 Ah, Twitter. Fun fact, it's actually my favorite social media platform, and you'd probably never know if you follow me there since I don't tweet often. But every day I'm reading and learning, as I do believe Twitter is where the most interesting discussions are happening on the internet. Sure, YouTube has some of the smartest people in the world talking at you. Instagram has the most beautiful people, and Facebook has your family members arguing over Donald Trump that you can get in fights with. But Twitter really has everything. It has broken down many of the walls between fans and the musicians they love, and given fans a direct source to get closer and have conversations with musicians they never would have been able to talk to a decade ago. For musicians who haven't yet built a large fan base, it's created a direct line to build relationships with fans. So that's exactly what we're going to talk about in this video, is how to use Twitter to build relationships with fans and get them to listen to your music. Hi, I'm Jesse Kennan, a music marker who's teaching musicians how to go from 0 to 10,000 fans, and this is Muse Formation. So let's get into this since I have a lot to say. When thinking about how to behave on Twitter, think of it like a party. Who do you want to be around at the party? Naturally, you want to be around the interesting people who are social, having fun, and actually participating in the party. The people who don't use Twitter a lot are the people who are already passed down on the couch. Why even bother with them? They're going to be no fun at all. Instead, focus on interacting with the people who are participating in the party, people with whom you have things in common. Note what I said there too, the things you have in common with, because that's everything here on Twitter. Interact with all of the fun and interesting people and let the annoying, boring people do their own thing. That's why there's a mute button on Twitter, so you don't have to ever hear from these people again. So going back to my guide on social media, which you can click on the link in the description or it's on a card right now, let's remember the graph I made about what you're going to post about on social media, but I want to refine it for Twitter a little bit. I think you can do most of your bond building here, and I would up that percentage here since that's what Twitter is built for. While you should tell stories about your music, I think what Twitter does that's so amazing is showing off your personality and your insight and random thoughts that creates bonds as fans can get to know you and see your personality quirks and build a bond with that personality. So what's so great about Twitter is recommending things is so welcome. You love a song? Tweet about it. Watching a great new TV show? Do the same. This is where that's welcome. Also show people what you just learned, whether it's an article on systematic racism or a sick video on how to build your fanbase. Intent? Tell people what you're really enjoying and make conversations with the people who respond. Twitter's about finding the people you have things in common with and growing a community. I'll be totally honest with you, I've made some great friends from Twitter and they were now my friends in real life. I mean I even followed my girlfriend on there before we met since I find it to be the place where you could find the people you have the most commonality with since each day we're all discussing our interests out loud. So to find these people you share interests with and are going to bond with, I'm going to recommend you use the app Tweetdeck for desktop and here's why. There's these search lanes you can use which are amazing for doing what we talked about in our video on building community which is linked in the description and in the card right now. You can enter in all your targets and follow their most passionate fans to start conversations with and notice I said conversations, not slide into their DMs with fire emojis. I mean relate and be a human and start genuine conversations with about the things you share in common. The bad news is this isn't as easy on mobile but you can do it with Twitter search in the Twitter app Hootsuite or Tweetbot which all work great. You can also search your own artist name and follow people if they tweet about you. If you realize you have a cool musical insight and it's rare you can even see who's tweeting about it, strike up a conversation with somebody who is tweeting about it since that's a way to make sure that you bond with the people who have the same thoughts as you. Let's also talk about Twitter lists. When you're doing your targeting remember to always look for every music writer you come across Twitter handle since this is the best place to become part of their community since music writers live on Twitter since they love to register takes on fucking everything. Follow them or put them on a list and become a name they recognize and hopefully when you sign their inbox with a press release if you have a bit of annoying and instead insightful or engaging they will be way more likely to open your pitch. The other great benefit of using Tweetdeck is it can schedule posts. Most people's weekdays are jam-packed if you worry about getting content out you can make it easier by taking the time to put together your social media plan for the week when you have the time. I should also note Hootsuite can do this on mobile as well. Now let's talk about telling stories and promoting your music on Twitter. Just like Instagram we want to tell stories around your songs and on Twitter since you only have 280 characters to do it you need to use threads where you can reply to yourself and it will make all the posts link together. While this sounds pathetic to an outsider it's actually respected on Twitter. Continuously telling these stories is how you get the promo work done for your songs. Just make sure the link to your new song is the first tweet of your thread. Let's also remember whenever you drop new content is totally commonplace to tweet about it more than a few times. I'd be remiss to not advise you to also post a picture of your single or a strong image whenever you make one of these tweets because as you can see it takes up more real estate on the timeline and then people are more likely to see it. It really helps to stylize your text here and there are all sorts of things that can be done. In my 1975 video I showed you how they stylize their Twitter feed. You want your fans to recognize when it's you posting since scrolling through the feed can get monotonous. Now let's talk about engagement. The world of Twitter also finds it acceptable to retweet a fan talking about your music especially if it's insightful or funny. Yet again this should be maybe 10 to 20% of what you do on your content drop