What if you could track every play of your music on radio or TV, anywhere in the world….in real time?

What could you do with that information?

Would it make a difference to your music marketing and promotion efforts?

And, what else might you learn if you had this information?

Well, you’re about to find out.

Radio airplay monitoring

Until very recently radio airplay monitoring was the preserve of the very few – usually major labels and music publishers, some of the big indies, and perhaps some of those artists with a current major label deal.

It’s expensive and primarily exists to apportion airplay royalties. If you have access to it, proper airplay monitoring gives you an amazing set of data to have to hand when disputing your publishing royalties earned by that airplay of your songs. Trust me when I say that the data collection and reporting of your publisher and the various global collection societies (PRS, ASCAP etc) can leave a lot to be desired.

With accurate airplay monitoring data to back you up you can press a very strong case with the collection societies for better accounting and therefore more money returned to you.

The same monitoring is also, of course, used to prop up the radio-led, chart driven mainstream, providing data to create those same charts.

Sure, the record labels can use that data to focus promotions geographically, reward stations that are playing their artists and lobby those that aren’t and generally target their marketing efforts using real data rather than blind hope.

Now, if you’re a major label artist you might just have seen reports generated by one of these companies or their competitors:

Nielsen
Radio Monitor
Radio Wave Monitor
Mediabase

But, a new service, Kollector, looks set to stick a rocket up the lot of them by providing the same richly detailed information to all and sundry. And, in fact, the information that they supply (and the detail) promises to be deeper in some areas than anything currently on offer. And, it’s in real time!

As a DIY or indie artist you just haven’t had access to this data before.

I’ve been using the Beta for nearly a month, and, ……it is amazing!

And, right now, it’s free. Kollector will be introducing payment in the future but it may well stay more affordable than the existing competition – which isn’t designed for consumer use in the same way as Kollector.

So, what is it and how does it work?

Kollector is an online real time application that tells you where and when your song is played – worldwide. It then displays that information in a variety of ways using graphs, maps and timelines. The data breaks down into individual plays on named stations at specific times. All done in real time.

I have actually been able to catch the tail-end of a broadcast play of a song I’m tracking, live, as it is reported by Kollector.

And, it’s so simple, it’s laughable.

You sign up for an account and upload mp3′s of the songs that you want to track (your own or songs that will give you data for comparison) and within a few hours they appear in your dashboard with airplay data. That’s it.

They won’t tell me how they do it, but it’s a combination of various elements such as ISRC code identification and audio recognition, like Shazam.

The plan is to return data on 10,000 stations globally – in essence to report on airplay from every significant broadcaster. As at today, they are tracking 1850 stations over 54 countries. This is a great start.

What can you do with this information?

If you’re getting any significant airplay, then having a complete log of your airplay is going to help you forecast your performance royalties and have evidence to present should you get underpaid by the collection societies – an unfortunate reality for those with some airplay but not enough to show up well in the often used ‘sample’ methods that many stations and societies use.

A sample of radio airplay data displayed in Kollector

That’s important as it affects your bottom line. And, I’m sure that’s what the people behind Kollector were really thinking about when they set it up, but the data is so rich that it can help you do a whole raft of things, as well as royalty checking.

Since part of the system relies on audio recognition, you can upload tracks before release and see which tracks are getting the most plays. Of course, if you’re an unknown DIY artist this isn’t going to help you if you get no airplay at all. But for a swathe of the indie world (and when all 10,000 stations are online), being able to monitor all the tracks on your album pre-release and see which are getting a reaction at radio – even if the data sample is small – is of huge benefit.

Such information can help you choose singles when you know that a particular track is already enjoying some support.

It can also make your target territories far more obvious.  Knowing when you’re getting any attention outside your own country is very difficult, even in this internet age. As such, it hampers artists’ ability to know when to try to make their mark overseas. Kollector is a massive aid in finding that out.

Having station and timestamp data means that you can contact a station and talk to the producer of the relevant show as well as programme directors or even DJ’s and offer station idents, interviews, or other incentives to increase the support for your tracks at station, or even show, level.

What about touring? The data can help you pick countries, areas, cities and towns where you know the radio station supports your band. And you can contact them before your shows for competitions, ticket giveaways and more plays.

Having facts about any airplay you do get is also a massive tool in helping persuade the next show or station to play your record. Most radio stations follow others rather than blaze a trail, so knowing that your music already has media support can help tip people into playing your records. Hand them the data from Kollector.

It can also help you avoid fruitless promotional efforts. If you get asked to do something for a station that hasn’t supported you before, you will now want to know why. Perhaps they’re about to get behind you and regularly play your single or perhaps they just have some dead airtime to fill and it’s not worth your commitment.

Watch this video to see how it works in practice.

What if you don’t have any airplay yet?

Ah, but how does this really help the DIY musician who’s never had a record played on radio anywhere?

Well, firstly, if you’ve actually released anything and done any promotion at all, you might be very pleasantly surprised. Upload your songs and see.

The guys at Kollector told me about one artist, an industrial band, who thought just that, but when they joined Kollector they found that they had been getting some airplay from a station in Austria. They contacted the station and discovered that the producer on the show had found their music and become an ardent fan. He hooked them up with a local promoter, they got a gig and they played with more support from the station and established a toehold somewhere that they would otherwise have overlooked.

And, if you don’t have anything released yet or you don’t have any airplay of music you’ve released so far, you can still use Kollector for comparative analysis.

Make a very honest appraisal of your music and pick a few songs and artists that are truly very similar to what you do and how you sound. Upload them and track where they are played. Mix up small indie artists with some bigger players and you’ll be able to identify hundreds of shows all over the world that play your kind of music. Even better if these are artists with whom you’ve played on the same bill.

If you’ve been honest about your comparisons you now have a list of shows that you can target when you do release something. This is not a list of stations and producers from an industry directory – this is bang up to date facts about what shows might be interested in your music. If you approach them with your knowledge that they’ve played bands in your genre, your chances of getting played are already greatly increased.

Not only that but such a comparative exercise will also tell you where in the world your style of music gets the most support. General information it may be, but it’s still valuable to know.

What’s not great about Kollector?

Not much. Like I said, I think it’s amazing.

The one thing that it doesn’t do yet that I’d like to see is an artist overall view. For now, you can only look at where a track is getting played and I think any user wants to see where anything by an artist is getting played – the overall picture. I’m assured that this will be possible in the future.

I’m also told that a mobile app to access and view the data is on the way. I’m not sure that it will add greatly to the functionality of the system but I know artists will be amused to browse their data whilst sitting in a bar and point out to their friends that they’ve just been played in some far flung corner of the world!

So, Kollector is an awesome new tool for every musician with different appeal and uses depending on what stage you’re at. But, with radio airplay monitoring now available to all, it’s undeniably useful.

Radio stations react to their audience. If you find out that someone is playing your music by using Kollector that means that they like it. If they keep playing it, it means that their listeners like it too. You can then leverage that interest by focusing your further marketing and promotion efforts on that show, station, city, area, and country.

And you couldn’t do that before.

This is part 6 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 5 here -Twitter for Musicians – Involvement & Music.

26. Follow big wigs

….and network like you would at a gig.

We posted the other day on the Make It In Music Daily about how a ‘quantum event’ can shift your career up a gear – and it’s true.

Those kinds of events are generally opportunities that arise from someone in a position of power creating an opportunity for you and your music that you couldn’t make happen yourself. Studio time, a chance of a ‘synch’ (your music in a commercial or a movie), a meeting with the right producer – it could be anything.

And these kinds of things really do happen because of who you’re connected to. Yes, these days, you can make a vast amount happen with your own determination and online savvy, but good old-fashioned patronage will help too.

So, just like you would get to know the players in your scene offline at your local clubs, bars and record stores (as we’ve discussed in this piece), target some national and international players that fit your genre and that you know are active on Twitter…..in person.

Richard Russell, MD of XL Recordings

Richard Branson (@richardbranson) looks like he has people do it for him, but Kanye West (@KanyeWest), Richard Russell (@richardXL), Russell Simmons (@UncleRUSH), Jared Followill (@youngfollowill) and Rob Thomas (@thisisRobThomas) are all doing it personally, as are thousands of successful artists, managers, promoters, record company execs, music synchronisation people, radio DJ’s etc.

I know it’s a lot to expect Kanye to reply to, or even see, your ‘@reply’ to him! He’s an example, not a suggestion!

Hopefully you’ll know a bunch of people in this area that you’ll want to follow – just from your media awareness – but there are two other ways to turn up the lesser known, and therefore probably easier to reach execs.

The first way to find these people is to turn again to Follower Wonk and find people whose bio’s say they work in  the ‘music industry’, ‘music synch’, ‘promoter’, ‘booking agent’ and so on. They love to tell the world how important they are in their bio, so this is very effective.

Look at their streams and see whether they are the sort of person who might have a musical connection with what you do.

The killer method though is to look at the medium to big artists that you’ve already identified as your targets (as we’ve looked at variously, such as in point 4 for followers and 24 for superfans). If they’re on Twitter personally, look at who they follow.

Often they only follow a hundred or so people (although they may have 10’s of 1000’s following them!) and in amongst there, hiding, will be the personal feed of their PR person, stylist, A&R man from the label, live agent, tour manager, manager, video directors they’ve used, and all sorts of motley music industry characters that you can unearth. It might take a bit of detective work clicking on profiles to see who’s who, but it’ll be worth it. This is gold! Follow these folks and you’ll be surprised how you might be able to open doors.

Just as an example, look at Florence Welch (@flo_tweet). In her ‘Following’ list, which is only 20 people at the time of writing, you’ll find 3 of her producers and her manager – who you can now contact directly. Pretty useful, huh?

It’s a tightrope to walk, obviously. You can’t just spam these people. Not because they’re ‘important’, but (especially the artists and execs with media profile themselves) because they’re going to have a lot of followers trying to reach them and they are very, very used to being approached by people looking for help. They are very well practised at ignoring you!

Just get inside their mind and see what makes them tick and if a chance appears for you to help them (rather than asking for help), jump in with your advice or skills and see if you can make a connection. Recommend another band – not your own – if they ask for a tip, and then work your music into the mix from there.

Sure, you’re going to need to be lucky for this to lead somewhere. But, if what you’re doing is great, and you’re watching the tweet stream of some of these players, you might get a chance to parade your wares right in front of them – and that is an opportunity that struggling artists never had before web 2.0!

Be alive to the possibility and maybe fortune will favour you.

27. Use TweetDeck or Hootsuite

If you haven’t used one of these, don’t worry – they’re free (well there is a paid option with Hootsuite which I use – see below) and they will revolutionize your social media use.

We’ve mentioned TweetDeck already in this post series at least a dozen times. And, that’s because it’s undoubtedly one of the best third-party clients for Twitter that you can use to enhance your Twitter user experience. The other leader of the pack is Hootsuite – and they’re neck and neck depending on your personal preference. I actually use both at the same time!

A massive advantage of Twitter over other social media is that it’s fully useable wherever and whenever you like. I know you can use Facebook on the go on a mobile but it’s not such a fully mobile integrated experience. Something about the 140 character limit and the exchange of pictures and video makes Twitter the de-facto ‘on the go’ social network for many.

And a third party client like TweetDeck just improves the whole experience because it’s more streamlined, customisable for what you want to see and has more features. It also synchronises between your computer and your Smartphone.

To get the very best out of either you’ll need to register for an account – that allows your settings to be synched across computers or on the web and, in the case of TweetDeck, is necessary to access TweetDeck support.

The key difference between the two is that one is a desktop app that you download to your computer whilst the other is hosted online, meaning that you can access it from anywhere – much like Twitter itself.

This might be enough to determine which you go for.

For TweetDeck, head over to TweetDeck.com and register an account and then download the desktop application to your computer and play around with it.

Then get TweetDeck for your iPhone or for your Android – it’s free. As long as you’ve set up an account, TweetDeck will have the same layout and functions whichever you’re using.

So why is this better than using Twitter on its own site?

Firstly, it sets up whatever feeds you want across a single page that scrolls left to right – as wide as you want it to be – i.e. as many columns as you want.

And, on TweetDeck, you can:

• Run more than one Twitter account at the same time – your personal one and your band one. No more signing in and out!
• Watch activity in your Facebook feed and update from TweetDeck – and do the same for MySpace, LinkedIn & FourSquare;
• Display the information from Twitter in columns with each column showing you pretty much any specific sub-set of feeds you want – All Friends tweets, Tweets that mention you, DM’s, Lists (either existing ones from your Twitter account or new ones made in TweetDeck), Facebook feeds, search results, hashtag searches, trending and on and on;
• Schedule tweets to be sent at any time you wish;
• Add locations to updates;
• Watch videos from links in tweets you receive within TweetDeck – and the same with photos;
• Add pictures and video directly within TweetDeck, including recording from your webcam;
• Auto-shorten your links by setting up your TweetDeck account with the API from your bit.ly account. This is a real timesaver for musicians tweeting lots of links (as you should be) – see the Sentric Blog post we referenced before to see how this is done;

And, there’s loads more functionality that makes using Twitter so much easier with TweetDeck – playing around with it is how you’ll find the best way for you to get the most of it.

