8 tips to help you grow on Twitter in 2021

Twitter has cemented itself as the go-to social media platform to discover trending topics and build hype. 

With 330 million monthly active users, 1.3 billion user accounts, and 145 million daily users, Twitter is perfect for connecting with other musicians, music professionals, and fans. [Source: Oberlo]

But how can you grow on Twitter in 2021? 

Here are 8 tips to help you build an audience for yourself and your content.

Optimise your content for Retweets

How do you come across new content on Twitter 90% of the time? Retweets.

This is how the majority of growth happens, retweets instantly place your content in front of completely new audiences.

People retweet for three main reasons:

1) To show appreciation
2) To show they agree with something
3) To save and bookmark something for later

So bear this in mind when constructing your posts and building your Twitter audience:

1) Keep it simple and interesting. Concise and novel content does well and people show their appreciation for fresh, elegantly articulated ideas.

2) State your position on something, people retweet to signal that they’re on your side of a discussion. This is particularly effective if your take is a fresh or contrarian position. This could be anything from your views on a hotly discussed new album, the latest Versuz battle, or anything you care about really.

3) If you know a subject inside out, tweet step-by-step threads. These can explain to a reader how to do something and offer real value. People often retweet to save these threads for reference later. For an artist, there are so many things you can explain to people from “tips you wish you knew when starting out”, to music production and marketing tactics. Just think about what would have helped you at a different stage of your career for inspiration.

Reach out to potential fans using Twitter search

This is a quick way to find people who are interested in your music. If you’re a hip-hop producer, enter the search term “hip hop” to find people who are looking for hip-hop producer recommendations or users who simply want to listen to new tunes. This way, you can reach out to potential collaborators and increase your following by tweeting your music. 

If you want to raise your game, you can also use social media tools such as HootSuite and Tweetdeck. Through these tools, you can set up rows of Twitter searches that automatically update every time a Twitter user posts a new tweet related to your topic of choice. 

Use your website and newsletter to promote your Twitter profile

Don’t forget to add a Twitter badge to your website. This may seem like a no-brainer, but believe us, many artists forget that they need to do this. 

Twitter has its own embedding tool – Publish – which enables you to generate an embed code for Twitter profiles, posts, lists, handles, and hashtags that can then be pasted into your website. 

If you send out regular newsletters to your followers, make sure that you encourage them to follow you on Twitter. Pique your fans’ interest by including an engaging Twitter post with every newsletter. 

Optimise your profile

Your Twitter profile should highlight what you’re all about. Keep your profile photo and bio up to date. Add your Amplify.link to your Twitter bio to direct your Twitter followers to other channels. Create a branded hashtag (e.g. if your band’s name is King Blue, use #kingblue as your branded hashtag) and keep in mind the relevant industry tags and keywords that you should use in your posts to boost searchability. 

Add relevant hashtags

Hashtags are there for you to label and categorise your content. Adding hashtags to your posts increases your chance of being discovered by other users. Don’t add irrelevant hashtags though, as this may actually hurt rather than help your account since your posts may be flagged as spam. 

Know the best time to post

According to social media expert Nick Martin, you should opt for morning posts because “People are getting started on their day. They’re taking the morning to get caught up on articles, scroll social media for news, and get their brains ready for work. Later in the afternoon people are heads-down on projects or in meetings, and they have less time to engage.” [Source: Hootsuite]

If you have a global audience, you need to sprinkle your posts around the clock to ensure that you connect with everyone, irrespective of their location. 

Regardless of the time of day you post, the frequency of good content is important for growth, if you post several times a day that’s more chances for someone to discover your content.

Add videos and images to your Tweets

Adding an image to your Tweet increases your engagement by 150%. Videos are super effective, as Tweets with videos are six times more likely to be retweeted. They also get ten times more engagement than posts without videos. Twitter users prefer watching videos on their phones – so vertical videos tend to work a bit better. The ideal video length on Twitter is between 6 to 15 seconds – so try not to exceed this “limit”. [Source: Yum Yum Videos]

Offer Twitter-exclusive content to your existing audience

Encourage existing fans to follow you on Twitter by posting Twitter-exclusive content. Use your other platforms as marketing channels to encourage people to access exclusive content on Twitter. 

You can also offer Twitter-exclusive giveaways, raffles, and contests that will keep your Twitter followers entertained and engaged. It can be something as simple as an acoustic session, a Q&A or a merch giveaway. 

Key Takeaways

• Optimise for retweets
• Use Twitter search to find potential fans and collaborators
• Add the Twitter icon and badge to your website and newsletters
• Update your profile pic and bio
• Add an Amplify.link to your bio to direct your followers to your music, website, merch etc. 
• Use hashtags to increase your posts’ searchability
• Use your other platforms to promote your Twitter profile
• Post Twitter-exclusive content to ramp up follower numbers

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash