With over 145 million daily active users, Twitter has huge potential as a platform to promote your content and connect to fans.
How To Promote Music On Twitter
Features of Twitter
Users can craft tweets up to 280 characters and attach images, videos, GIFs, and polls.
Attachtment options:
Auto-Playing Video
- Videos (up to 2 min, 20 sec).
- Videos are muted as standard. Once a user clicks/taps a video to view, the audio is unmuted. The key is to engage the user with your video preview, so they will activiate the audio.
- Tweets with videos are more prominently visible than purely text Tweets.
Live Video
- Composing a Tweet and pressing the “Live” button allows you to "go live" via Periscope.
- When users click/tap your video, it will enter full-screen mode, with sound on.
You can use this feature to show what's happening behind the scenes, such as live streaming from recording sessions, video clip shooting etc.
Polls
- Create a poll by clicking the “Poll” icon when you write a Tweet.
- Polls can have up to 4 questions and can remain open up to a maximum of 7 days.
- Voting is anonymous.
Use this to engage your fans and gain valuable feedback.
Threads
- If 280 characters per Tweet are not enough to get your message across, you can use the option to link Tweets into threads.
- Click the plus button in the composition screen to activate, and your tweets will be connected and published at the same time.
You can also use this as a style or tool to prolong the attention span and time people spend on your timeline.
GIFs (animated images)
- On the composition page tap the “GIF” icon to search for GIF’s within the platform while composing a new tweet.
- Use a GIF to enhance your post with moving content, without it having to be an entire video.
Photo Editing
If you tap the the smile icon, you can use Twitter’s photo editor, which allows you to:
- Use filters on your pics.
- Edit brightness.
- Crop the image.
- Ad Stickers.
Etiquette on Twitter
- Communicate, respond to replies on your Tweets.
- Tweet often, but not more than 3-5 times a day.
- Keep tweets concise, develop your own style.
- Use relevant hashtags.
- Retweet yourself if an old Tweet of yours becomes relevant again.
- Be a part of the Twitter community: interact with other accounts, users.
- Keep your Tweets mostly personal and grow your audience on your personality. Promoting your music should only be a small part of that experience (max. 30% of your Tweets). Otherwise fans wil disengage.
- Do not share/embed stuff from other social media. It does not look nice. Instead, you can link to posts and stories.
- Donn't share content or news without a link to the original source.
- Don't use more than 3 or so hashtags in a Tweet.
Optimizing Your Account for Promotional use
The best thing for your promotion would be when a DSP such as such as Spotify, Apple, or Amazon would retweet you. To entice any DSP to engage with your Tweet, only tag one at the same time!
When tagging a DSP, make sure to include a relevant photo, video, or GIF to make the Tweet more engaging. Here are some ways to optimize your tweets with or without DSP support, specifically if you are looking to have your account verified:
- Write a clear description of yourself in your Twitter bio – including album pre-order/buy links.
- Have your (artist) name match your handle.
- Pin an important/informative tweet to the top of your page (album pre-order, video premiere, etc.)
- Create a branded header with release information and images related to that release.
Use the Analytics to your advantage
Navigate to
https://analytics.twitter.com/ on desktop to view the full report. Once you have found the analytics page, Twitter will give you a 28 Day Summary of your insights, along with tweet highlights. These can be used as pointers to what works for your audience!
Your analytics consist of:
Tweets Page
- Monitors your impressions, engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, likes, and replies over a certain amount of time.
- Use the Export Data feature to download a .csv file of all your data. This can be used for further analysis by importing it into Excel and filtering and sorting parameters, for instance.
Audience Insights
- Provides a look at your audience’s top interests, country, region, and demographics.
- Viewable by followers, teh entire Twitter user base, or your organic audience.
- Use the "Comparison: Audience" to see how your fan’s/follower's interest matches up with different audiences across Twitter.