Twitter For Musicians Done Right

This is a guest post from Andrew McMillen.

Look how they shine for you.

Twitter is the social networking flavour of 2009. Though it was launched three years ago and embraced by the tech community, the service’s adoption rate has exploded following a highly-publicised uptake by popular athletes, actors, politicians and musicians. Millions have followed the lives of these public figures, whose daily actions are condensed into 140-character bursts, known as ‘tweets’.

Due to the service’s broadcast nature, anyone who opts to ‘follow’ your tweet-stream will receive your message in their Twitter client of choice. For novice users this is often their Twitter homepage, while several third-party applications for home computers and mobile devices are popular for better micro-managing the service.

H8 U Wolverine.  <3 U Opera Centre.

Though there’s debatable value in knowing what Hugh Jackman (Twitter username: @RealHughJackman) ate for breakfast, Twitter offers musicians the opportunity to connect directly with their fanbase. The system can be used by an emerging artist in the same manner as a massively popular band. Therein lies its beauty: with daily commitment and dedication, an emerging artist can organically grow their audience by engaging with their fans directly.

Of course, it’s very easy to take this opportunity for granted. Spend some time with Twitter; start following some prolific accounts, and you’ll soon receive unsolicited ‘follows’ from unscrupulous dudes who’re pursuing a low-percentage strategy that yields few favourable returns. It’s worse when you witness potentially interesting accounts - like young bands - sabotage themselves by inverting the ideal process. They follow people en masse - and subsequently piss the majority off - before attempting to build their audience.

Here’s some advice if you’re an artist about to start a Twitter account: don’t do that. As with any other social networking site, it’s really easy to tell who’s genuine and who’s full of shit. In this case, compare the signal-to-noise ratio of followers-to-followees: if an account is following far more users than those who have returned the favour, you’re probably best to steer clear until they get their priorities straight.

Instead, start conversations. Respond to every @reply; these are messages directed to a particular user, which appear in a different feed. @replies are Twitter’s lifeblood; without them, the service would be nothing more than several million people simultaneously yelling.

Westpac subtly infiltrates Hip-Hop culture.

Ivy League Records-signed Sydney hip-hop artist Snob Scrilla (@SnobScrilla) is a prolific Twitter user; he regularly interacts with around 2,000 followers. According to Scrilla, Twitter is “ideal for leaking stuff because only the kids that are really paying attention are gonna catch what you’re even doing. It’s cool, ’cause that way I know the ones who are getting the free music are the ones who are gonna appreciate it the most.”

He continues: “I just feel like the very least I can do for people is reciprocate the energy that they give me when they write or chat or tweet or whatever. I do get some people that add me and IM almost every night with hardcore questions that I would think they would get tired of asking. But everybody is different and I try to have time and patience for everyone.”

“I think at some point it will become physically impossible to stay on top of it all - and at that point I’ll have to put a limit on it - but until then I’m pretty committed to the ‘all access, all the time’ attitude and I’m always trying to think of better ways to make myself more accessible, so it looks like it will be this way for a while at least!”

Not The Flaming Lips.

Early on April 21, Sonic Youth (@TheSonicYouth) tweeted a link to a free download of a new song ‘Sacred Trickster’ to their 12,000 followers ahead of their June album release. Hours later, the track had topped online music chart WeAreHunted.com after appearing on dozens of music blogs across the web, as well as being picked up by Triple J.

Let’s step back and think about this for a moment. One of the biggest and most consistent alternative rock bands in the world chose to launch their promo single directly to their attentive audience, who jumped on the track and pushed it into popular consciousness. Within a day. That’s the power of Twitter when used correctly.

Take Amanda Palmer (@AmandaPalmer), a popular solo artist and frontwoman of punk-cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, as another example. Between holding impromptu shows for her followers and offering on-the-spot gig guest list freebies, Palmer regularly uploads photographs from her mobile phone to an image hosting service named Twitpic. These instantaneous glimpses into an artist’s world are valuable to the devoted fan; each photograph that Palmer posts will be viewed thousands of times.

Trent, Trent, Trent… “Get the f*&k out of my shop!”

Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor (@Trent_Reznor) is one of the most followed artists on Twitter: his 356,000 fans have established Reznor as one of this generation’s most important cultural tastemakers. This is no understatement: the power to instantaneously communicate directly with 356,000 people via the phone in his pocket is enormous. When considering Reznor’s anti-label, do-it-yourself approach to releasing his music, it becomes apparent that direct artist-fan communication is increasingly important in the hyperconnected world of the modern musician.

Sharing is the key to building any successful musician Twitter account. Promote your work and upcoming shows, sure. But make sure that you become part of the community. Interact. Answer every question.

Do all of this at a comfortable rate; don’t saturate your audience. No more than a handful of broadcast tweets spread across each day, in addition to fielding every @reply directed at you.

This way, you’ll slowly build a network of fans who care what you have to say. A network of fans who, if you engage them intelligently and regularly, will become far more passionate about your cause than a passive MySpace or Facebook fan.

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Brisbane-based Andrew McMillen writes for several Australian music publications. He can be found on Twitter (@NiteShok) and online at http://andrewmcmillen.com/