Let’s not beat around the bush: tweeting is easy. Even the most cursory glance at the Twitter feed of just about any celebrity will prove this point. For example, it probably didn’t take Ashanti very long to come up with her classic “Hey yalll!!! What do u think about face book??” So it’s true that tweeting is easy, but using Twitter as an effective tool to engage with your fan base and build your career - is hard. Lucky for you, there are a few musical artists who have Twitter figured out so why not learn from them and see what you can apply to your own future tweets.
You could choose to forgo basing your Twitter identity on your music at all. Seems counterintuitive but some people make it work for them, like Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy. He tweets almost nothing about what he sings about, but tirelessly about political and social issues he cares about.
Why it works: Sometimes the music says all it needs to about itself. A lot of followers genuinely enjoy getting to understand a more complete image of the artist behind them via what content they share. It doesn’t have to be music related to appeal to a music fan. This is one of those weird industries where, if someone likes your music, they are more likely to care about what you care about just because you care about it. Weird and true.
She’s pretty much owning the Twitter game right now. Whether it’s being passive aggressive in response to TLC’s shade-throwing, or posting as many pictures of her new niece as any annoying aunt on social media would, RiRi is very unabashedly herself. She also makes sure to post and retweet key things pertaining to her actual music career. While she’s certainly achieved a level of stardom that affords her to freedom to do basically whatever she wants without serious damage to her career, there’s nothing to be lost by applying her “these are all the sides of me”, confident approach to your own burgeoning Twitter presence.
He exclusively posts “party tips”. People who don’t give a damn about his music will follow him. So there’s another option for a Twitter brand: pick a shareable gimmick and take it to the house.
A lot of artists are ‘eccentric’. So maybe just get on Twitter and figure out how to use its many functions to express exactly the kind of ‘eccentric’ you are. That’s what Cat Power does (aka Chan Marshall), and does so well.
If you happen to be a naturally funny person, please save yourself some time, do your career a favor, and just be really funny on Twitter. Most of us can’t do it, and there is literally no single greater way to win followers and fans. MC and producer El-P knows this and is Twitter famous more than he was ever real life famous.
Twitter, at the end of the day, is just a non-stop stream of bullshit. Sometimes it’s best to just acknowledge that and participate in that in the most artful, glorious, textured, interesting way you can. And occasionally throw in some info about shows and albums and friends’ stuff you wanna promote, but not too much because honestly, people would rather hear about the time you saw a live bear in a movie theater than see the 10th tweet about your show this weekend. Grimes really gets everything I just said and people love her Twitter account because of it.
Contributor: Muzooka Inc. is a social music platform that allow artists’ demos to reach an audience of music lovers. Muzooka users listen to tracks and vote for ones they like, ranking them among others in the system. High ranking songs gain attention from the hand-selected panel of industry pros. Shawn Wilson is co-founder and CEO of Muzooka.