There’s a great option to add a column that only shows the Bio’s of your most recent followers (‘New Followers’). This is fantastic, since it allows you to show some real interest and interact with people when they first follow you, thereby creating a deeper long term engagement. If you follow a huge number of people this is a very valuable filtering tool.

TweetDeck also has a directory where you’ll find a whole host of Twitter users listed in various ways – by genre, in user-compiled lists and even in a word cloud. You may well find some interesting people or lists to follow there.

Lastly, they’ve just introduced a new auto tweet extender called ‘deck.ly’ which automatically allows you to go past the 140 character limit when tweeting from within TweetDeck. I’m not a massive fan as I like the fact that users of Twitter are compelled to say what they have to say within that limit – that’s a great part of the attraction, the brevity – but I have been using it on occasion!

So, what’s the difference between TweetDeck and Hootsuite?

Well, not much in terms of functionality, and, as we said above, the key thing is that Hootsuite isn’t running on a computer but on the web – meaning you’re accessing your account from whatever device you’re using and all your settings are saved within the site.

Hootsuite has pretty much the same functions as TweetDeck. The layout is a little different and more flexible than TweetDeck in that the default is to have each profile in its own tab. So, it feels like you have more room to play with. For example you can have a personal account on one tab and a band account on another and keep them separate whilst both are at hand to be flicked through.

I also personally find the display of my Facebook Page wall much better in Hootsuite – not to mention that it’s a pain to set up in TweetDeck!

Hootsuite Screenshot - my set up

The automatic shortening can only be done through their own ow.ly URL shortener (or its related ht.ly) but when you use that you still have to drop the link in the shortening box as you compose a tweet rather than the fractionally quicker auto bit.ly shortening that you get on TweetDeck.

I do prefer the actual click stats that I get from bit.ly, but, overall Hootsuite wins the stats battle – it has more depth and some great stuff like showing you all the ‘influencers’ who have mentioned you and your tweets and how often. These are people that you ought to be in touch with!

It also has your Google Analytics and Facebook Insights account right there in Hootsuite – and that can be a real advantage for spotting stuff and then sending it out as a tweet or responding to something that the data shows you.

Two more tools that Hootsuite has to fight its case are the ‘Hootlet’ that sits on your browser taskbar and you can click on it whilst browsing the web to automatically send a tweet of a link to that site. Seems simple but having it there does encourage you to tweet interesting links to your fans.

Last but not least, and one that make it the default choice for some is that Hootsuite will auto tweet an RSS feed. Not going to get too into that for those that don’t know what that means (sorry!) but in essence you can set it up to automatically tweet things such as posts on your band’s blog. This is obviously pretty nifty!

Because they both do different things and because I don’t want to miss out on bits of information that I might only get from one or the other…I use both.

I set up scheduled tweets in TweetDeck, usually, and have it running on one machine all day. I then occasionally check into Hootsuite where I can check stats and set up search streams more easily.

I’d recommend checking both out and dipping in and out as needed.

Never simple though, is it, as they aren’t the only options!

One of the major contenders threatening to depose the two leaders is Seesmic. It appears to have the best of both worlds with desktop, mobile and web based versions all linking through one account. It doesn’t have embedded stats as yet but it is growing and changing rapidly and I for one will be keeping an eye on it.

Your other options are:

• Cotweet, which is designed for teams of people to share one Twitter account. Therefore seemingly perfect for musicians in a band, but to get all the functionality (and to add Facebook), you need the ‘Enterprise’ version which costs. And, how difficult is it for a band to share a log-in on one of the other platforms?

• UberSocial began as a SmartPhone client that I was hearing great things about (I guess we should have put this in point 12!) But it’s now growing very quickly with a desktop version and very positive users. Well worth looking into

• Echofon is, for me, the surprise package. It runs as an app in Firefox or on a Mac desktop or on a Smartphone. People love the way it syncs unread tweets across its platforms and it appears to be growing aficionados at a very rapid pace. It’s another I’d check out.)

28. Embed it in your site

It’s a key part of your online promotion to be able to reach people in a variety of ways in as many places as you sensibly choose.

Making your tweets (or other Twitter feeds such as a search, favourites or one of your Lists) part of your site or other online presence is therefore a very sensible way to let your visitors get a snapshot of what you’re doing from your Twitter feed.

Having it on your own site can create a very strong first impression of what you’d be like to follow and it can be surprising how many people will add you from a full Twitter feed on your site (rather than just a follow button).

Some would argue that having a full Twitter feed on your site sidebar immediately encourages people to click off to Twitter. I don’t agree and all my testing to date shows that it actually keeps people on your artist site for longer.

I have yet to hear a convincing argument for not doing it, so get on and embed it on your site.

There are literally hundreds of ways that you can take your Twitter feed and embed it on your site – and I recommend searching Google for the latest methods that are on offer.

But, keeping it simple, you may as well use the widgets that Twitter itself offers. They are customisable to a very detailed level and let you choose what to display and how it should look – it’s a very simple customisation process.

In Twitter you need to go to Twitter Resources – and you’ll get the option of designing a widget and then grabbing the code to allow you to embed it in your site or on pretty much any web page, depending on your html skills.

That means that you can embed a widget on MySpace, or most hosted blog platforms as easily as on your main site. I’d encourage embedding a widget wherever you have a presence and can do so.

If your main site is a self-hosted WordPress blog (as it should be) then there are a bunch of plug-ins that approach the Twitter feed from the other end – i.e. by pulling the feed into them and doing the design and layout at that end. This is a perfectly acceptable option and I have often used this Twitter Widget Pro plug-in to do just that.

No discussion of feed driven widgets is, however, complete without talking about Widgetbox. This site has endless ways that you can use widgets on your website. There are loads of widgets that people have already designed or you can make your own using their very simple tools. This site can make you something that’s unique to you and your band and that displays your tweets pretty much however you want, with other functions such as following direct from the widget. Well worth a look.

Whichever way you do it, spread it around and get your tweets front and centre of your web presence.

29. Don’t Spam

If you manage to ignore all this advice and come across as a spammer then all your efforts to build a following on Twitter will be wasted. Being seen as a spammer is worse than not having a profile on Twitter at all.

Shameless self-promotion with no interaction and no genuine interest in the stuff your followers say is tantamount to spamming!

Golden rules that show you know you’re not spamming are that:

• You’re interacting with the people that you’re following, not just adding them and then ignoring them!
• You’re tweeting about your band occasionally without endlessly linking back to your site! Remember any more than about 1 in 5 self-promotional tweets is too many.
• You’re keeping the number of followers higher than the number you follow – any lack of balance looks like you’re just adding people to increase your follow count.
• You’re mixing up all the elements that we’ve covered – RT’s, photos, video, links, music etc.

Oh, and try not to get into fights either – they are there in the digisphere forever and are unseemly – people who follow you will take sides and it can blow out of all proportion. You’ll lose followers and dignity.

30. Use Tweetadder

How can I say that after saying ‘Don’t Spam’? Well that’s the point.

It’s OK. If you’re doing all the above, then it’s fine to mine other user’s followers and add more people as potential followers. We all know now, just like with MySpace, that someone who follows loads of people to get loads to follow them back is doing just that, but….if it’s done right, if the conversation is good and the activity is there, then it’s OK to do that.

The key on Twitter is the amount of adding and the pace and whether you take the time to assimilate new followers and clean up your mistakes (i.e. people you shouldn’t have followed and who you failed to engage).

What you have to remember with all Social Media, but even more so with Twitter, is that you get out of it what you put in. The key word is ‘Social’, not ‘Media’.

So, if you just add loads of people randomly and take no notice of them and don’t engage with ‘@replies’ and back and forth conversation, then you aren’t being social.

If you take all our tips on board and have a rich and varied use of Twitter, then you can add plenty of followers in the hope that they’ll follow you right back.

And, if you’re doing that selectively by searching out what they have stated are their interests, then I don’t see the difference between using a tool to do that and sitting there clicking on hundreds of user profiles manually.

I don’t agree with auto DM’s when someone follows you back nor randomising tweets and sending auto-reworded junk – which is what some Twitter adders and automation tools do. You should be able to tell that that is pointless – numbers mean nothing without engagement!

But, to add followers by careful criteria at a sensible and manageable rate and to schedule tweets – sure.

And, if you disagree, that’s fine.

It’s not for you and you’ll build an even more hyper-focused deeply engaged following. Good for you. My point is that some ragged edges are OK for most artists.

In particular, automation can help to kick you off with a healthy follower count to start with – and then let your music, personality and your tweeting prove your case.

I use Tweetadder to do that for our artists.

There are others that I haven’t used but I’ve looked at the comparative reviews and I’m pretty sure that Tweetadder is the best for the functions that I do want to automate.

If you want to spam people with crap, there are lots of other things available, and Tweetadder has many functions that I don’t use. But for targeted following of likely fans it works perfectly.

I don’t use it all the time, and we are very careful.

In fact, we run it to add people for a few days (never more than a few hundred at a time – and around 60% will follow the artist back if we filtered well), assimilate the new followers and then leave it a while – a week or so and see if those new followers are interacting (so far as you can tell). If not, we will look at why we picked up random followers who aren’t interested in what the artist is tweeting and we’ll refine our approach.

Running a survey to solely your Twitter followers using Twtpoll is a great way to try and gauge their interaction at this point.

You need to have something that you can question them about though. So, first, once you’ve added new followers, tweet an offer for some tracks that will be new only to new followers – a free download – so that longer term followers will already have had them. Tweet something like – ‘For our most recent followers get free mp3’s of A, B and C at this URL’.

Track the URL using a bit.ly link to see how many followers click. It’s a little unscientific as the link can get retweeted but it’ll give you an indication as to how many people that you’re adding are truly interested. You are able send it out to specific followers using ‘@replies’, so you can try to focus it on your newest followers only very tightly using the information in the ‘New Follower’ tab in TweetDeck for example.

All your followers will see it though – which is why we advocate offering something that most existing followers will already have and following up with a survey.

Then set up a survey at Twtsurvey (Twtpoll is for more simple polls) with multiple choice questions – free for up to 100 users (hence why adding 200 or so at a time is a good idea) – and ask the same followers a bunch of questions – saying in the tweet that sends it out that they’ll really be helping you out if they take the survey – or offer a prize to make them give up emails as well);

• How long have you followed us on Twitter (a week or less, between a week and a month, about 6 months, around a year or more)
• Have you downloaded our free tracks from this tweet that we sent out 3 times last week (Yes or No)
• Which of the two tracks did you prefer (A or B)
• Which would you like to see on video (rehearsals or us goofing around)

You get the idea.

Since the results of the survey are self-selecting and trackable, this will tell you what your new fans are thinking as well as whether you’re actively attracting interested new followers – particularly useful and reassuring if you are using a tool to add people.

Of course, you don’t only need to use this to survey or poll your followers to check how well you’re engaging them when they first follow you. You can use it for a myriad of ways to interact with them at any time. Polling and surveying fans when you have built a large following is brilliant engagement.

So, one last thing. Just to be clear, I’m not suggesting that you buy Tweetadder and set it up to randomly add 1,000’s of followers at a time.

I left the issue of using it to the very end of these posts as I k now some people won’t like the suggestion that you use it. For me, it’s simply a time saving device and is therefore worth the cost in man hours saved. I hate the idea of pointless adding of people who won’t ever become fans of your music.

But I do like the idea of using a tool sensibly to speed up the right result.

This is part 6 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

This is part 5 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 4 here -Twitter for Musicians – Help, Lists & URL’s.

22. Get your followers involved

We’ve mentioned this in passing in some of the other points, but it deserves its own section!

We all get so caught up in the power of the web and Social Media that sometimes we forget that all this content is being pushed out to real people who we want to have a long term relationship with. That can’t be just one way.

What better way can there be to let them know how much they mean to you than to let them get close to the action – at least once in a while?

So, meet them in the real world.

Imogen Heap does this brilliantly – inviting fans to the soundcheck and hanging out with them for ages when she should be soundchecking! But the fans love it and they all tweet about the experience which then furthers Imogen’s fan reach even more.

You can obviously do this off the cuff and invite fans to whatever parts of your musician’s life or everyday life that you feel comfortable with – soundchecks, rehearsals, band meetings even.

But you can also do it in a more pre-arranged way with what are generally called ‘Tweetups’.

Some Twitter aficionados think a Tweetup is only really appropriate for a group of Twitter users to meet up and talk tweeting and tweet about it! I don’t agree and think, in its simplest form, it’s an event for a group of people who are connected on Twitter (either as your followers, or by being on a list or some other commonality) to meet up for a specific reason in the real world.

