How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, The Ultimate Guide Part 2

Welcome to part two of our two part series on how to promote your music with Twitter. If you haven’t already, we recommend you read the first part so you’re all clued up on the early stages of the process (How to set up an attractive Twitter page, how to find and get targeted music fans to follow you, and how to automate your Twitter promotion using Tweet Adder):

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, The Ultimate Guide Part 1 (Opens in a new window)

In part two we look at the process of unfollowing non responsive people and why this is important, the art of messaging your Twitter followers without having you messages overlooked (Most Twitter messages are spam, don’t make yours appear as the same), and finally we look at a proven strategy to making money from Twitter and your music. So grab a coffee and get ready to learn, as you’re about to discover the secret to dominating Twitter!

Unfollowing Non Responsive People

I mentioned briefly in part one of How To Promote Your Music With Twitter that it is a good idea to unfollow some of your subscribers every few days. I didn’t however tell you why this is the case or how to effectively do so, so I’ll go into it now.

There are a few reasons why you’d want to unfollow some of your Twitter followers, one of those being because you want to appear to be an authority. Think about it, if you go onto someone’s Twitter profile and you see them following 1000 people but only 3 people follow them back, would you dive any deeper or immediately close the window? Most people would close the window and do something else, which means you’ve lost a potential fan. Image counts for a lot in the independent music business, so make sure you portray the right one everywhere you go.

When you’re starting out with your Twitter account however, it’s not really possible to have more followers then you have people following you. As you build your numbers up however, you can start deleting followers who either aren’t following you back (You should be deleting these people anyway) or aren’t interacting with your account in any way. As you do this your numbers will look more attractive to new people visiting your page.

This is all about social proof. A person is much more likely to follow you if they see a lot of other people doing the same.

I’d recommend deleting anyone you follow that’s not following you back within three days. I say three as not everyone gets to go on their Twitter account daily. Three days is enough for people to accept you, and anyone who doesn’t do so in that time is either not going to follow you back or doesn’t come on enough to be a good person to market to.

A word of warning however, if you repeatedly follow and unfollow the same people, you are likely to get your Twitter account banned. In reality though it is more or less impossible to remember every person you have added then unfollowed, so how are you supposed to know which people to stay away from? Well, the easiest way to do this is by using Tweet Adder. Tweet Adder keeps track of all the people you have followed and unfollowed before, and automatically removes them from your list so you won’t accidentally follow them again. This makes your job a lot easier and means you won’t get banned for abusing the Twitter system. We talked about other ways Tweet Adder can automate your Twitter promotion in part 1, so check that out.

If you haven’t got Tweet Adder however, it is possible to manually unfollow users that don’t follow you. This isn’t recommended as it can take hours as your Twitter profile builds up (That and the fact you can’t keep track of who you’re following / unfollowing unless you manually make a note of them and check it against each person you follow), but in case you’re interested I’ll tell you how to do it.

Just to note, Twitter makes this process long winded as they don’t want you to unfollow people just because they’re not following you. It’s not going to get you banned doing so, but is just an extra measure put in place to keep the Twitter community social.
In order to work this out who you’re following that’s not following you, you need to go to your ‘following’ list. You then click on each individual profile and see if there’s an option to message them. If you get this option it means that you’re both following each other. If there’s no option to message them, it means that there’s not following you. This doesn’t take long when you only follow like 20 people, but when you’ve got a lot more it can take a long time. Have more then a couple of hundred people you follow and it’ll take up a good chunk of your day (Hours). Have 1000 followers and you will have given up on Twitter promotion a long time ago.

As I mentioned in part one of our how to promote your music with Twitter guide, it’s best to automate your Twitter promotion. Doing is manually take up more time then it’s worth, and can’t be done on the mass scale which you need for it to be effective. Unfollowing users is a prime example why using Tweet Adder makes everything a lot easier.

How To Easily Unfollow Twitter Followers

Tweet Adder automates all of this for you. If you want to unfollow all users that aren’t following you after say three days, you tell it that, come back in three days and click ‘start’. Because it keep track of all the people you follow and when you follow them, it will automatically select the people who need to be unfollowed and unfollow them. When you’re next following people, it will also make sure it doesn’t follow these same people again.

