Can Twitter Grow Your Fanbase? Study Shows Just 8% Of U.S. Adults Use It Daily
Amanda Palmer's 550,000 Twitter followers just help her raise $1.2 million on Kickstarter. But Twitter works better for some artists than it does for others. Part of the answer why is how each artist uses Twitter. But a new study shows that for others, the reason that Twitter works or doesn't may be that their fans simply don't participate in the 140 character social network.
A new Pew Internet survey showed that as of February 2012, 15% of online adults use Twitter, with just 8% doing so on their typical day. Overall Twitter adoption remains steady, as the 15% of online adults who use Twitter is similar to the 13% of such adults who did so in May 2011.
But there is hope for the future. The proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled since May 2011 and has quadrupled since late 2010. At that point just 2% of online adults used Twitter on a typical day. The rise of smartphones may account for some of the uptick in usage since smartphone users are particularly likely to be using Twitter, says Pew.
I think that you have to use Twitter the right way – create quality Tweets and have an actual personality – that way people will want to share your stuff. I don’t think people give enough consideration to how hard it is to write quality Tweets. 140 Characters isn’t really a lot of space, so it’s underrated how hard it is to actually create good content that people want to see. Too many companies simply think that showing up to the table with a Twitter account, throwing any old content onto the network, maybe using the types of companies found at BuyFacebookFansReviews who promote Twitter and Facebook pages to essentially try and buy followers is the path to instant success. This is false. There’s no secret to instant success except hard work and doing things the right way. For social media, this means creating content that other people love. That’s the only thing that matters. If you create quality content that people love, if you listen to your followers so you understand what they want, if you make sure to keep your posting frequency respectful so you don’t over-burden people with seeing your comments every 2 minutes, you’ll come out much farther ahead. It’s definitely worth spending some time obsessing over a lot of the details.
I agree, it is about quality content, and having something to contribute. It takes time to get meaningful followers, and it seems that being consistent is key.
Amanda Palmer is the queen of Twitter. She showed the world (and the label cronies) how you need to keep fans engaged IN BETWEEN album cycles and that textbook promotional efforts can’t be applied to every artist equally. Her label disagreed so she said fuck em and went off on her own. She made $19K in 10 hours a few years ago on a whim from rallying her twitter fans late one Friday evening around a T-shirt idea she came up with on the spot and setup a Paypal buy botton for. Genius.
Amanda Palmer (and other musicians like Questlove, Zoe Keating, Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles) were early adapters in the Twitter world and really found that transparency is the key in this new era.
Gone are the days of the mysterious musician who’s too cool for his fans.