So, if it’s more than a casual ‘feel free to come by at soundcheck’, and you’re promoting a Tweetup as something that you build up to over a few days or weeks, it needs to have more weight – the classic ‘after-show’, a secret gig, a band beach barbecue with acoustic campfire songs….or something like that which is special enough to engage deeply with your fans.

Involvement of your fans can also be using them as crowdsourcing – finding amongst them people to help you out in areas where more hands are needed or where you and your band don’t have the skills.

Often this will be in the offline world – a proto ‘street team’ to man your merch stall and collect emails at gigs for example, but it can also be finding a graphic designer who loves what you do from amongst your followers and having them design a T-shirt, gig posters etc.

Use your follower fans as your army! But, don’t take the piss and do make it worth their while with special access and reward.

23. Search Local

I know that we talked about this at the start as well (when saying that you should use searches to look for people to follow) but you should also make it a habit to spend a proportion of your time searching locally – either by using filters in the Twitter Search ‘Advanced Search’ or by using third party services.

Why concentrate on local? Well it’s going to reveal a huge amount about your local scene that you can then use to network offline and it’s going to set you and your band up as the authority on all things happening musically in that scene.

Sure, it’s going to show you new potential followers who you can add, but these local searches will also reveal conversations that you should be in if you’re to be seen to be relevant in your local scene. You’ll pick up fans but you’ll also establish that vital authority by passing on local information, supporting other local bands, venues, clubs, record stores etc.

Your approach should be two pronged:

• look for people generally interested in live music, gigs, going out, and being involved in the nightlife of your area (using those phrases as keywords in a Twitter Search); and
• look for people who express an interest in your genre of music by searching for various keywords that you know describe it and any other cultural references that tend to fit (as we referred to before – a Goth will likely show an interest in piercing and Twilight books and movies, for example).

You’re looking for these people as potential followers & fans (maybe street-teamers) but also as a source of news and info that you can pass on or act upon.

There are various ways in which you can do this type of local search.

A great place to start is to search the bio’s of people locally. Use the service at Loca Follow – and run through using both types of search. This turns up people that have those words in their bio – so someone who says ‘live music’ in their bio and lives in your town is someone you should be engaging!

Loca Follow works by place name rather than postcode and has its limitations, but it shows you people in order of their authority (followers, number of tweets etc) which means you can easily find the players. I always use this tool to search for venues as well in any city I’m looking for a band to target, by using anything I can think of that they’d use to describe themselves – ‘venue’, ‘live music’ (again!) and so on. Very useful when you’re targeting towns for setting up shows.

Tweep Search can be used to do the same thing. Just add the location to the search phrase – so for me it would be “live music London” rather than just ‘live music’. I like the way that the results are presented in Tweep Search – they can be ordered by follower count, friend count, latest update or alphabetised. Great tool for this purpose.

To search the content of tweets locally, use the ‘advanced search’ part of Twitter Search – right down to within a mile of a postcode – giving you results of what local people are saying in their tweets in real time

Watch this great short video from Mashable.com for ideas on filtering down to find the interesting stuff in people’s tweets that you’re after.

Nearby Tweets and TwitterFall are the other two services that you need at hand when searching actual tweet content locally. Twitterfall can be overwhelming but it’s fantastic as it’ll allow you to add multiple searches to the continuous stream of tweets that it will feed you in a tumbling board – a format that I find very easy to scan. You can then save those searches, tweet, follow, DM and everything else right from within Twitterfall. It’s an awesome tool for this kind of local search (or indeed any keyword based searching). Check it out and become addicted!

Nearby Tweets is much more basic but still gives up the goods.

Don’t underestimate the power that this gives you to unearth possible fans and things going on in your local scene. At a given moment it will give you things to do there and then or news to pass on. It will, if you do it often over time, reveal the players that you need to know in your area as they will be on Twitter making a noise about their events. Get to know them on and offline.

Searching for something basic like “gig” locally will show you people to follow who go to gigs, new venues to check out and gigs to be at to network, flyer and promote your own shows.

When you have uncovered everyone in your local scene, use that knowledge to promote your music with their help. Offer local store discounts for tickets to your shows and if you’re lucky enough to still have a local record store get them behind you by offering them something unique – a Band T-shirt for staff for example, or free CD’s for people who buy show tickets at the store.

As you expand out of your local area on tour and on out-of-town shows, you’ll find this type of search to be invaluable in building some grass roots promotion ahead of your dates. At least a few months before those gigs, search as we’ve looked at and reach out to people in those towns you’ll be playing and ask for help.

If you go the whole hog, this is the way to build a network of street teamers and local scene players (venues, promoters, musicians, record and music stores and so on) in each town and city that you play in your area – truly helping you expand out from your home town to cover a larger area with the same kind of support.

This is real fanbase building and Twitter can be a key part of that strategy since it gives you instant direct access to people that you otherwise couldn’t reach.

24. Talk about music – find superfans

By which I mean more searching!

If you’ve used the tools we’ve discussed to add loads of followers who have listed your genre or bands that you’re like in their bio (see point 4), you might well still be missing out on the majority of people already pre-disposed to liking your band – because they didn’t put that in their bio. Instead they may just tweet about their love of ‘cosmic disco’ now and again.

How are you going to sweep across Twitter on a regular basis and find these people? You want to, since if you can catch them when they’re raving about something that fits with your music and band, then they’re much more likely to be receptive.

The truth is, although we told you to seek out people who are following bands and maybe mention them in their bio (by using Follower Wonk), you’ll be missing out loads of people when they’re listening to or tweeting about stuff that relates to you.

The best way to find these people is to regulalrly immerse yourself in a real time Tweet stream centred around tweets about those bands. One way to do this is to use a service like Tweet Chat. (but Twitterfall is awesome for this too!). And, to do it often – once a day isn’t too much.

Tweet Chat isolates all the tweets about a certain subject as filtered by a hashtag. Since music fans (especially uberfans and geeks) tend to be au fait with the hashtag you can get a healthy stream to delve into.

The aim is to regularly contribute to discussions about bands that are similar to you in a genuine music fan way. This should be easy as you should pick bands that you can rave about if they are your influences or contemporaries!

This activity also has the beauty of removing any worries about what to say and do on Twitter – joining into music conversation is very natural for musicians, and by quickly building the number of tweets you have made by these focussed sessions you’ll also be seen as a more interesting music-centric Twitterer by all the other users that you come across.

Sign in by letting Tweet Chat link with your Twitter profile and then enter a hashtag of a band that you want to see a discussion for. TweetChat will then show you just the tweets hashtagged with that word – and put you in what it calls a ‘room’ dedicated to that stream.

You can tweet, @reply and RT direct from within Tweet Chat. You can’t follow though, so you’ll have to click on the user profile pictures to go to their profile on Twitter to add them – which obviously you should do if they’re appearing in this discussion. Check any lists they’ve compiled too.

Then get stuck into the conversation. Say that you love what they said about ‘Band X – you’re a fan too’, and, leave it at that. When you’re using the band Twitter profile, you can’t just leap in to these conversations and then ask people to check you out. Many will – simply because you joined in and interacted with them. OK, many won’t, but this is a numbers game and you’re looking to spread positive comments about you and your band by reference to similar music.

It works – and it’s not random friend-adding like old school MySpace as the interaction comes first, then the following.

To deepen the niche even further, try using Music Followers. This is a very simple tool that looks at the bios and tweets of Twitter users and see’s what bands they like. It then compares them to other users with the same tastes and suggests bands that are similar.

So, if you’re like Coldplay and Keane, Music Followers will tell you that many fans of those bands also like Aqualung and The Killers. You can keep refining those matches to get a whole list of bands whose followers might like your sound. I find that the deeper I go with Music Followers the better the results I get – so when I am turning up smaller niche bands that I’ve never heard of, checking them and then their followers out, I get a much better take-up rate in return. Not surprising, I guess, since their fans must by their very nature be more interested in less well-known bands.

Then go back to Tweet Chat and enter them and spend time engaged in discussions about those bands. (You can, of course, take that information back to point 4 as well and add all those band’s followers using Follower Wonk.)

When using Tweet Chat, have conversations – don’t just add hundreds of people. These people are laser targeted to your music – so don’t waste that opportunity.

If Music Followers suggested a niche band LIKE YOURS and you delve into a thread about that, this is when potential followers are ‘hot’ – in the marketing speak we used earlier. Engage and get a fan. One by one!

The larger scale adding of similar band’s followers is fine and the hope and aim is that your tweeting and musical quality will engage them – as will the fact that you answer @replies from followers and basically do the ‘good Twitter’. But the people you pick up using this method should be super hot for you and you shouldn’t try to shortcut the process whilst having these kind of music fan conversations.

One extra note on this.

I have seen this kind of interaction done from a user account on Twitter that isn’t that of the band or one of the members. Generally from a personal account of someone else involved with the band (a street teamer usually).

Why? And is that ethical?

Well, it’s cod psychology to be honest. I’m happy to see a band jump into a conversation and say that they love ‘X band’ who are similar to them, and not be too pushy about asking people in those conversations to check them out. But, sometimes, it seems that a fan of ‘Band X’ randomly jumping in an out of conversations about them over a long period of time and pro-actively saying to people – ‘Have you checked out Band Y?’, in even the shortest exchange, can be effective.

If you try this, the user account that you use must be that of a genuine music lover who also recommends music other than ‘Band Y’. People aren’t stupid and will go and look at the stream and see what else you’ve been saying. But I think it’s perfectly ethical if done carefully.

Of course, this is a perfect ongoing long-term task to ask of your online street team. Show them this point as their instructions!

As a strategy, don’t dismiss this in-depth musical tweeting. It gives you something to engage people about that isn’t about you and can be done in very intense bursts several times a week.

If you’re good and are in any way like the bands you talk about you’ll be amazed at how quickly some people catch on and add you as a friend. People love to be close to the action with a hot new band and they’ll think they discovered you!

There’s a little extra trick that I forgot to mention right at the start of these posts that definitely increases the number of people who follow you back when you follow them.

If you’re going to add followers of a band that you’ve been tweeting about (like in this point), or are just about to add a bunch of people whose profiles you’ve found by looking at the band’s follower list, try this.

Before you go through and click on all the ‘follow’ buttons next to the users names, send a tweet to the band who they follow just before you do. So, if I’m about to add a load of people who follow @KanyeWest, I’ll send a tweet to @KanyeWest right before I click and add them all.

Then, many of the people I’ve just added will immediately click on our profile to see who this dude is that has just followed them. They’ll see that I have interacted with someone that they follow and this will increase their sense of association to your band. They will be more likely to follow you back – at which point you need to earn their continued interest!

We have tested this and guarantee that it increases the number of people who follow you back. Try it.

25. Give away tunes

We know that you’re already giving loads of stuff away on your own site or Facebook or at shows – tracks, demos, acoustic versions, videos, DJ mixes and on and on. But, we want you to do it again!

Why? Because it works!

I would much rather that free tracks generally be given away in exchange for an email address from your site, but Tweet for A Track is just so simple and brilliant as an idea that you have to use it now and again.

You upload a song (up to 10MB), post to Twitter with the song linked in the tweet, and then your followers can get a download of the song from a link automatically emailed to them, but only if they retweet (or repost to Facebook) your original tweet. They need not follow you to get the track.

The free track tweet also gets a URL, so that it isn’t just about a one time tweet. You can link to that URL from anywhere, obviously meaning it’s always on hand for new fans to use, keeping the Twitter promotion rolling along.

Tweet for a Track is beyond simple to use. That’s all there is to it.

There are mixed reports about how effective it can be and you may give away a track and get very few new followers into the bargain. We’ve used it and had good results. I think the secret is in what your overall content strategy is. What do I mean by that? – well, we’ll look at it some more in a separate post, but, in essence, you need to have a constant stream of things that you give away from all your various online profiles to keep fans engaged.

Giving away a track occasionally using TFAT is therefore a part of a bigger series of spreading your music, videos, artwork, free tickets etc all over the web.

Used as part of your system, it’s well worth a go.

It’s worth knowing that all tweets sent from Tweet for a Track automatically have the hashtag ‘#TFAT’. Take it from us – people watch that tag, and being in that stream will attract new listeners!

There’s also a paid option to collect the emails of everyone who tweets the track. Since the Tweeter needs to give their email address in order to get the free download link, TFAT has those addresses. For a fee (normally $49.99 per month, but they always have offers on!) they will supply you with all those email adressess.

If you use ‘double opt in e-mail’ software (which we recommend) this can be a pain as you’ll need to import the emails and then your software system will ask people to re-confirm – not all will! Still, every email of a fan who has engaged with your music is worth its weight in gold.

