Top 5 Ways To Fail On Twitter
This guest post comes from Dave Cool, the new Blogger In Residence at musician website and marketing platform Bandzoogle.
Most artists and bands now use Twitter to promote their music and connect with their fans. But like with all promotional tools, there are certain things you should avoid doing. I’ve searched through literally thousands of artist accounts on Twitter and noticed some alarming trends. Here’s a quick Top 5 things that could cause you to lose your fans on Twitter:
1. Don’t respond.
Twitter isn’t just to talk at people, it’s meant to be a conversation, so don’t ever leave a fan hanging. If they’ve asked you a question or commented on something you’ve said, respond as soon as you can.
2. Only promote yourself.
If your entire Twitter feed is made up of tweets like:
- “Come to my show tonight!”
- “Buy my album!”
- “Check out my music!”
Chances are, your fans are going to tune out. Yes, you need to let people know if you’re playing a show, or where to buy your music, but not all of the time. Instead, focus on connecting with people by responding to their tweets, asking questions, or by talking about things that interest you. You never know how those little things in life will help you to connect with your fans and strengthen your relationship with them.
3. Use the same content on Twitter as on Facebook.
Although there is inevitably going to be some cross over, make sure that you are putting out some different content on Twitter than you are on Facebook. If it’s always the exact same, then why should people follow you on Twitter? And if you’ve synced your Twitter & Facebook accounts, use something like selective tweets so that only some of the content goes to both accounts. Take advantage of the possibility of longer updates on Facebook and use Twitter for more frequent updates and constant fan interaction.
4. Tweet too much.
If you’re updating your Twitter feed every 2 minutes with mundane details about your daily life, chances are, people are going to stop following you. A handful of updates everyday is enough, so if you start tweeting several dozen times per day and start losing followers, it might be time to scale back a little bit.
5. Rarely Tweet.
And last but not least, if you’re not active on Twitter, then don’t expect your fans to keep following you. You’ll need to constantly keep in touch with your fans to hold onto them and to grow your following. Even updating your feed just once a day will help to give fans a reason to stay in touch with you on Twitter.
Awesome advice!
Great advice, Dave! The smartest thing indie artists can do on Twitter is be real, be themselves, be transparent.
Great stuff, thanks for this.
I’d add number 6: Always retweet every positive comment made about you by anyone ever.
This wears pretty thin pretty quickly.
http://www.bitrebels.com/social/10-acts-of-twitter-kindness/
Agree on all these things, especially #1! I always get annoyed when I tweet about/to a band and get only silence in return, not even necessarily from a ‘fan’ standpoint but from a ‘that’s just bad marketing’ standpoint. On the other hand, the ones that do reply basically guarantee that I’ll tell my friends about them and will be at their show the next time they’re in town.
One other item I would add is tweeting nothing of value to your followers. Be real but also don’t tweet a bunch of non-sense. You’ll see a drop in your community of followers if you follow that approach.
OK – gotta add a few more:
6) Spam people you’re not following with “listen to my music….”
If you want people to listen to your music, be interesting, of value, and engage with them – and then occasionally, in your stream – suggest they might like your music. Even when someone follows me and I look at their stream and it’s all – “mememememememememe – look at me!” – I usually won’t follow them back. I mean why would I? Boring!
7) Follow people and after they follow you back, unfollow them to skew your numbers so it looks like you’re a big deal.
Unless you can get 10K followers just because you’re on twitter (in other words, you’re already famous), you’re here to engage with people and build relationships. It’s not about quantity, it’s about quality.
8) Don’t follow people back who follow you (I’m not talking about bots or get rich quick schemers – I’m talking about legitimate people who are following you because they are interested in you)
See #7
9) Don’t give credit where credit is due.
Like the folks who use a quote and instead of saying who said it, just say #quote – not good enough
10) Be an asshole
What you say on twitter lives on forever on the net. Be kind, be forgiving or as my mother would say – be a mensch
very much agree with Debra’s #7 – it’s childish, isn’t it?
This is probably the best post about Twitter that I have read. I have unfollowed people for tweeting to much, because like you said, it is annoying!
Very useful info…About #3…what if you are wanting to get your messages out to fb and twitter because not everybody uses both..and what difference does it make if a particular follower is getting the messages via fb or twitter as long as they ar getting it?