Is Twitter The New MySpace?

Social networks seem to have a fairly predictable life cycle; months or years of obscurity are followed by a sudden meteoric ascent, a spell of glorious world domination, and then a slow decline as advertisers and users realise that most of the other ‘users’ are actually dormant acccounts. Is this the case with MySpace?

MySpace for Music

We all know that MySpace is ugly, but for musicians it has been a very useful promotional and networking platform. It is not the hot new thing anymore, but it is still powerful and widely-used.

It may well be in decline in terms of general users and new adoption, but I suspect that the userbase of artists and independent music fans will stick around a bit longer than those who simply want to keep in touch with their friends (there are many other sites that do this much better than MySpace). As such, I wouldn’t abandon MySpace just yet – but in the dynamic area of Internet-based music promotion, it’s vital to get on new waves as early as possible.

Does Twitter Really Rock?

Although I heard about Twitter a long time ago, I’ve only recently begun to explore its potential in terms of music. Facebook Pages seemed like a useful promotional tool, but this is something that requires a lot of work to get moving. Twitter, on the other hand, is designed for the minimum-effort approach – tweets can only be 140 characters long.

Twitter has reached the critical mass of users required for it to be a truly useful tool. In fact, it is still gaining momentum, and may become the next ‘must-have’ social networking phenomenon (if indeed it hasn’t achieved this status already).

Therefore, it makes sense to take advantage of this momentum in any way possible. David Hooper is convinced that Twitter is a vital resource for new musicians; he is certainly au fait with many of the tried-and-trusted online marketing tricks, so it may be worthwhile keeping an eye on his blog for developments in this area.

He is also selling an ebook about using twitter for music promotion, so it may be a case that he spotted a niche for marketing an ebook rather than a breakthrough in marketing music. The ‘sales letter’ page for the book certainly ticks all the internet marketer boxes; big red headings, yellow highlighter, bonus offers, time-based scarcity bonus, bolded keyphrases, multiple calls to action – although I notice he missed out on the reduced price trick (such as worth $99, get it for only $27). Perhaps he will put this in later…



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