A social media strategy for independent artists

Pt. 1 - Twitter

Independent artists in almost every niche need perhaps more networking skills than anything else.

Twitter is full of artists eager to interact, that's usually the reason people join twitter in the first place - to communicate.
Twitter is also a great audience multiplier. You can share your links to all your friends/followers, and they can 'retweet' it to thousands of their friends, who in turn retweets it to thousands of theirs.

• Start an audience on Twitter by asking your friends to 'follow' your Twitter account.
Your closest friends are likely to be your most loyal followers. Meaning they might reply/retweet/favorite your links more often, which gives it points in the twitter world - and on the web in general.

• Share your links, thoughts, and pictures.
Leave your digital footprint by sharing anything you create or work on, as well as stuff that you like. A tweet can be up to 140 characters, and links are shortened automatically. Your first few lines should be like a title, the next few lines should contain the link you're promoting, and mention any people involved (with their @Twitter name if possible), and any #hashtags/keywords you want to include.

• Use your twitter around the web, to comment on sites, Tweet links, and increase your visibility.
Don't just make a timeline (list of 'tweets') full of self promotion. Your Twitter will undoubtly become much more popular if you interact with other people.  Interact with your colleagues or friends; share stuff you find around the web by clicking the Twitter button found almost everywhere, it often fills in article and author names which should be included with the link; especially if it's their @Twitter name. 

On Youtube you can connect your twitter account.  Then when someone Likes or Favorites your video they will automatically mention your @Name on Twitter with the link, if they have their account connected. This is also a good way to network with videomakers on Youtube and Twitter at the same time. 

• Follow/Support people with similar interests 
Most artists love it when you share their work, and will often follow you and return the favor.

 By following and sharing content by people with similar interests, they are very likely to follow back and REtweet your content, etc. This is the most common way to build an audience of likeminded people on Twitter. If you need to you can manage who you follow, who follows back, etc. with some of the 'twitter tools' (section below). You can write comments on many websites by logging in with your twitter account in the comment section, to link back to your Twitter.

Make your Twitter account the 'number one hub' for your kind of art, your 'niche', then link back to it anywhere you can. 

Some more tips about Twitter basics: Check out this infographic on How to use Twitter, by Twiends.

Tools for the job:

Klout - Measuring your influence


When we talked about gaining points in the twitterverse earlier I was referring to things like your Klout score.  Klout measures your influence by keeping track of how many followers you have, how many retweets and mentions you get, as well as other factors. Most importantly it gives you a score from 1-100, which grows or shrinks over time. This is important because many people will be looking at your Klout score to determine if they'll follow you or not.
And when you have a high score you'll be getting more followers every day.
The strategy explained in this post should help increase your Klout score.

Formulist
Make intuitive lists of the people you are following. You can use this to see who doesn't follow back, as well as many other things.

Followfriday.
I use this for the recommendation feature. Under the MyFF tab there's a list of people who have been recommended by people I'm already following. There I can easily click to follow new people and mention their name + the names of those who recommended them, on Twitter. This gets their attention and they usually follow back =)

Click Recommend to see how to recommend someone on Twitter. A popup window will open with the right info to post.
It includes #Hashtags to reach more people, @Tubeblogr (my Twitter name), and a link.

Use these tools the right way and you'll reach lots of people. Don't use Twitter to spam or flood links (posting a lot in short amount of time)

Buffer App
Buffer is a tool to queue your tweets, spreading them out over time instead of posting them all at once.

Let us know in the comments how your experience has been with networking on Twitter, and which tools you find useful.