If you do go for the premium service with email addresses collected, our best advice is that you get those addresses uploaded into your email software asap and you follow up with a great message and perhaps a further freebie to get the new fan on side.

Twiturm is another way to share your music which you can set up to stream only or allow downloads – there is no provision for collecting the emails of the people you reach though. I’d not used it before writing this but will suggest that my clients do since it allows you to create another way for your music to spread virally.

The set up is the standard that we’ve looked at many times in these Twitter posts. You allow access to your Twitter account and it creates a Twiturm account which takes your Twitter background image and creates a URL (using your Twitter username) where all your uploaded tracks will be hosted. So, in our case, the page is at http://twiturm.com/profile/MakeItInMusic.

All the tracks that you’ve uploaded can be stream or download, so you can create a URL with as many tracks as you like where Twitter users can click to share on Twitter or Facebook. They can also review the tracks and favourite them

There’s another way to trade a track for an email though. This is free to use code from Cash Music. It requires some coding knowledge – hence why I haven’t used it yet! If you are a bit techy, it’s worth a look. You can learn more here and the how to is here.

Apparently this service will have a WordPress plug-in in the early part of this year to make it easier to use for us non-geeks!

The most recent addition to this method of sharing music on Twitter and, as an option, trading a track for a tweet has come from Bln.kr.

Watch the video below for all the options that this newcomer has to offer – looks like it’s going to be a winner with stuff like specific feedback to music shared, automatic video creation and posting to YouTube and one-click sharing to all your social media profiles.

It’s a great contender for tweeting for a track to spread your music, but also offers a whole load more. I’ll definitely be using it.

What about giving away music that’s not yours?

Well, you can’t give away downloads of stuff you don’t own (you wouldn’t catch us suggesting that you give away DJ sets or similar on your site or Soundcloud as that’s technically illegal – actually, you would!) but two services that you should have a working knowledge of are twt.fm and blip.fm.

The first allows you to log-in using the Twitter API, find tracks and tweet links to them directly from twt.fm. You just search and twt.fm finds a link to a track that someone is hosting somewhere and makes a player – all on the fly. It doesn’t have  every track ever made (by some margin) but it has a lot! Simple as that. It is buggy now and again, so check the link before tweeting it. But, what a great way to quickly let your followers hear what you’re listening to.

Which is what Blip.fm does too, but in a different way!

Blip.fm is a Social Network all of it’s own with massive functionality. What it does that interests us in this regard is that you become a DJ selecting tunes and once linked to Twitter and Facebook these tunes will be ‘blipped’ into your Twitter feed with links for people to hear them.

Both Blip.fm and twt.fm therefore give you a way to communicate with your fans on a purely musical level, allowing you to find music that influenced you, new bands that you like or even guilty pleasures to point to your fans. As we pointed out before, this places you and your music into a frame of reference for your followers.

And, as we said before, tweeting music and talking about music adds depth to your stream and means that you don’t have to worry about what to Tweet – just tell people what you’re listening to!

Lastly, let’s not forget that you can use Twitter to give away anything. Free tickets, guest list spaces, merchandise or anything that you can think of can be informally given away by asking your fans to retweet a message and rewarding the first 5 or 10 to do so. This is very effective on show days.

This is part 5 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

You can find the 6th and final part here – Twitter for Musicians – TweetDeck, Hootsuite & TweetAdder.

This is part 4 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 3 here – Twitter  for Musicians – Facebook, Pictures & Video.

16. Ask for help and information

You can use Twitter to source facts and local info and to find out what’s going on.

Twitter is a conversation, so it’s two way. When you have a decent following there’s no end to how you can use that to build even more interaction.

If you’ve got any kind of question that you really need help with, tweet it to your followers. Don’t mug them off by asking questions that you transparently don’t need an answer to – things that they know you’d already know – but when it’s genuine, reach out to them and get help.

Things you can ask for help on could include:

• where to stop and eat when you’re on tour

• where to get the van fixed if you break down

• how to solve some set-up issue (take a picture if that helps show the issue)

• who to use to style you for a photoshoot

And, of course, you can ask this of your fans but also of the wider Twitter community by using location or keyword hashtags. People monitor relevant location hashtags in particular.

As for asking what’s going on, Twitter allows you to create real world interaction opportunities aplenty to meet your fans and develop a stronger bond. If you’re going out to another band’s gig, remind your followers and meet up. Hopefully you’ll have previously tweeted that you’re going so as to help promote the other band’s show anyway but remind followers on the day.

As an aspiring musician you need to be fully involved in your local music scene, so networking in the real world is vitally important. If you’ve networked with players in your scene on Twitter, find out where they’re going to be (at gigs, clubs and other music related events) by asking people what they’re up to on Twitter, and show up. But, don’t be a stalker, and don’t bother people. Ask about them rather than pitching you, and you’ll easily make real connections.

This level of interaction is very useful and often leads to not only really helpful answers but also a whole new raft of opportunities as well.

A useful tool when looking for help is Tweefind which hopes to filter out search results based on the number of followers that someone has. So if you’re looking to send someone a direct question in a tweet, this is a good way to find them.

Of course, you can also ask your followers for direct help at the relevant time. They can be marshalled to vote for you in a Battle of the Bands or you can ask them to request your music on local / national radio stations when you have a single coming out. This can very quickly turn into a street team that you can call on both online and offline.

Don’t do it all the time and for the star who helps the most, give them a reward – some merchandise or special treatment at a gig.

17. Help others

Fix a problem that they‘ve asked about. The other side of the coin.

Just keep your eye out for people asking questions that you can help with. You should obviously look out for followers asking you direct questions but you can also watch trending and follow a few hashtags that cover topics that your knowledgeable about. That allows you to jump in and help when you see someone looking for help who isn’t necessarily already a follower.

You can do this on your Twitter profile homepage – where you can set it to your nearest location so that you can target your help to locals (obviously good if you look out for people using hashtags that relate to music and you can jump in advise them what gig to go to, for example). For more on this read Twitter’s support page on Trending.

You can also watch trends and look for help opportunities using your client such as TweetDeck, or my personal favourite – Twitterfall, which has all sorts of filters including postcode location.

This needn’t just be about your planet sized knowledge of music, your genre of music, the local music scene or the latest tricks you are using on Logic Audio. That’s all great and helps followers see your music in context and your skills as an artist. But, by revealing that you’re also the font of all knowledge on marine tropical fish as well as yeast-free baking your followers will get to know you more – and not just those that you’re helping out, but all your followers watching your stream.

And, as for those that you reach out and help – guess what? – they’ll be really grateful and may become a follower, a fan or even an evangelist for your band.

18. Get feedback

Not just help.

There are moments for all musicians where what you’re after isn’t help but honest feedback about what you’re thinking, doing, making, should do or make!

Twitter is great for this. It’s instant.

You need to balance how you want your fans to perceive you against the wish to get their direct feedback as it’s true to say that some fans want there to be an element of distance and idolisation in their relationship with you.

If you feel that is the case for your band, then restrict your search for feedback to either/or queries – e.g., ‘Which track of these two should be our single?’

If you’re comfortable with your followers seeing all your human frailty – and in the modern connected world I think this is the better option – then ask them anything – both about the process of creating your music and the way your life fits around it.

I’ve seen people ask for rhymes to finish off a song, for verdicts on a final mix and any number of requests for a view on the current state of a project. Kanye West legendarily posted ‘Love Lockdown’ on his blog (before he tweeted like a maniac – but the principle is the same!) and got negative feedback about the drums and his heavy use of auto-tune. He re-recorded the drums and the vocals but left the auto-tune dialled up to 11! The exchange with his fans was real and heartfelt.

You can use this to take requests. UK artist Little Boots asked her followers every week what song they’d like her to cover just acoustically on her piano – which she’d then video and post on YouTube (you, of course, know that you could use Qik or Ustream for this, being as you are even more modern than her).

Fans can also pick setlists, suggest places for you to play, choose merchandise items (thereby pre-qualifying themselves for a purchase!) – the list should be almost endless.

As well as feedback, use Twitter to get collaborators. With modern studio technology it is so easy to get a part recorded in one part of the world to an mp3 backing track, sent to you and plugged into your master. Search out people that play weird and wonderful instruments and get them on your record. Or how about a Balinese nose flute version of a fan favourite?

Since you’ve added and are followed back by lots of bands in your local scene and globally in your genre (we told you to do that, remember), reach out to them and collaborate – cover each others songs, do a split 7” release, have a mini-festival and use Twitter to spread the word.

Same thing applies to remixes of your tracks. Reach out and see what your followers have to say. Or how they can be involved.

Asking for feedback will make your fans feel much more part of the process of your creativity and that can only strengthen the bond.

Imogen Heap (this is not her last appearance in these tips!) used her fans to give her both help and feedback when she asked them to re-write her bio using just tweets – so they had to send a tweet and then she compiled those into her new bio – help, feedback, interaction and involvement all in one!

19. Let people find you

As we said at the beginning of these posts, you need to have your Twitter name be obvious – hopefully it’s just your artist name – so that people can find you easily.

If you’re building an offline following or having success online with blog reviews and mentions on Hype Machine, you’ll be surprised how many people will come online and seek you out.

But also have your Twitter address everywhere so that fans can join you or just come and see your tweets from as many places as possible. This is dead obvious, but you need to do it.

Universally recognised 'follow' button. Stick with it!

That means have a follow button on your website, on your other profiles on MySpace, Facebook and YouTube (just an html link on your YouTube channel – unless you’re a YouTube partner!), put the address on all your physical releases (even if that’s CD’s you give away at gigs) and place a link in your emails.

I’d generally recommend sticking with obvious and simple Social Media follow buttons, at least down to colour and shape. People know the icons and recognise what they’re for and you don’t want to over complicate it.

For a clickable link in your emails, which all members of a band should do in their personal email account, there is a cool tool called WiseStamp which, so long as you’re using Firefox as your browser (i.e and Safari are coming!), allows you to add a Twitter icon linked to your profile and a latest tweet to your Gmail or YahooMail emails. It does lots more too – see their tour here.

It’s a great way to encourage people to follow you and get more interaction from email.

Anywhere else that you can think of makes sense if it fits your style – on a business card (OK, not a business card, per se, but a card that has your act’s contact details on!), on the side of the van, on a T-shirt., and make sure that it’s everywhere when you gig – on the merch stall, announced by your singer at some point in your performance and on some kind of card / flyer given away at those shows.

Use your imagination!

20. Use lists

Using Twitter’s list feature allows you to break up your followers in to manageable groups by subdividing by area, genre, business, fan, whatever you might like. But the ‘list’ isn’t just a list of profiles, it’s their streams -  clearly this makes it easier for you to navigate your way around the tweets that are coming into your stream.

Oh, and you don’t have to be following someone to add them to a list, although you normally would be. And, you can add yourself to your own lists too.

As a band you might want to break it up into sections such as other bands (successful/ national/global/local), promoters & venues, music advice (for people like us!) and so on. That way you’ll find it easier to scan what is happening and make sure that you don’t miss anything that might be an opportunity for you or something that you might want to Retweet.

But, there are other things that lists are great for too.

Lists themselves can be followed, so you can use this functionality to spread your marketing and your pre-eminence in your scene that little bit further.

You can create a list of all the members of your band’s individual profiles so that fans can follow that list as well as following the official band Twitter stream. If you engage in a bit of banter between band members online, then this list stream could itself be very engaging for your fans. I love this use!

To show your place in your local scene or musical niche you can create lists of bands that you fit in with. For, example, local kids who are into Emo might follow a list of all the great bands and band members in that genre that you have created and added your band to.

Or, think sideways, and create lists that aren’t just music but place you in a niche – such as ‘Great people from [your town]’ – linking you with politicians, businessmen, painters and the like, or ‘Skate Dudes’ where you lump your band in with (assuming you are skate band!) Tony Hawk, Ryan Sheckler and bands like The OffSpring. It doesn’t all have to be just music and musicians!

Put lists together along those lines and then tweet the URL of the list to your followers and encourage them to pass it on. Recommending a list of cool people that your fans will like will be very well received.

As a list builds a following you’ll find other interesting people who you hadn’t found before by clicking through to see the people who are following the list!

Being on lists complied by other people is obviously appealing – and, on occasion, you might find a list that you’d like to be on. If it’s appropriate, maybe you can tweet the list owner and suggest that they include you.

Don’t though just approach someone and ask them to add you to their list as your first contact – you need to have genuinely tweeted back and forth before asking. Otherwise it’s like walking up to them in the street and making demands as a complete stranger – something people do all too often online and deeply ineffective – let alone rude.

It ought to be easy though. If you think you’ll fit on their list you should have common interests to discuss.

Since the followers of a list can see your tweets in a list whether they follow you or not directly, this can greatly expand your audience if you can get on to some widely followed lists. I’m not suggesting that you should try this in particular, but, for example, Mashable’s ‘Music list’, which we mentioned before, has 1300 plus followers that you would instantly access.

