How to use Twitter effectively as an unsigned band or act

How To Use Twitter effectively; Welcome to Hot Tip Tuesday, teaching you how to use twitter effectively as an unsigned band or act.

This is the first in a new weekly series from Live and Unsigned, now that we are deep into the 2012 auditions, it’s time to start promoting yourselves, and learning how to effectively use Twitter as a promotional tool is of utmost importance for unsigned bands and acts.

How to start using Twitter effectively for unsigned bands and acts

To use twitter effectively you must know how to set up a good profile page, luckily – it’s not rocket science! The obvious aim is to allow Twitter users quickly know what you do, but also it helps users to find you (searching is the strongest tool to master in order to learn how to use Twitter effectively, and we will come back to this in more detail in a moment!)

Twitter is all about simplicity, and you need to play into its hands! Most of the time, Twitter users will view your profile as a thumbnail image, so your profile picture needs to be high quality and simple. In just 160 characters, your ‘bio’ information must strike the right tone and engage potential fans (include links to your Facebook, YouTube and/or website here!)

How to engage the right people on Twitter

All your favourite bands and acts use Twitter, but you’re not a household name – yet! That means that you can’t just wait for followers to come to you. When someone follows you – follow them back! If you know how to use Twitter effectively, it’s not only potential fans that you will come across, but also promoters, festivals, studios, reviewers, DJs and other bands.

So you want to know the big secret for how to use Twitter effectively? Searching! On Facebook you search for people/bands that you like – great if you already know what you’re searching for. Twitter is unique in that you can search for what people are talking about, and tweeps will stumble across you if you post effective Tweets. As an unsigned band looking for gigs why not type in ‘unsigned bands London’ and look through to find some great opportunities – for example a promoter who is ‘looking for some unsigned bands to play a last minute gig in London this weekend!’

Using the search tool effectively in Twitter is key to a long and fulfilling relationship with the social networking giant! We use social media dashboard Hootsuite – great for scheduling tweets to go out at certain times of the day and also for saving search terms so that whenever someone tweets the term you have saved – it will come up in your streams!

How NOT to use Twitter effectively!

There is nothing more annoying than someone over using their Twitter account – it’s a quick way to lose those followers you have worked so hard to gain! Whilst you will want to engage users by retweeting or replying to tweets regularly, be aware that all your followers can see retweets (replies are safe because only people following both parties in a conversation will have these tweets appear in their timeline – so chat away!)

The reason some people have millions of followers is because they are funny and relevant. It’s pretty simple, tweeting about popular and interesting events (pay close attention to trending topics in your area) will engage users to retweet and chat with you, especially if you can engage some measured wit and humour.

If time and resources are an issue, you can link your Facebook to your Twitter so that when you update one – it updates the other. This is a great time saver but be aware of two things: 1 – if you get Twitter to repost to Facebook AND get Facebook to repost to Twitter you run the risk of creating an infinite loop – hilarious for your followers, until they ultimately get annoyed and unfollow you; 2 – You will want to use @replies in Twitter and #hashtags, this can make Facebook posts look messy, so use wisely!

What are your hot tips for how to use Twitter?

If you have any other tips post, we want to hear them! Post your comments in the box below to help others and see if you can find your band or act some good tips too!

In the coming months we will use Hot Tip Tuesday to give unsigned bands and acts tips on Facebook, website management, as well as other aspects of the unsigned life - so come back next Tuesday for part two of Hot Tip Tuesday.