Twitter’s mission statement is that “Twitter serves the public conversation”.
It imagines itself to be a site for journalism, public relations, and interpersonal communication. It is different from other social media in the sense that it imagines posts to broadcast outwards towards the public. Messages flow from one-to-many people, not from one-to-one person like in a chatroom.
Because of this, Twitter is an incredibly useful tool for musicians to become known. It allows for musicians to build fandom and community, share their work, share progress, and think out loud.
It’s different from other more “quiet” social media, such as Snapchat and Instagram, where textual content fades into the background. What you say matters. Conversations happen on Twitter with words, and they happen in public in front of people.
Twitter is Promotion: Broadcasting Your Musical Work
One of the most common usages of Twitter for musicians to broadcast work. Many artists such as Beyonce, Bruno Mars, and Mitski use their Twitter in this way. They use Twitter to let projects be known to the public.
These artists tweet infrequently to cross-promote their social media, to announce new music, to announce shows and tours, and to catalog successes. The way in which they tweet does not clog up feeds, and their accounts are low maintenance.
Yet, these artists are only able to tweet in this way because they already have large followings. Their large followings are carried over from other places, allowing for them to not devote a lot of attention to Twitter. Still, as their Tweets get retweeted, they allow for projects to be known across time and space. They naturally catalog an artist’s progression and serve as a form of documentation on top of promotion.
Twitter is Journalism: Connecting Fans Together
Another usage of Twitter is to share with one community what is happening in another.
If journalism is simply the communication of what is happening to others far away, Twitter can serve as a form of journalism for your community. In this sense, Twitter continues to be what it was originally: a micro-blogging platform.
Within your genre, scene, friend group, or fandom, you can use your Twitter account to have public conversations about what is going on. In this sense, Twitter can be used to converse with the public, connecting communities together that would otherwise be separated by space.
These conversations keep these spaces alive, maintaining their activity. At the same time, these conversations lower the barrier to join these communities. You do not have to be in the same place or time to know what is going on within a community of people.
This usage of Twitter is beneficial once you have become integrated within a community. It happens as you follow a community, have conversations, and retweet others' tweets. This approach gains you followers as people slowly come to you to know what is going on. At the same time, this approach is very committed. It defines you in terms of a group of others.
Twitter is Communication: Building Fan Communities
Most broadly, Twitter is a place where you can interact with people across time and space. Anyone can reply to anyone – fans to celebrities, citizens to politicians, friends to friends.
For musicians, this can be the way in which you build community. Artists such as Charli XCX and Rina Sawayama have built online communities where the artist directly engages with their fans. Smaller artists such as Weatherday and dltzk have broken in the music industry just by staying involved with their fans.
Fans want to know that they are being heard. They care about artists, but they also care for each other as a community. They value when artists give back to their community, but they also value when artists indicate that they are listening to their community as well. Artists that do this share a community’s humor, know who’s who, and resonate with the feelings of a community.
This is the most involved way in which artists use Twitter, but it is a way that allows for artists and fans to be deeply connected. It creates followings of dedicated fans who buy whatever you put out. It lets you find fans who care about your success.
Building these communities requires you to speak as well as listen. You need to be multifaceted: funny, caring, understanding, and open. It also allows for you to be incredibly self-expressive, having a space to share your feelings with a community.
You can build a space where people understand one another and protect one another.
Getting Started on Twitter
For help crafting a strategy for communicating over Twitter, Starlight has everything you may need. We have a variety of services for artists at any level to grow, build fanbases, and get your music out there.
