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, 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 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.

Twitter Music Promotion

So now you know How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, good luck at getting it done!

Today I’m going to show you how to promote your music with Twitter. From my tests, Twitter seems to be the quickest and easiest social media platform to get fans to your music. While many independent musicians have struggled to use Facebook effectively, Twitter can be the easy but just as effective alternative that you’ve been waiting for.

Over this two part series on promoting your music with Twitter, we will be looking at where to find targeted Twitter followers, how to get these followers to do what you want (E.g. Check out your music / join your mailing list etc) and most importantly how to automate this whole process using Tweet Adder. We will also be looking at a whole load of other details in between, so make sure you read this article in full to become a Twitter expert!

Note: How To Promote Your Music With Twitter, The Ultimate Guide Part 2 can now be read here. This however should only be read once you have read this post start to finish.

All the methods I share in this article I personally use on my many Twitter accounts, so I can tell you they work. In order to promote your music on Twitter, you will of course need to have a Twitter account. If you haven’t already got one, you can sign up here for free. You will then be ready to promote your music with Twitter.

The Number One Mistake People Make When Promoting Music On Twitter

I’ve been using Twitter for a good while now, and have to say it’s one of the easiest means of social media promotion I use. It wasn’t always like this however, if you don’t have the right tools then promoting your music on Twitter can be a long and timely process.

As someone who does independent music, you should be spending the majority of your time doing the things that will gain you the most money and exposure. If you’re spending all day sitting at your computer adding Facebook and Twitter fans you’re not going to get very far at all. Yes these things do help get your name out there, but only as part of a wider promotional campaign. In fact, only around 5% of your time should go into this type of thing.

If you promote your music on Twitter manually, you have a long and hard task ahead of you. In order to create a strong and responsive account, you need to add a load of people, message them all, find out and delete the ones that aren’t responsive in any way, and add new people without double adding anyone. This is a very long process, and as you get more twitter followers this can take up many hours a day.

In order to cut this time down you have two options:

1. You can outsource your twitter promotion. This is a good idea if you can get someone who will do it for free and is reliable. If you don’t know anyone that’s willing to do that for you for free, this option can be very expensive and probably not worth it.
2. The other option is to use software to automate your Twitter promotion campaign, and this is the option I use. When I started out trying Twitter I done everything manually. I was adding followers blindly one by one, and although I was getting visitors back to my site it was taking up a lot of time and effectively burning me out. I then came across the idea of using software to automate your Twitter promotion, and after trying another less then effective automation tool (I won’t name any names), I came across Tweet Adder which I’ve been using ever since.

The things is, when you automate the process you don’t have to sit at your computer for hours adding and interacting with people. You can get Tweet Adder to add relevant people (I’ll explain the importance of relevant followers later), message people, tweet your messages, and unfollow people all on auto pilot. So while this is happening you can get on with writing your songs, networking with venue managers to get shows, sending your songs to Djs to play on radio, and all the other things that will make you the majority of money from your music.

While it’s not 100% necessary to use automation software to follow the rest of this article, I would strongly recommend using it as without it Twitter will take up too much of your time and won’t be worth the effort. Tweet Adder is the best twitter campaign manager I’ve come across, so give it a look.

Making People Want To Follow Your Band Page

Just because you’ve got a Twitter account and one or two posts, that doesn’t mean that people will automatically want to follow you. Although Tweet Adder will make your promotion efforts a lot easier, you will still need to provide something worth while to your visitors. If you get a 1000 people coming your your Twitter page but you don’t have anything interesting to say, how many of those people do you think you’ll convert into fans? None is the answer, so the first thing you need to do after setting up a profile (And before you start adding people) is to make you page look lived in.

By this, I mean tweet some interesting things. You want at least 10 tweets on your page before you add a single person, so when they come to your page they’ll have a good idea if the information you provide is something that will interest them. Some things you might want to tweet about include any free songs you have, something interesting related to your music, or a competition. It can be anything really, but try to stay on topic with music and what you do. No one is going to want to read about what breakfast cereal you had, so think less ‘Facebook status’ and more ‘music business updates’.

