwork when announcing an upcoming release, and a link to the streaming platform when it lands! Adding something visual to your announcements are a proven way to boost interaction levels.

Yes! You should be using hashtags… But please stop using hashtags!

It’s true, hashtags are an effective way to make yourself more discoverable. Tweets with hashtags typically receive double the engagement as those without do, and they are a simple way to reach music fans who aren’t following your page.

The trouble starts when you go crazy with them. Stuffing your tweets with hashtags can do more harm than good. Research shows that one hashtag, or two, is plenty to increase your reach on twitter. But when you tip above two, you risk doing more harm than good, with your engagement dropping by 17% for additional hashtags. So, be sure to pick out one or two fruitful and relevant hashtags when you tweet!

Use twitter to build a network

Create a network of mutual respect and invest start nurturing those relationships. Make sure to follow artists who inspire you, who align closely with your styles and who you want to see succeed in the industry. There is no reason to keep the following count at zero, and networking can provide many opportunities.

You should also invest some time in interacting with other users. Spend some time replying and retweeting some of their posts. If you create more a community with your followers, other artists and your inspiration, you will stand a better chance of your content being shared further. Using your social platform to give other music artists a boost will never hurt. They may even return the favour. Besides, you of all people know how hard it can be to promote music.

Now you’ve got some handy tips for kick-starting that twitter into growth mode, it’s time to get out there. This guide will help you increase your twitter for free provided you follow the advice and find out what works for you. Alternatively, to see your music promotion reach new heights, check out our music promotion services, and contact the Identity Music team here: https://identitymusic.com/contact