days and maybe only the best ones on any other day. It's just an average fan tweeting about that they love your song. We get it. People listen to your music. Keep it to the special ones as it also encourages fans to be more creative than just posting innocuous endorsements of your music. But all this talk about posting you're probably wondering how often you should post. Let's take Twitter back to this party analogy. You don't want to be the person at the party who talks too much. Says dumb things all the time and annoys everyone. Twitter is a great party. Don't ruin it for everyone. If you're the person who is cool, fun and interesting others at the party will want to talk to you, retweet you and tell others how cool you are. If you are lame and annoy everyone the party will move to another room to get away from you. And what I'm saying here is let's say you have a couple hundred followers and you were seeing them go down in numbers instead of up. You may want to refine what you're doing because you become the guy who is playing Wonderwall on an acoustic guitar driving everyone out of the room. Nice move. As well you don't need to do anything you find to be lame. If you don't want to use every little social media trick in the book you don't have to. Lord famously told her labels social media people that if she used hashtags she would alienate her audience. She instead tweets her real emotions and is barely self promotional. And plenty of other small artists make bonds with new fans by just tweeting what they are passionate about. Remember people at the party like you if you act like yourself and find a commonality with one another. Don't pretend to be something you are not. Look around Twitter and find the language and technology you feel comfortable with using. Now let's get into some general Twitter tips. Just like people head to the Instagram bio to see what you're about your profile page has the ability to show people a great roadmap since you could have the same bio as Instagram. You could also put your link tree in the bio just like we discussed in my Instagram video and you could pin a tweet that shows off your personality. It could be great to put your latest single here in the pin tweet but you could often promote that in the banner up above and you could save the space to show off your personality on why somebody would follow you. You should open your preferences and allow anyone on Twitter to message you and leave on notifications for your DMs. Shockingly this is how many people conduct business and it also allows you to talk to fans and grow relationships since that's what we're here for. You should follow everyone who follows you and participate in the conversation they start in order to improve the relationship you have with them. If you are annoyed reading what they write make Twitter lists so you can ignore them or mute them temporarily. Let's also talk about topical posts. There's always things happening in the world and that's what Twitter is about is discussing them. It's all about the jokes the internet is having right now. If you are passionate about current trends and events weighing in your takes on these events can get you shared fast and really grow your audience especially if you are good at breaking things down. Nothing has more currency than a reaction to what's happening right now on Twitter. Let's go over some rules for spreading your content. You can retweet yourself and your big announcements after two hours and it will re-populate in your followers timeline but just remember you gotta make sure you don't annoy your followers. As well tweets don't age like fine wine. If your tweet isn't getting any hearts and retweets after an hour it's not going to suddenly get discovered. If the tweet will still be funnier and insightful later it can help to get some in the notes app and try again at some other point or workshop it a bit more and post it another day. Or you can leave it up and retweet it for Night Twitter because it really is a real phenomenon that the people who are on Twitter all day are not the same ones on at night. It's stunning how some things will spread during different hours which brings me to as I've said before when you don't have a lot of fans analytic apps are kind of worthless but there's one exception which are the apps that tell you what time to post and this website that has clearly not been redesigned since 2008 called Twirid will tell you when to post. Use this to find out when you should schedule the stories for your announcements. I tell everyone when they're starting out on Twitter to try putting 20 minutes of effort into Twitter each day. Go through your targets but also get people you respect that would want to hear from it and follow them since so much of Twitter is about getting inspired and learning and growing as a person from it by fighting those who are into what you are. I get so many great musical recommendations and thoughts from the people I respect on Twitter. Getting to hear my favorite author's thoughts on things is something I wish I had my entire life and could be rewarding and outside of just growing a fan base it can help you get inspired and be a better person and artist. Lastly people often leave a party because they find the crowd lame usually because they didn't give the party a chance. One of the biggest reasons people leave Twitter is they follow idiots and people they don't have commonality with out of obligation. The reason I use tweetbot is I'm able to block out everything I don't care about with their mute function. You can see my list here and you see it's mostly sports and Donald Trump fans because I don't want to hear about that stuff because it makes me unhappy. There's plenty of people here interested in what you are. It can be amazingly fulfilling medium you may have to put some effort into and walk around the party to find those who you bond with. It never ceases to amaze me how much people can get out of Twitter if they search out like-minded people and join the vibrant and supportive community I guarantee you will find it just as rewarding as me. Thanks for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I want to answer them so leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did please like, subscribe and get notified and I'm going to be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information no playlist or con artists only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you want to learn more about me work on a record with me or check out any of my books podcasts or anything else I do go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon on all the socials. One last thing there's two playlists here one is on how to grow your fan base from zero to ten thousand fans and the other is specially chosen to match this video or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.