In order to keep people following your page, you’ll want to tweet at least once a day. If you ever miss a day it doesn’t matter too much, just make sure you do one the day after. If you own Tweet Adder, you can pre-program tweets to go off in the future. I personally like to write seven tweets at once and set one to go off every day. I then come back a week later and write another seven tweets for the next seven days. This gives my followers something new and interesting to read every day without me having to always be on my Twitter account.

Customizing Your Twitter Profile

Another important thing to do is customizing your Twitter profile. You want your profile to instantly stand out and being recognisable to you. In order to do this, you can either design your own Twitter background and colour scheme, or you can get someone to design one for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself (Which isn’t as hard as it sounds), you first have to go to ‘settings’ in your account dashboard, then ‘design’. Here you will be able to select a pre designed twitter layout, or on the right hand side of the screen customise your profile more clicking ‘Check out Themeleon’. Themeleon is a pre-installed add on which gives you access to more pre designed Twitter themes, or in fact design your own. This is the option I recommend using.

You can design your own Twitter theme either by simple choosing the colours of your profile, or by adding one of your pictures as the background of your Twitter profile (If you have any Photoshop skills now is the ideal time to use them). Get your theme how you want it looking and click save.

Finding And Following Potential Fans Of Your Music On Twitter

Now that you have your Twitter account looking lived in with your page designed and your first few posts, you’re ready to start finding people to follow you. Unless you’re already established and you have a way of telling your fans to follow you, then you most likely won’t get any natural followers. This isn’t a problem though, as there is another way of getting twitter followers: By following them first!

People aren’t going to know you exist unless you get in their face, and you do this by following them to begin with. When you follow them, you want them to take interest in you by going back to your page to see who their new follower is. If you have something of interest to them on your page, they are likely to follow the information back to your website and check you out. This is why you need to have interesting things on your profile before you start adding people, if you simply add people with an empty profile they’re not going to end up back on your website or follow you back.

So how do we find a bunch of people that will potentially be interested in our type of music? Easy, we ‘borrow’ them from other established musicians in your genre.

Think about it, these established acts who make the same kind of music as you are going to have followers that are into that type of music. If you make the same kind of music to a high level, there’s a chance they’ll look into and follow you too. For example, if you make hip hop music then following all of 50 Cent’s followers could be a good idea. Or if you make rock music then it could be a good idea to follow Radiohead’s followers. You may want to follow big underground musician’s followers first however, as these followers have shown a proven interest in underground music (Which is what you currently make if you’re not mainstream yet) and are more likely to listen to you.

In order to make things a lot quicker and easier, I suggest you use Tweet Adder to make the process of following other independent musician’s followers a lot quicker and easier. While you can do this manually, the amount of time you put into it won’t be worth the rewards. What you need to do is set Tweet Adder to follow 200 of the fans of ‘Artist X’ (The musician in your niche with a lot of Twitter followers). I say 200 as when you have a new profile and 0 followers, it will look weird if you’ve 0 followers and are following 1000 people. Once you’ve set this you can leave Tweer Adder to run in the background while you do something else. A few days later (2-3 is ideal) you should go back and unfollow all the people that haven’t followed you back. These people will bring nothing to your marketing campaign, so there’s no point having them on your profile. Once again this can be done automatically using Tweet Adder, but you can do it manually if you’ve a lot of time on your hands.

For now, rinse and repeat this. As soon as you’ve unfollowed users, then go on to adding the next bunch. As you get more followers yourself you can start adding more people. So instead of adding 200 followers a time, you may want to add 300 or more. It really does depend on how quickly you want to scale this campaign and when you need to have it done by.

Once you’ve finished ‘borrowing’ all the fans from one particular Twitter account, you should go on to another related musician and follow all their music followers too. Once again, rinse and repeat.

Promote Your Music With Twitter, End Of Part One

That’s it for part one, please believe me when I say we’re just warming up!

Update: Part two is now avalible and can be read here.

Twitter Music Promotion Part 2

Be sure to look out for part two where we’ll look a lot more at how to effectively promote and sell your music with Twitter. This post will be available next week, so be sure to subscribe to our site to be informed when this post is ready.

I’ll see you next time with more tips on how to promote your music with Twitter.