To see what lists you’re on, click on ‘Listed’ on the top right of your profile page – mine through the other people on those lists to see if you should follow them as well! If a follower thinks you fit in a group – work out why!

It’s really easy to create a list. Just click the ‘Lists’ button at the top of your stream and a drop down menu will offer the option to create a new list. Fill in the details and you’re done. Obviously for maximum exposure make your list ‘public’ – ‘private’ means just that and you’d miss out on the viral nature of lists.

Adding people to lists is done from a variety of parts of the Twitter profile, but, in essence, if you click on a profile, you’ll see the list icon – as shown in the image, and you can add people to a list there.

It’s also worth checking out Listorious and listing yourself there – it’s a Twitter people search tool but also home of all things Twitter list related!

21. Shorten & track your links

We mentioned shortening the URL’s that you tweet in point 8.

It’s necessitated by the nature of the 140 character limit set in Twitter. Many of the links that you might want to share could well be 140 characters or more on their own, leaving you no room for any actual tweet content!

Although URL shorteners had already appeared, it was Twitter’s need for fitting maximum info in a tiny space that made their use explode.

If you don’t know what they are (is that possible if you’ve read this far?!), they will take your any length URL and shrink it to a manageable number of characters and then redirect anyone who clicks on it back to the original URL.

You use them either by visiting their site and entering your long URL into a text box, then clicking and the site will give you a short URL to copy, or they can be automatically linked to some services, primarily third party clients like TweetDeck.

The usual length will be compressed to something like 13 or 14 characters, but you can get as little as 5!

So, you’re using a URL shortener because it cuts the space your link is using in your tweet, but what you get in return is a huge amount of data and that’s where the fun really is.

Just as a quality email list system will give you vast detail about who does what with the emails you send them, the best URL shorteners give you the same about the click stats of the links you tweet.

In order to get this data you’re going to need to use one of the services that require you to set up an account where all your links will be aggregated. Most do these days but some (like the original Tinyurl.com) can be used on an ad hoc basis without signing in – so you’d get no tracking data.

Why do you want this data?

Well it’ll tell you what people are doing with the links that you share – which are popular, which aren’t, which get clicks, get RT’d and so on.

You can then use that to tailor your future tweets, learn which words that you use in a tweet get a reaction so that you can write more engaging tweets and even find out which links are popular enough to merit being tweeted more than once.

There is a great article on this and other ways that musicians can and should use data tracking on the Scentric Music blog (all their posts are detailed and accurate) that I recommend you check out.

So, now that you know you need to use a URL shortener, you have loads of options.

Bit.ly is my preferred shortener. The main reason is that it automatically links in with TweetDeck (see the Sentric post above for how), but I also love all the tracking data.

If you opt for HootSuite (see point 27), you’ll find yourself using Ow.ly, which is great but some people have a problem with something it does to your browser that I don’t really understand!

Rather than going through the others here, read this great article which lists out the features of the top 10 URL shorteners out there.

Twitter’s own service which will automatically shorten URL’s when you tweet from Twitter itself is being worked on and is currently only used for Direct Messages – you can read more about that in this Twitter support article.

You might also one day find the need for the shortest possible links and then you’ll need these two articles on the Single Function site – Really short URL shorteners and the Shortest URL shorteners.

One last word about URL shortening. People have become used to clicking on shortened links but some people worry about them hiding spam or worse viruses.

Given that bit.ly has a great reputation for avoiding such problems and that it’s very short, has great tracking and links with it’s API to third party Twitter clients – I can’t see much reason to use any of the others, for now!

This is part 4 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

You can find part 5 here – Twitter for Musicians – Involvement & Music.

This is part 3 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 2 here – Twitter interaction for Musicians.

12. Go Mobile

Twitter is an entirely different experience if you embrace it in the era of Social Networking on the go.

Most importantly, embracing Twitter fully only comes when you can tweet no matter where you are at any time. This is what allows you to fully integrate Twitter into your everyday life as a musician.

After all, being a musician isn’t exactly one of life’s jobs where you spend all day in an office at a keyboard. If you’ve got your phone with you at the rehearsal room, the guitar shop, in the pub when you’re meeting up with your band – these are all opportunities to tweet to your followers – ‘Band meeting in the pub – Dave late again as usual. His round wouldn’t you agree?’ – that sort of thing.

Maybe tell your followers where you are and get them to come by after the meeting!

Of course, this makes you more engaging and three dimensional to your follower fans.

On top of that, just under half of Twitter users send and check tweets using their phone. It is by far the most mobile of all the social networks. This allows for real world meet-ups and interaction as we’ll look at later.

If you’ve got a Smartphone you’re laughing – there’s an official app for Twitter for iPhone, Android and Blackberry that allows you to do everything on the go that you can from the Twitter home page on the web.

However, some Smartphone users (myself included sometimes) opt to use the Twitter mobile site when using their phone. Just browse to ‘mobile.twitter.com’ on your Smartphone.

TweetDeck for iPhone - highly recommmended!

Then, there’s TweetDeck for iPhone and Android. We’ll look at the desktop version of this later, but suffice to say, if I don’t use the iPhone app, I use TweetDeck for iPhone. If it’s available for your phone I’d recommend it – it’s quicker and has more functionality than the mobile apps.

If you don’t have a Smartphone, you can still tweet on the go.

Twitter can be controlled by SMS through the site. I’m not going to explain it as Twitter always update their help section on this. It’s straightforward. Go and read this – Twitter for Mobile.

There are at least two things to be aware of when using SMS to tweet – it can get overwhelming and it can cost a lot. It costs, not because of Twitter, but because all those text messages back and forth can add up very quickly – especially if you forget how much your operator charges you if you’re overseas.

And the amount of messages that you’ll get if you follow and are followed a lot can be huge. Twitter will cut these down for you with text codes (see their page again) but it’s a fiddle to set up.

Maybe it’s time to get a Smartphone?

13. Link to Facebook

Since you’re a super savvy Web 2.0 musician you’ve already got a Fan Page set up on Facebook, haven’t you?

So, it makes sense to have either your tweets appear on Facebook as status updates or the other way round. I much prefer to do it the first way.

Often my Facebook status updates involve more than 140 characters and video, so they’re best suited to Facebook, whereas my tweets work perfectly well as little titbits of information or clickable links on Facebook just as much as on Twitter.

As a tweeting musician, both these services do different things for you and your fans and you should maintain them separately, but, as I say, in most cases, you may as well feed your tweets into your Facebook Fan Page as well.

Next question – where should they go – on the Wall or in a separate tab?

I currently feed my tweets straight to the Fan Page Wall so that they then appear in all my Facebook Fan Page friend’s feeds. I think that’s the right choice for anyone actively promoting their music as you get the maximum reach.

There are various ways to do this, although it can be a major pain making it appear on your Fan Page rather than your personal Facebook profile, or making some of them work at all!

If you Google ‘Twitter to Facebook’ or look at the reviews of the apps on Facebook, you’ll see that a lot of people have issues with this.

I’d be very interested to see comments below on what has worked for people. I have tried everything and only one method works consistently for me.

In fact, whilst editing this piece I ran through them again and had some of the problems that I’ve had before.

It may be because I admin quite a lot of Fan Pages for various clients and these are all linked to my personal Facebook profile and perhaps that causes the confusion. But, I believe that there are also API problems when the two systems attempt to talk to each other.

So, unless someone tells you different, this is my personal experience.

The official Twitter to Facebook application will post to your Fan Page wall, but one problem that people experience with it is that when trying to post to a Fan Page it can end up posting to your personal profile.

The other often reported issue is that it simply won’t set up and connect. It seems that if it does, you’re away!

I have never managed to get it to work properly. Plenty do though (although lots also complain.)

As it’s the official application, I’d recommend giving it a go first.

Note though that it only posts tweets – it does not post ‘@replies’, which might make it unsuitable if that bothers you. To be honest, if it worked for me, I wouldn’t mind that it showed just the tweets.

To give it a go, check it out here – Twitter application for Facebook and click ‘Add to my Page’ on the left side.

Or go straight here to try the install.

From there, you simply need to check the box to allow it to post to your Fan Page rather than your personal profile.

It’s never worked for me, but it works for some!

If this doesn’t work for you, you can try Smart Twitter for Pages. This again allows tweets to be posted to your Fan Page wall (‘@replies’, RT’s and hashtags can be allowed although the default setting needs to be changed). However, similar problems have been reported and it works sometimes and for some people. Search for it in the Facebook search bar and install as usual or go direct to the install here – http://apps.facebook.com/smarttwitterpages/

The easiest method which has always worked for me has been to use the RSS Graffiti application in Facebook.

You can find the app page here – RSS Graffiti for Facebook – and, as usual, click ‘Add to my Page’ and install or you can go direct to the install here – http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/

Or, as you would with any app, search for it on Facebook and install it on your Fan Page and link your Twitter account.

This is not done by allowing the two to talk to each other since RSS Graffiti will actually take in any RSS feed – which is useful if you want to add other feeds direct to your Wall. The app can handle numerous feeds, not just Twitter, all coming into the same Fan Page.

If you don’t know much (or anything) about RSS feeds – don’t panic. If you do, you’ll see that this app could make your Facebook Wall populated from all sorts of other places where you and your band might have a web presence – but we’ll look at that another time. It might explain why it’s my top choice.

So, to set it up, you need to get your Twitter Status RSS feed.

You can access Twitter’s help on this topic here – How to find your Twitter RSS feed. The problem with that is that it’s written for old Twitter and might not direct you to where you need to be.

If not, all you need to do to get the Twitter RSS feed is to go to your Twitter account and click the orange RSS icon in the browser address bar at the top.

If it doesn’t give you the URL that you need, try logging out of Twitter and going to your Twitter profile page as a visitor and try again.

It should give you a URL that looks like the one in the image – i.e. that says http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/186XXXXX.rss, the last part being the number that identifies your profile on Twitter. Copy it.

Go back to the RSS Graffiti app on your Facebook Fan Page and then click the ‘Add feed’ button in the app, paste in the ‘Feed URL’ that you just got from Twitter, give it a name for future reference in the box below, and you’re set.

Your tweets will now appear on your Fan Page wall. At last!

There is another Facebook ap that works in much the same way – Twitterfeed – which I hear good things about. As far as I’m aware it only posts from Twitter rather than any feed and, again, needs your RSS feed.

My other favoured method – and you can actually do both as I do at the time of writing – is to create a tab on your Facebook Fan Page just for a Twitter feed.

There is an app on Facebook for this – TwitterTab – which drags in your full Twitter feed, including background, but I much prefer the Involver Twitter tab.

Find this either by going here – http://www.involver.com/applications/free/ – or search within Facebook for ‘involver app’. It’s the usual facebook installation routine and then you’ll have a separate tab on your Fan Page pulling in the whole Twitter feed, including ‘@replies’ and RT’s.

If, however, you feel that you don’t want all your tweets to go to your Facebook Fan Page, then there’s a solution for that too. Use Selective Tweets, but remember to unlink any other app that you have running (and double check this at the Twitter and Facebook ends to avoid driving yourself mental!). Install the app on Facebook and then when you tweet, only those tweets that you add the ‘#fb’ hashtag to will show up on your Facebook page.

This is a great solution if you want to micro-manage what your fans are seeing in different locations to maximise their involvement with you – but it requires more thought!

Whilst you’re about it, you can do the same for MySpace using TwitterSync.

14. Say it with pictures

It should be obvious that letting people see what you and your band are doing ‘behind the scenes’ is great for fan engagement.

The most commonly used way that Tweeps use to get their photos in front of their followers is Twitpic. It’s ace – use it!

So, I’ve now set myself up to tweet with Twitpic which is dead simple.

You go to Twitpic.com and log-in with your Twitter username and password which gives two way access to both accounts – that’s all there is to it!

You can then browse for photos on your computer and upload them and add a tweet (reduced to 114 characters to allow for the auto-generated URL of the photo) and post to Twitter all from within Twitpic – at this address: http://twitpic.com/upload/.

Of course, you’re likely to get the most out of tweeting pictures of what you’re up to in your musician’s life when you’re not at your computer.

This is also very easy to do. When you’ve registered for Twitpic you’ll find an email address at the upload page (when you’re logged in it’ll be at – http://twitpic.com/upload/) in the top right. Stick that in your Smartphone’s contacts and when you’re on the move you can take pictures on your phone and tweet them straight from your Smartphone.

When you’ve taken a picture, attach it to an email and send the email to that email address that you copied down. The text you put in the subject line of the email will become the text of your tweet. Simple.

(Note: since this post was written Twitpic is now able to tweet video as well as photos)

Photos can also be sent from your mobile from within the Twitter app for any Smartphone. Methods vary but take the picture and open the app and you should be able to easily find the function that will allow you to attach the photo. When you do this Twitter has the say on how they are uploaded so they might be sent via Twitpic but not appear in your account or might be sent by another service such as yfrog.