Messaging Your Twitter Followers With Your Music

OK, so now your profile’s designed, you have tweets up on your wall and you’ve started adding people who are starting to follow you back. The next stage however is to further build a connection with these people and get them doing what you want (Which will also benefit them of course). You need to think about what the aim is for your Twitter account. Do you want to use it as a way to drive visitors back to your main website? Or do you want to just use it as a communication place for you and your fans? Either way it is important to send messages to people that follow you.

In all honesty, there is a lot of spam on Twitter these days. Around 99% of all the messages people send are seen as spam, and therefore often ignored. Having said that, if you send a genuine and helpful message then you’ll get people who will take notice. I’ve used Twitter messaging to get a load of people on the Independent Music Advice mailing list simply by saying that they can download it for free if they want a career boost. And what independent musician wouldn’t want that?

When you message people on Twitter, it is good to write a couple of messages that can be sent to anyone but also sounds personal. People should be able to retweet these messages if they please (It does happen, provide people with the goods and they will share the news) and also form a conversation about it. Make people feel like you’re reaching them on their wavelength and they will warm to you. And if they warm to you they’re more likely to listen to your music and become a fan.

You can send out messages to your followers manually, but often it’s hard to remember which people you have already messaged. It is also a very long process if you’ve followers in the hundreds or thousands. Once again I recommend using Tweet Adder to do this automatically. Once you have a message, put it into Tweet Adder and tell it to send messaged to all new subscribers. It will do this and you can work on something else.

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter – How To Make Money From Twitter

Twitter of course is a promotional tool. Having said that, you promote your music in order to get more fans and in turn make more money. So where does Twitter fit into all of this?

Well, Twitter is a great tool to raise awareness of your music. Using Tweet Adder you can quickly get a load of people to see your profile and in turn travel back to your website (If your Twitter profile interested them enough, just don’t forget to leave a link back to your site on your profile). This is a lot more significant then you think. Baring in mind that if people don’t know about you they won’t become a fan and won’t buy your music, don’t you think that getting a lot of people to listen to your music fast is something that you need to make happen if possible?
The reality is however that using Twitter won’t make you a over night millionaire. In order for your Twitter promotions to be effective, you need to first have something of value to offer people. If you don’t add anything interesting to your profile but add a load of people, how many of those people do you think will then go on to your website and listen to your music? Very few, if any at all. The thing is, if you don’t offer people something of value (Free songs, witty banter, anything that will make them happy) then Twitter won’t help you make more money from your music.

If you offer something of value however, Twitter can get you a large amount of fans quick! You can then funnel these people back to your website and get them on your mailing list. As you may know, mailing lists are one of the best ways to make money from your music career as they can keep you in constant contact with your biggest fans. These are the fans that will buy tickets to your shows and even buy your music.

Some musicians have trouble with getting people on their mailing lists however, and that’s where Twitter can help. I’ve used Twitter to get hundreds of people on the Independent Music Advice mailing list, as well onto mailing lists of my other sites. My mailing list is one of the biggest assets I have, but it would be a lot more empty without the people that have joined it from Twitter.

You can also try a direct selling approach with Twitter (E.g. Tweeting about ‘buy my new single’) but I’ve found that to be far less effective then the alternative. People don’t generally like to be sold to, so offering people good value rather then selling to them directly will mean that you’ll make more money from your music career.

I touch further on how to use Twitter to make you money in our book How To Make Money From Free Music. The idea is to tweet about where people can download your music for free, then instantly follow a load of new target people. When people see your follow, there will be a number of people who check your profile and see your tweet. Some will then follow it back and go on to download your song free of charge. So how do you make money from this I hear you ask? Well, every time someone downloads your song you are paid money. That’s right, the fan gets your music for free but you’re still paid for this. For more information about how this works, check out our book here.

How To Promote Your Music With Twitter Conclusion

Twitter is a great way to promote your music. It can be used to easily get targeted visitors to check out your songs and potentially become a fan, and we all know that the more true fans you have the better your chances of getting free promotion and making money are. Having said that however, doing it all manually can be more time and effort then it is worth. If you’re serious about promoting your music with Twitter, I suggest you use Tweet Adder to get a lot of potential fans without working much at all.