How To Build A Loyal Twitter Following For Your Music

SSocial media is the perfect marketing tool for up and coming musicians. Twitter in particular provides you with a unique channel to distribute news, listen to your fans and communicate with ease.

However, managing your Twitter profile can become overwhelming at times and if done incorrectly, can be damaging to your professional reputation.

Whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter or anything else out there, we think it’s incredibly important to use it to your advantage.

Image credit: Slava Murava Kiss on Flickr

As we love Twitter, we thought we’d put together a simple guide on how to build a loyal following for your music. Let’s break it down in to a few bite sized chunks to help you out.

1. Follow and comment on current trends.

Keep an eye on current trending topics, band trends and styles is incredibly important. Follow key influencers from the industry including leading publications, artists, and decision making people. These people can often inspire you and give you ideas on how to create interesting and relevant content that may eventually revolutionise your own Twitter profile. Try creating some lists on Twitter and adding certain people to them.

2. Make sure your music is easy to share.

People don’t want to have to jump through hoops to hear your tracks. If you hide them away or force them to download, the probability is that you’re going to miss them completely. Try to become an asset to your listeners, host your music in places that makes it easy to hear and equally as simple to share.

Most musicians will use streaming services such as YouTube or Bandcamp, however Lemoncake is also a fantastic platform to host your music and get paid at the same time due to being a music publisher and production library. With the ability to create playlists and share tracks combined with an easy to use intuitive interface that your fans will love.

3. Keep on sharing.

The most important thing to do is keep your Twitter profile active. You may not have any new music to shout about, but there are many other things that you can share with your fans. Post about tour dates and exciting industry or fan related news. Try and promote other musicians too. If you scratch their back, the probability is they’ll probably scratch yours too!

Remember to keep it relevant however. Don’t over post and especially don’t post junk as this will more than likely result in people unfollowing your account.

4. Keep it consistent and stay on topic.

Although posting personal updates about your day and what you’re up to may be useful on the odd occasion, don’t forget to think about your Tweets from a fan perspective. Remember, they’re following you because they like your music so try to stick to what you think they’ll enjoy.

5. Keep it lean and mean.

Try to filter everybody you follow. As we mentioned earlier, by following industry influencers you can learn a lot and be inspired. If you’re following users just for the sake of it, your feed can become very cluttered and you can often miss out on important posts.

Really think about who you’re following. Are they going to help you out in anyway? If you’re interested in a particular person or band, connect with them and see if you can strike up up a conversation. You never know where it may take you.

6. We’re all friends here.

Tweeting is like trying to make a new friend in a social environment – sometimes you have to work hard to win their friendship. Explain who you are and what you do to people. This can be incredibly important when starting out in the music industry. Don’t just wait for people to speak to you – your followers will be more engaged if you start joining in conversations.

7. Don’t overcomplicate things.

Try to organise your Tweets as often as possible. Although this may seem like overkill, flooding followers Twitter feeds with nonsensical chatter is a sure fire way to get them to unfollow you and dislike you as an artist. Try and post a regular amount of Tweets throughout the day.

8. Direct your fans to the right places.

If you’re music is hosted on Lemoncake, or whether you have a blog or website, ensure you’re helping your fans to find you on Twitter. Add “Follow me on Twitter” buttons to your website or blog and provide them with some engaging teaser content that will give them a reason why they’d want to follow.

9. Keep it social.

The one recommendation we can suggest is to never use bots or automated Twitter platforms. Whilst this may make keeping up on top of your Twitter account easy, it’s completely the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Software like this will never have the personal touch that you achieve and it will turn interested fans away.

Remember, as our CEO Peter Oldroyd says, “It isn’t social if it’s automated!”

Simon Brown is the Publishing Manager at Lemoncake.com, a revolutionary music production library and publisher. Visit www.lemoncake.com to learn more about it.