There’s apps to simplify the process even further – I like Twitpic Poster. It just takes out the email step and makes it even easier – TwitPic Poster.

If you can’t do this from a Smartphone then revert to taking pictures when you’re out and about and then tweeting them from your desktop as soon as you can so that the flow of your tweets is at least close to real time.

So, how is this going to help you in your Twitter music marketing efforts? – well it’s the same as with your regular tweets. Mix up photos that are about your band and your efforts as a musician with ones that place that role in your everyday life. Maybe at the guitar shop, take a picture of all the strings on the wall and ask for tips on what people would buy. Maybe the last band member to rehearsal has to do a forfeit and a photo of that gets posted.

Anything that ties your life to your music can be tweeted with pictures , but again, don’t over do it!

And, of course, you can take pictures of a load of other stuff that you see that you think your followers might like – things that are funny, dark, newsworthy, shocking etc. Whatever works for you.

There are other sites that do much the same as Twitpic – the main competitor being yfrog. It works in essentially the same way as Twitpic – with the ability to upload tweets with photos from your desktop or on the move (no app for iPhone yet though!).

You can also embed your Twitpic or yfrog stream into your band website – this is relatively easy to do and you’ll find the widget in the section of either yfrog or Twitpic where your hosted photos are – basically your profile. Grab the code and drop it into the sidebar of your WordPress band website (if you’re not using WordPress for your band website, see me after class!)

Another method of getting your images on to Twitter that’s worth thinking about is doing it from your Flickr account using ‘Flickr2Twitter’. This makes a great deal of sense if you’re an active user of Flickr (which I heartily recommend but that’s another whole blog post right there!).

The advantage, if you fit that profile, is that tweeting your images to the email address provided by Flickr in the Flickr2Twitter application, tweets the image (the subject line of the email again being the tweet) just like the other services will but it also drops it into your Flickr account as well. Pretty smart.

Lastly, most of the Twitter clients will allow you to attach pictures or video directly, and in the case of TweetDeck, you can do it all directly on your Smartphone on the go.

We posted a while ago that fans love photos of the artists that they support with recent research showing that it is one of the most searched and viewed aspect of an artist and their site. So give them what they want on Twitter – and lots of it.

15. Do the same with video

Not a lot of people do much with video on Twitter, other than linking to YouTube videos – either their own or those they think their fans will like. Nothing wrong with that – in fact, that’s exactly what you should do. As a start.

If you have a YouTube channel for your band, it’s a simple click to autoshare that video on Twitter as you upload it – something I’d recommend.

But, just like with photos in the point above, you can tweet video clips direct to Twitter from inside various applications and third party Twitter clients like Tweetdeck.

The site with the biggest following for video sharing on Twitter is TwitVid. It doesn’t have quite the ubiquitous reach for video that TwitPic has for photos but it’s getting there fast. Log-in and account creation is again by allowing access to your Twitter account.

And, it is, as you can see from the image, pretty much the same to use with the ability to post a video that you’ve previously shot to be uploaded from your desktop, or by filming one on the spot with your webcam, or, as is most likely, whipping out your Smartphone and tweeting either via email, MMS or through an app.

Any of those ways is super effective for constant and instant fan engagement to make your fans feel like they are on your musical journey with you. Imagine if Bono tweeted a video of the Edge strumming in the dressing room five minutes before U2 went on stage. You’d be gobsmacked! Well, doing the same for your fans can have a similar effect.

Other options abound and new ones are coming all the time. Yfrog has added the ability to tweet video as well as pictures, but, as far as I’m aware there is no iPhone app.

Many third party clients, such as Tweetdeck, allow you to record right from your webcam onto Twitter (some via a twitvid tie-in) – meaning that you can send a very personal quick message to your followers at any time. The scope for you as an artist with this is immense. You can just have a new idea, video it and tweet it to get an instant reaction from your fans. A regular video shout out to your fans asking them to come to the next gig will often work better than traditional Facebook and Twitter messaging. Give it a go.

Perhaps the most exciting thing that you can do with video on Twitter for your fans is post live streaming video from your Smartphone. The most common way to do this is by using Qik.

It’s not quite the same drill as most of the applications that use the Twitter API – where you sign-up and log-in simply by using your Twitter profile details. In this case, you have to set up a separate account at Qik.

The main reason for this is that Qik is more than just a one-trick-pony for streaming live video to your Twitter followers. It’s also a hub for all your video that you take with your Smartphone. The long and short of it is that you can set it so that all your video is instantly uploaded to your Qik profile and can then be shared (or not) as you direct to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and various blog platforms.

So, it stores your videos but spreads them about as well, rather than tweeting them one by one and leaving them on your phone as Twitvid does.

Once you’ve set up an account, you need to link it your other profiles – Twitter, Facebook (personal profile by default – you’ll need to route via something like Ping.fm to make it go to your Fan Page) and YouTube for sure and type in an auto-populated tweet that it will use to let people know you’ve uploaded or are streaming a new video.

You can see in the image below that I’ve put ‘Live feed from my phone with #qik’. With the ‘Upload all public videos’ box checked, your videos and streams will automatically post to the networks you’ve authorised.

The most exciting thing from a fan interaction viewpoint is that you can stream live video right from your phone (BTW, you can set up Ustream to do this and it comes with apps for your phone too, but Qik is just that little bit more off-the-cuff, whereas I’d recommend Ustream for your more planned moments).

How should you use it?

You can use Qik to let your followers see what you’re doing in little bite size pieces. As I said, if you want to do a full live gig from your rehearsal room you could use Qik, but Ustream is better for that. On the other hand, just whip out your phone and film the guitarist tuning up at rehearsal – 20 seconds. Or film when you have a show of hands vote on the artwork for the next single.

Simple moments that your fans will love.

Using it on your phone requires an app for all the functionality. Once you’ve signed up Qik will sort out getting that to your phone by sending a text message link or email.

When shooting or streaming with the app the way it works will depend on what Smartphone you have and what app, but most of the settings are controlled in your account. Play around with it to get used to it. Took me a while!

I think it’s a great way to engage your fans.

This is part 3 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

You can find part 4 here – Twitter for Musicians – Help, Lists & URL’s.

Image by joelaz

This is part 2 of a 6 part post which will are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. You can find part 1 here – Twitter Basics for Musicians.

8. Spread the word

This is one of the golden keys to Twitter for me. You can be informative and reveal interesting stuff with links.

Some of it (again not more than 1:5) can be links to your own stuff or stuff that refers back to you – blog reviews or online radio stations playing your tracks etc – but the majority should be stuff that you’re interested in and that you think your followers will like as well.

If you’ve engaged a following by revealing your personality as well as your music then you should, as we said before, have some idea of what you have in common and what they’d want to know about.

Links will generally be to a piece of music on a band site, MySpace, YouTube or other, or to news stories on news sites and blogs, or perhaps to a flickr group or a forum thread. Your followers should feel that clicking on the link will benefit them.

For most musicians it can be very good to comment on and talk about other bands, big and small, to reveal a rounded musical appreciation – and one into which your own work can be placed in the mind of the follower.

If you’re particularly focused on a niche as a musician, as you most likely are or should be as an indie musician, then it can be worth your while becoming a scene leader as a commentator as well as an artist. Tweeting links to other bands and articles about those bands and the genre can very quickly build the respect amongst your followers that you and your band know their stuff when it comes to your genre.

Many DIY musicians create a micro-niche and get to know all the bands in that niche. Even building a separate site that deals with the genre – in which their band plays a key part. This is something that Twitter amplifies very effectively – either by tweeting with the band username or using a separate niche username.

An example would be if you were part of a Cajun independent rock act and you built a local scene and website talking about your band and the others in that scene, and then tweeted about that scene from both perspectives.

But links should also be about other things that are relevant to your audience. If you’re a hippy folk act it might well be acceptable to tweet about left-wing politics and global climate issues for example. If you’re a gothic horror metal act, you might regularly tweet links to sites and articles about piercing.

Your followers will appreciate it!

As you only have 140 characters to work with, most links need to be shortened. If you’re tweeting from the Twitter web platform, this is not done automatically (although they want to be able to do this and are working on it) so you’ll find yourself needing to use a URL shortener.

My favourites are tinyurl.com or bit.ly but there are many alternatives – see point 21.

Tweeting links that appeal to your followers is a key part of your Twitter strategy – it engages people, starts conversations and shows people that you’re active as both a musician and in Social Media and it reveals your personality.

You can tweet links to anything that fits with your previous behaviour on Twitter and that your followers will like. But, balance all link tweeting with one-on-one interaction and remember, not too many links back to your own site.

If you’re doing it right people will go off Twitter and check out your band website anyway – the URL is on your Twitter page after all, isn’t it?

9. Retweet

Passing on or forwarding the wisdom of others is the art of the ‘Retweet’. It’s done by adding ‘RT’ in front of the username of the person whose tweet you’re passing on – so ‘RT@MakeItInMusic’ followed by our tweet will send that to all your followers.

It also lets your followers know that the tweet came from us originally – as well as letting us know that you’ve passed it on as we see it appear as a ‘RT’ in our stream.

Clearly this pushes any tweet into another realm of viewing figures. It’s generally accepted that a Twitter user with a vast following (such as @StephenFry) will cause a massive bump if he RT’s your tweet, but, there will then be another massive bump as all his followers do the same as they repeat his wisdom!

It’s a form of flattery, of course, toward the person whose tweet you are forwarding to your followers. But, and this is probably more important, you’re demonstrating that you’re using Twitter, reading what other people are saying and getting value from it that you want to pass on.

That will make people follow you and believe that you want to pass on good stuff, rather than just promote your music.

People whose stuff you should be re-tweeting are definitely other local bands (to promote their shows and releases as well as your own – share the love!), happenings in your genre or niche and links that others have found that you like.

Of course, a great effect of being a solid RT’weeter is that many of those whom you re-tweet will return the favour sending you traffic and hopefully promoting your stuff when you need them to.

It’s not to be seen as tit-for-tat and you shouldn’t make a habit of asking for the RT, but it will happen organically. In some cases you can ask your followers to RT for you, but, again, don’t just do this when it’s for a self-promoting tweet.

Don’t be a bore and just retweet everything someone says. That shows a lack of imagination

You can get a load of information about what’s going on with your tweets as far as RT’ing goes by clicking the ‘Retweets’ link on your Twitter timeline.

And should the person who retweets your stuff be thanked? – generally yes, but if you have too many followers and don’t do it all the time people will mostly understand and not be offended.

One last thing about RT’s and thanking. When someone has RT’d one of your tweets, a golden opportunity has opened up. You could just thank them on Twitter as we talked about, or you could use that moment to open up a new relationship on an entirely deeper level – and who knows where that networking might lead.

How so? Well, go and look at their profile (again, as you should’ve already done it if they’re following you or vice versa) and see where else you can connect with them – Facebook, MySpace or, hopefully their own site or blog.

Is there a blog post that you can tweet a link to, a comment you can leave, maybe subscribe to their RSS feed?

If they’ve RT’d a few times, send them a DM (this is the time!) and give them your email address, IM / AIM or even Skype address or phone number and see if you can take the fact that you’ve had some common interest that little bit further.

Networking = the lifeblood of the music business!

Oh, and you can get people to retweet your messages on a paid basis or an ‘earned credit’ basis using a site like Retweet It . There’s obviously the upside of getting extra traffic from such a retweet, but perhaps it’s not the sort of traffic that will be easy to turn into fans.

Test it to find out if it works for you.

10. Direct Message

The DM is very often misused and it can do plenty of damage to the speed of your follower growth and the way they perceive you.

It can be a great way to make a deeper connection by sending someone a message that isn’t broadcast to the whole world.

But, a few thoughts.

Firstly, you can only direct message (this is done by adding ‘D’ in front of the username) a user who is following you back. So, unfortunately, many users who you might want to message are out of your reach, meaning that you’ll need to use the ‘@reply’ to try and get their attention – which will be public!

There are various hacks that purport to allow you to message someone who doesn’t follow you but I have never been able to get them to work (you may have seen my failed attempts in my Tweetstream from time to time!). But, even if you can manage it, then it’s a pretty abrupt interruption and not the best way of introducing yourself. Better to stick to DM’ing people that you’re connected to.

One of the bugbears for many Twitter users is the auto DM that people can send when you start following them. Does it have its place? That’s a tricky one.

Conventional marketing wisdom loves the idea of ‘hit them while they’re hot’ – so send a DM as soon as someone starts following you – but Twitter is about long-term engagement and conversation and the conventional Twitter wisdom  is that the sending of such a DM is too pushy.

If it is, you’re getting a new relationship off to a poor start and may well get instantly unfollowed.

