First off, when you’re promoting your band on Twitter we absolutely want to stay away from spam. That means no direct messaging people with links (if you haven’t spoken to them before). Same for using the @username to get someone’s attention. No unsolicited links or promos!
If you haven’t spoken to that person before, then you shouldn’t be bombarding them with links to your album. At the very least, give them a shout out and start a conversation. As long as your Bandcamp or website URL is in your profile description, they will organically check you out.
Now that we’ve gotten spam out of the way, let’s look at how you can target fans who would listen to your band, and how to get their attention and get them to follow you.
The Process
Start by making a list of about 5-10 bands who meet this criteria:
- You love them
- They have similar music, or a similar audience to your music
- They have at least 3,000 followers (if not much more)
Take a look at their followers list. The main technique here is to follow the people who are already following music like yours.
So go through these bands one at a time, and follow their followers. This will get their fans attention.
Depending on a few factors, about 5-20% of them will follow you back.
Ways to maximize the ones who follow you back
First off, get yourself custom graphics. That means profile picture, header image, and background. Do not use any of Twitter’s default graphics.
Heck, even a plain white background is better than the default blue twitter background.
Bands that I do this method for have had a great response if they have custom graphics. Any bands that I’ve worked with who have default images consistently produce worse results.
Also, it’s important that you are tweeting regularly.
If you only have 8 tweets, don’t expect this technique to produce great results.
How many should I follow per day?
At max, I recommend you follow 100 people a day. Any more than that and you might start to get flagged as a spammer by Twitter (who follows 1000 people per day, seriously?)
If you have a brand new account, and you only have 10 followers, I would only follow 20-40 per day. Once you’ve gotten over 80 followers though, I would say it’s safe to start hitting the 100/day mark.
What about the people who don’t follow me back?
You’ll want to keep track of anyone who doesn’t follow you back, and after about 3-5 days, unfollow them. This gives them some time to follow you back.
It’s very important that you don’t keep followers around who aren’t following you back (unless you really like their updates or you know them personally) so that your Twitter presence doesn’t get tarnished (it just looks bad when you’re following 10,000 people and you only have 500 followers).
It can be a bit tricky to realize which people you followed each day, and calculate the date since you followed them. Tracking people in an excel spreadsheet can work, but it takes some time.
What type of results should I expect?
If you take the 5-10 minutes a day (about 4 hours a month) to follow about 100 people each day, you should expect between 75-225 new followers each month, depending on how well you’ve optimized your profile graphics and how often you tweet.
Promo Box: My name is Andrew Muller, and I run a website called therealmusician.com, which is about personal development for musicians.
If you want more Twitter followers, but don’t want to do it yourself, there’s hope for you yet!
I run this exact Twitter campaign for artists for a super low fee of $50 a month. The artists that have signed up have had really awesome results. They love it because it saves them a ton of work and the hassle of having to remember to do this everyday.
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