If you really want to send an automated DM to all new followers, DON’T ask them to do anything in it – particularly don’t ask them to sign up on Facebook or your site or go anywhere else – just say thanks!

If you’re going to do it, the best way is to do it through an account at SocialOomph, which offers a bunch of other cool functions that you might find useful.

But, my suggestion – don’t do it. When your following is small enough to be manageable, send some personalised DM’s to find out more about your followers soon after they’ve signed up, but keep it low on the hype!

11. #Hashtags

Using Hashtags is a way of putting your tweet into a stream of related tweets and conversations and helping them to spread further. That way the idea is that all the tweets about a specific subject are united and that they therefore become a searchable category.

This is done by putting the ‘#’ symbol in front of the keyword to which your tweet relates. Most commonly they’re used to refer to a specific phrase, a group, an event or location. Examples would be ‘#SXSW’ used by people referring to the South by South West festival in Austin, TX or ‘#musicmarketing’ that I could add to my tweets in that vein.

Although people think they are the best way to alert people to the fact that their tweet is on a certain topic, it seems that they have been somewhat misled.

In fact, the latest data shows that hashtags are not as often searched for and as commonly referred to as people think and that a standard search for the words you’re after will generally give better results. This is because they aren’t universally understood nor used by the majority of Twitter users. It could easily be argued though that searching for a hashtag is more effective since it’ll stand out in a search result.

Nonetheless, that is a revealing fact as it means that those using and searching for hashtags are the Twitterati elite and therefore people who you definitely want to be able to reach and influence.

There is no doubt that this group of users is monitoring the hashtags that they find interesting, so you can easily drop your tweets into that stream.

A lot of Twitter traffic also goes through the front page of Twitter where people can look at and search through ‘Trends’ to see what people are talking about right now. The importance of influencing trending is increasing all the time as more and more people use 3rd party applications (see point 27) and with the roll-out of new Twitter which has trending more prominent on your own home page.

Used intelligently therefore, adding hashtags to some of your tweets ought to bring you to the attention of new followers. For example, tweeting your forthcoming gig with the relevant location hashtag could bring in new gig-goers in that local area.

Often a hashtag comes into being for the wider community and offers a chance to reach everyone taking part. In recent weeks there have been many – such as ‘#tweetyour16yearoldself’ or ‘#whatwomenwant’ that offered just such an opportunity.

Can you think of one that would spread and appeal to your target audience?

Many hashtags come into being in a de facto way just because people start to use them and see others using them so they get adopted universally. There is no set procedure to follow if you want to introduce a new hashtag for a particular event – but do let all the people who might want to use it know about it.

However, you can look at Tagalus for a list of definitions to see what is being used to refer to a specific phrase and you can submit a new hashtag to them there or via Twitter (‘@tagalus’). But, it’s not required.

Hashtags.org is the site behind the Twitter tags – use it to find out more about a particular tag and to see trending information.

My personal favourite for delving deeper into the whole realm of hashtags is Twubs which will dig up all sorts of data on a hashtag, give you similar tags to spark off ideas and lots more. Give it a look.

A word of warning – don’t overdo it. Like anything on Twitter don’t just tweet with a hashtag in every one. And don’t put loads of different one word tags in one tweet. ‘#London #North #Pub #Pint #BeerGarden’ isn’t how it works!

The two classics for the music business are #FF (or#FollowFriday) and #MusicMonday. The former applies to all Twitter users but obviously being recommended as someone to follow (on a Friday!) can only bring you more fans. You should use this both ways and be recommending people as well as looking to get recommended – don’t ask random people to #FF you – maybe your closest friends on Twitter now and again.

#MusicMonday is a simple tag that people use to tip a band or make a listening recommendation. Again, be involved both ways.

This is part 2 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

You can find part 3 here – Twitter for Musicians – Facebook, Pictures & Video

Image by inju

This is part 1 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians.

I got asked ‘What are your top Twitter tips for musicians?’ by @acitizenabove on Twitter a few weeks ago.

I made this quick reply: “I will post – but, be regular, engaging, don’t push for sales, become a font of knowledge, follow by search not just followers.”

I was thinking about it, after the event, and realised that it was good advice but that I should follow through, expand, and come up with a dose of real help. What should’ve been a little pointer has gotten out of hand and will be posted in five posts over the week!

Nonetheless, this is intended to be a simple list of essentials and, where necessary, we’ll expand on them another time.

So, in no particular order….

1. Get Stuck In

Simple. You’ve got to be in it to win it.

I make Twitter one of the Holy Fivinity (yeah, I made that up) – your own band website, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube Channel. You have to have an active presence on each of them – for different reasons and with different levels of activity. Oh, and Flickr would be the next one I’d add!

On Twitter, you need to get there and start tweeting. Like all Social Media, you’re only going to get good at using it, get what you hoped from it and learn it’s quirks by using it and exploring what it can do. That’s the first really important tip. Don’t expect to start and on Day One know all there is to know. It will take time.

When you set up your Twitter profile you’ll need to decide whether to tweet as ‘the artist’ or as one of the members of the band. Obviously, if you’re a solo artist this choice is made for you and it’s easier for potential fans to connect with you as both an individual and a nascent rock star.

However, I would recommend that if you’re a band, go with the band name and tweet as ‘we’ or as one of you (named) when the occasion suggests or requires it.

That also allows you to tie up your Twitter profile to your band name and the band website domain name as tightly as possible.

Just make sure that the person in the band who has the main responsibility should be someone who has an engaging personality, probably funny, but not too risky!

2. Brand your Profile

In order to tie your Twitter profile to your other online profiles, match up the background and profile picture to the design and imagery that you’re using elsewhere. Twitter backgrounds are notoriously shlonky (another real word!) since there are differences depending on viewer’s monitor size.

The roll out of the new Twitter is coming to everyone in the end – so why design a background for the old layout?

Suffice for this post, your best bet is to go for Twitter background image dimensions of 1920 x 1200 pixels. Since Twitter positions the image to the top left, and because you only have the left and right side panels to add extra (non-hyperlink) info, work to the left side and keep within the first 110 pixels from the left edge – plus put anything important in the top 478 pixels but at least 40 pixels down from the top (there is a permanent bar across the top of the screen in the new layout). We won’t go into all the reasons why – just take my word for it – this way most people will see the image you want them to!

Note that the right panel in the new layout has a 75% opacity which means you can put some stuff under that panel, and, if used creatively, it will look good. For more on the latest best practice on backgrounds search ‘background for new Twitter’ as people are coming up with new stuff all the time – it’s only been out a month or so.

Also, choose your profile picture wisely. It will generally be seen in a tiny format, so bear that in mind and make sure it’s consistent with your other band photos. I prefer a band photo that works at such a small size rather than a logo (although that’s what I use – but then, I’m not promoting a band am I!). Oh, and it’s square.

3. Write a proper Bio

Musicians are notoriously bad at writing biographies for their act. Unfortunately, this carries on to the band Twitter bio!

You only have 160 characters for your bio – for most people that equates to something between 20 and 30 words. Don’t be clever and obtuse. Why not? Well, your bio has strong SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) power, so you should use it to accurately describe your act and music with words that might help people find you if they turned you up in a Google search or a Twitter search.

The bio will be the description that shows up as the description under the blue search title in Google.

As you can see, Stephen Fry hasn’t quite obeyed the rules on not being too clever, but, then…he is very clever. But his description fits in a Google search query.

He has also edited his ‘Name’ setting in his profile settings so that his full real name is displayed rather than just his username – I suggest that you do the same.

And, make sure that you put the URL link to your main band site in the ‘Web’ box in profile settings! The full link, with the ‘http’!

4. Start following

Add your friends first. As with most social network sites, Twitter will give you various ways to find friends such as by linking to your email account to see if they already have a profile – or you can seek them out on Twitter or by email.

Once you’ve added a few real world friends, interact with them, tweet a few 140 character messages and get a feel for it.

Don’t just follow your mates though.

You could just add real world friends and acquaintances (see the image below – Twitter will sync to various email accounts and your LinkedIn profile if you have one) and wait for word of your genius to spread…….but that might be a little slow.

The accepted way to accelerate following is to add people that you think or hope will be interested in you, your band and what you have to say, and many will follow you back. From that point on it is up to you to engage and reward them by being interesting, relevant and a good band!

Remember that, odd as it might sound, having followers per se isn’t the point. It is all about interacting with them and the wider Twitter-sphere.

The obvious things to do to start building a band focused Twitter following is to add everyone on your band mailing list, send out bulletins to age old MySpace fans, do the same on Facebook and then start hunting.

Targets are other bands in your local area, their fans (if genre appropriate), local venues and people in your scene.

For further adding the Twitter Search is a very powerful tool – http://search.Twitter.com. You can keep it simple and search for bands in your genre and begin to add their followers or the followers of acts you like.

Whilst this will give you plenty of people to follow, just because someone is a fan of the Killers (i.e. follows them) that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a really big fan who gets behind the band. Sure, add people who follow the Killers if that’s your demographic, but also go a little deeper.

What you need to do is search the content of people’s bios and find the people who have ‘the Killers’ in their bio – these people are superfans and if you get them to love your band, they will spread the word. There is no universal way to search everyone’s bios, but the best tool I have found is Follower Wonk.

Search peoples’ bios for the bands that are similar to yours and concentrate on adding those people first. Tweep Search can do this too but the API (the thing that lets them see Twitter data) is far from perfect, so you’re not getting a search of everyone on Twitter, but it’s a good place to start.

In the ‘Who to Follow’ section of Twitter (on the web) you can click ‘Browse Interests’ to show genre based lists of potential ‘followees’. Once you’ve been up and running it’s always worth checking here to see what Twitter has put in ‘View Suggestions’ since this is algorithmically driven by who you are following and your tweets – It always turns a few great ‘follows’ up for me.

Twellow is another very powerful search tool that is constantly tracking tweets and categorising users into smaller and smaller niches. You can register yourself if you want (which is useful) but it gives you a great tool to use to search out people that you might want to follow.

As the image shows, just the music category has over 600,000 profiles and lists users out for such things as venues and by various genres.

You should also try to go deeper and find other local bands, people involved in your local and national scene and genre – local music journalists, bloggers, studios – anyone that puts you into that scene.

I also recommend searching for conversations that would indicate someone as a potential fan. Use the search tool, go deeper using phrases in quotes (“search phrase”) as well as the straight broad search phrase to throw up people talking about topics that fit your niche – ideas could include searching via keywords for gear you use, venues you play, terms that describe your sound or scene. A New York indie band might for example search for “Mercury Lounge gig”, “New York Indie”, and “NY indie scene”. It’s your music and niche – you ought to know what people will be talking about.

Follow the people that are engaging in that conversation (and engage in it yourself as per point 7) and look at their followers too for more like-minded individuals.

5. What to tweet?

I can see us expanding on this later so I’ll try to keep it short and sweet – just like the majority of your tweets.

That’s a good rule. Generally if it can’t be done in 140 characters, running over into several messages to get your point across isn’t what Twitter is about. Sometimes….maybe. But generally make each tweet a stand alone statement.

First proper rule is to not just tweet all about you and the band and what you’re trying to get people interested in – whether that’s selling something or giving something away free. Sure, you need to ask followers to check out your site, facebook, videos, merchandise and tracks, but not in every tweet! I like something like a 5 to 1 ratio of totally narcissistic self-referencing to general wittering on.

And the general wittering on can be pretty much whatever you want it to be. Some people do tell followers way too much information, but, for them, it seems to work.

Generally, you don’t need to tweet about everyday function – eating, sleeping and worse, but sometimes it’s OK. If you just visited the legendary Hodads in San Diego and ate their foot high burger – tell your fans! Better still (see point 22), get them to come down and have a burger with you.

On the music side, tell people about what you’re doing when writing, rehearsing, in the van, setting up, soundchecking, getting a drum skin designed, what’s happening with the release that’s coming up (artwork shots, listening parties, street team activity) etc. Remember that making music is a process that you can involve your followers in – from the start and writing the first songs right up to the album launch and beyond. Tell them the pertinent details without sales hype.

But, to be three dimensional, tell them about you – what other music are you listening to, which local bands do you like, where do you hang out, what do you all do together when not making music. What common interests are you likely to share with your fans (which also applies to finding them in the first place in order to follow them)? – if you’re a Goth band you’re likely to all be watching the latest vampiric TV show right? So, talk about it.

I also like bands that talk about the interplay in the band – about individual member’s foibles and oddities. It garners a real sense of kinship from followers.

The best way to look at it is to put the fact that you’re a musician, in a band and trying to get people to notice your music within the context of your everyday life and give a rounded picture of the whole you – not just the artist screaming for attention!

Let’s face it the whole artistic struggle and progress is interesting – that’s why we want to know how Led Zep wrote and lived it up on their own jet and how Tupac managed to write and record every day. If they’d been tweeting that process we’d have been riveted!

If you weave all of that journey with it’s ups and downs, dead ends and moments of pure exhilaration into your tweets plus the right mix of personal detail you’ll be on to a winner.

Lastly, look at what bands that you like (big, small local and international) do when on Twitter. Some will be awful self-promoters, actually done by label employees, but some will be great. Model your tweeting on those.

A few who know how it’s done:

Stephen Fry – all engagement, the inside of his brain and virtually no self-promotion.
Amanda Palmer- stream of thoughts plus a little musical talk.
Imogen Heap – now legendary user of Social Media.
Jimmy Eat World – much more about them and the music but still not just promotional.
Calvin Harris – one of my favourites. A globe trotting DJ who tweets his whole outlook on life and occasionally asks you to buy his singles!

And have a look at this post on Flavorwire of 10 Indie rockers to follow – 10 Indie Rockers to Follow on Twitter.

Or from the Social Media mecca, try this – Mashable’s list of Music Tweeps.

6. How often?

Regularly is the key – as it is with all online activity for your act. Once a day is better than a burst of five tweets and then none. I hate ten in a row and then nothing all day and would much prefer a drip feed of mixed up bits. Some personal, some queries and some links is the best way to do it. Try to think of it as how you would talk to people that you were hanging out with to gauge what to talk about, how often, when to change the topic etc.

It’s hard to know when it’s too much. If you feel like you’re detailing every little event and your followers aren’t growing organically or responding then you are probably overdoing it.

7. Be interesting and join the conversation

It’s not all about you. It’s about them. And the conversations you have with them. That’s what the ‘@’ is for. When someone wants to comment on something you have tweeted, they will usually use the ‘@’ reply. This appears in your stream and the public stream of anyone following you and / or the replier.

This is very cool – it means that people can see that you’re getting reactions, some of whom may not already be following you. They may well therefore come over and check out what you’re all about.

It also obviously creates conversations that show you to be an interesting person. These foster genuine relationships with fans and potential fans.

And that’s just when people come to you – it works even better the other way round – when you jump into something that you see going on that someone you’re following is talking about. Be involved, have an opinion and bat it back and forth.

That’s what people want to see – not yet another ‘Check out my MySpace’ tweet – dull, dull, dull!

If you actually look at what some of your followers tweet about, read their bios and go and look at their sites if they link to one, then you’ll find those that you genuinely want to talk to and find out more about.

Of course, when you’re searching for topics that interest you and looking for people to follow (as at point 4 above), you can (as well as following them), join those conversations.

A tool that helps to isolate a larger topic of conversation is Tweet Chat. You log in with your Twitter user details and search for a topic using a hashtag (see point 11). You can then jump in and out of the conversations that are highlighted from within Tweet Chat.

However you do it, this is proper use of Twitter since you’re engaging people that you have, as yet, no direct connection with, but you’re coming to them with a relevant take on something that they’re already talking about. As long as you do this with genuine interest and no hype – i.e. just about the conversation, not trying to point them back to your site or mentioning your music – you’re very likely to find the people that you find in that way checking you out and following you.

Don’t overdo the ‘@reply’. If you find you’re jumping in to conversations and not getting a response or are sending too many short (‘I agree’ / ‘That’s funny’) replies then you’re overdoing it. This makes you look too needy, shallow and the level of noise and interruption that you’re putting into your followers streams could well lead them to unfollow.

And, one last thing, don’t ever just send an ‘@reply’ to someone you follow as an opening gambit which asks them to check out your site or listen to your tracks or such like (i.e. ‘click this link’). It’s like shouting – it’s rude and it turns people off.

Engage them another way first, by getting involved in their discussions and adding your thoughts and they are far more likely to come and check you out by their own volition.

This is part 1 of a 6 part post which are all collated on this page – Twitter for Musicians. If you wish to link to the post, you might decide to link to that page instead.

You can find part 2 here – Twitter for Musicians – interaction.

You know that we think that the hub of all your online activity should be your own band website.

We talked about the key steps you need to take in this post on how to build your fanbase.

Step One is buying a domain name and hosting for your site, followed by our preference for a WordPress based site (and, in our opinion, running the Thesis theme).

We have always recommended Hostgator for hosting your band website. It’s simple to use, reliable, cheap and their support is fantastic.

Whenever you’re reading this, they’d be our recommendation. But this post is really meant for those off you quick off the mark as they are running an awesome price reduction offer today.

But, if you’re reading this on so-called ‘Black Friday’, and you need to buy hosting, go to Hostgator and buy it today as they have a 50% sale on all day, and if you’re quick enough…80% off. That means you can host your band website for as little as $34.95 for three years.

Then, install WordPress (simple with their ‘Fantastico Deluxe’ button) and get at it.

More tips on what to do with your band website to come, but you need to buy your hosting first!

Don’t hang about as the 80% off deal is on now and will sell out asap.

You’ll probably know that I’m a great fan of the ramblings of Bob Lefsetz. I heartily recommend that you sign up to his newsletter.

In one of his posts this week he referred back to an interview with Jerry Greenberg on Bite Me! in which Jerry makes a major statement on how to build your fanbase.

It almost passed me by but the more I thought about it, the more I realised that it is exactly the ideology that we now follow with our artists and which we suggest you should too.

The piece said, “Bud Prager—who managed Leslie West in the old days and Felix Pappalardi—he’s a great producer who I have the utmost respect for. One day we went for lunch…it was 1979/1980 and MTV had just started. Warner Communications funded MTV in the very beginning along with American Express.

Steve Ross had a vision of creating music on TV and having it be a marketing tool. Bud said to me as MTV progressed that he felt MTV hurt the record business. His whole philosophy and, I have to agree with him, was that we broke bands by them going out and getting a fanbase – a real fanbase. AC/DC started out in a little club called Max’s Kansas City then they worked their way up to the Fillmore then the Forum and then the stadiums. They built a fanbase, but so many of these artists just became these video stars and you could see them on video. The only way you could see AC/DC, before videos, was to wait until they went on tour.

Bud felt that in the long run it hurt the artist and hurt their career and then it also created a lot of what we call “The One Shot” video artist – who were really acts that people got because of the video but when they really had to go out and do it there was no substance.”

It’s obvious really isn’t it?

You need a fanbase

If you are hyped and leveraged into the national (or international) consciousness, you’re going to have to be spectacular to make it last. All the kids who get the big break on the TV talent shows cannot sustain the level that those shows give them.

Why not? They just aren’t actually talented enough, but, more importantly, they haven’t built a fanbase. They get instant recognition but it fades in the public interest when the next series comes along.

I can see that the same was true with MTV – and the same is still true for major label artists today that are over hyped and simply manufactured. Sign someone half pretty and get them a load of songs from the current writer / producer du jour. It all sounds good enough but 99 times out of 100, there isn’t anything to back it up. I’ll accept that there will occasionally be an exception.

BUT – if the right thing to do in order to build a career is build a fanbase, then how do you do it?

Look at Arcade Fire – how did they do it. Quality material, no bullshit, slow build of momentum, unreal live shows, true talent.

No-one wanted to sign them when they started, so they did it on their own!

The message is the same now as it was for AC/DC when Jerry Greenberg remembered how they started.

Get your material strong and go out and play it. Watch this video of legendary Island Records boss Chris Blackwell telling how a live show and word of mouth is all you need.

So now that the music industry has changed and everyone wants music for free, how do you build that fanbase and why is that change a good thing?

Well, you can still do what AC/DC did and go out and play. You must! You’ll improve, you’ll bond as a unit and you’ll find champions who will tell everyone how good you are.

BUT - you now have an advantage that outdoes MTV in it’s heyday and will allow you to build momentum slowly, reach a global audience, perfect your style and sound – all the while sticking two fingers up to the old music industry hegemony.

The internet. You must use the internet to build your fanbase.

10 steps to building your fanbase

Here’s what you do:

1. Get your act straight. Right people, right look, right sound and BRILLIANT material. Not ‘good enough’ – brilliant is what is required.

2. Buy a domain name for your band’s website (we use Namecheap – it is!), and then buy hosting for it. Use Hostgator. I know you have loads of choices, but, trust me, this works really well and I have never had a problem.

3. Build a website – Use WordPress, hosted on your own domain (that’s downloaded from wordpress.org not hosted at wordpress.com). Personally I always use Thesis as the theme for the site for a host of reasons that I won’t go into here. It is awesome. If you think you can’t build a site in WordPress and/or Thesis, you will be able to. Honestly – there are loads of videos on YouTube to talk you through it and if you get stuck, find someone at your school, college or even on Elance to do it for you.

4. Build a list of fans using serious email software. You can use Fanbridge – it works fine – but if you are really serious, there is only one choice – Aweber. It will do more than any competing mailing list software and it will last you your whole career.

5. Give people something really valuable in return for joining your mailing list. Sure, give them mp3′s of a few tracks. But, you can do so much more. Give them a whole album and ask them to get their friends to come and sign up for it.

I love Pretty Lights and what he does – 3 albums, 2 EP’s and some live material. All FOR FREE. How does he make a living? He sells merch and has a massive live following. If he hadn’t given this music away he would not have gotten anywhere. The free music gave him the momentum. Now he makes more money from his music career than if he had signed to a major – by a factor of 20 or more. Plus he gets to be a true artist and do exactly what he wants, when he wants with his art.

6. Put the sign-up box for the free stuff on the top right of every page of your site – what designers call ‘above-the fold’. Why? Because it works. Also – have a dedicated ‘squeeze page’ on the site or even on another domain that you can send people to. He doesn’t do this, but Pretty Lights could have a squeeze page at freeprettylights.com. It’s easy to remember and you just put a single page site there with just a small pitch and a sign up box for your Aweber list.

7. Build a quality profile (and interact – don’t ignore any of them) at MySpace (yep, still – it is the music directory and you need to be there), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This is the minimum – there are others that you might wish to add.

8. Shoot LOADS of video of your band. Writing, rehearsing, gigging, in the van – goofing off. It doesn’t matter. Send emails to your list at least once a week telling them to check out something that you have posted somewhere online. DO NOT just email them the week of a show asking them to come. Be in regular content. Put those videos on your YouTube channel and all over the place.

9. Post on Twitter and Facebook all the time. Not inane stuff but things that your fans will want to know.

10. Develop a healthy interest in music blogs. Find ones that might support you and start to build rapport with the bloggers. This is a key way to spread your name when you have material being released. Chris Bracco has the best guide to this currently available – which is free – get it here.

11. Don’t neglect the art! Keep writing. Write much more than you record and rehearse as much as you write. Recording is important and you need tracks to give away, but it is having great material that is going to make your fans talk about you to their friends and build that fanbase. Writing is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing.

12. Play live. Anywhere for anyone. Not to the extent that your fans can’t keep up. But spread wider, cross genres, make new fans. Obviously, collect every name and email address that you can at gigs. Go to other band’s gigs – hand out cards with your site address on them at those gigs. Hang out, meet other bands and meet their manager, agent, sound guy….whatever.

13. Be tired. No, really. If you’re working a full time job and you’re doing enough to succeed, you are going to be exhausted. The people who can keep going when they are exhausted will win.

There you have it – I think that’s a blueprint on how to build your fanbase. I’ve just read it over and, in essence, that is all there is to it.

Of course, I can and will expand on many of those points and go further another day – how do you move from this point to selling records, how to go up a level etc.

But, right now, that’s not important. It’s not important since you MUST build a fanbase to get started and to achieve anything – whether that is DIY and Direct-to-Fan success or the aim of getting signed. Either route will happen much more easily if you have built the fanbase yourself – that’s what other fans will see so they will want to be in the in-crowd – and it’s what agents. managers and record label A&R will see that will help take you to the next level.

One last thing. This is not ‘selling out’. This is ‘selling’. It does not cheapen the art. It gives you a chance.

It will only happen if you do it – start now.

Step one is critical! But as soon as you have something ready for the world to hear, build your website at the heart of your efforts. Go and get a domain (Namecheap) and hosting (Hostgator) right now if you don’t have that sorted yet!

Image credit – by wonker

Our last post was all about the best software and methods you should use for building your band mailing list.

Although our best pick is Aweber (read the post to see why!), one of our mild criticisms of Fanbridge has just bee fixed.

With the launch of the Fanbridge Fan Collector uses of Fanbridge for their band mailing list solution can now get a fancy app for Apple mobiles (ipod, itouch and ipad) that can be used at a gig to take email addresses and whatever other details you desire to take from your new fans.

We love any method that does away with handwriting lists and scraps of paper and this is very welcome.

It also syncs automatically with your online FanBridge account.

The key issue for us is that we want to see all artists building a mailing list in a professional software system that they control. If you’re not sure whether to go for FanBridge, the app is another reason that might well sway it for you.

Let’s hope that Aweber are going to get this sorted soon too – as they have indicated!