The Tweetest Thing – Bands On Twitter

When Twitter first emerged, I was one of many people who greeted it with significant scepticism. After all, why should anyone want to sift through an endless array of comments about how satisfied a complete stranger was by their breakfast/shower/airbag? However, now that Twitter has gained a larger audience, it seems to be an ideal platform for bands to connect with potential fans…

Fascination Tweet

If you have never even heard of Twitter, you are probably not from the USA and/or don’t do much online social networking. Basically, Twitter is a micro-blogging platform – you write small ‘tweets’ that can be about anything you like, within a 140 character limit. You can also ‘follow’ other Twitterers, so that their tweets appear as a sort of feed on your own page.

The key to a good Twitter initiation is probably in who you choose to follow. Because the barrier to posting is so low, you can tweet the smallest thoughts or observations, or quickly share a link that caught your interest. If you follow someone who is doing interesting things, then these glimpses into their daily life can be very revealing (on the other hand, if you follow someone who only documents how many times they floss, the rewards may be somewhat less, unless you’re a dentist).

Where The Tweets Have No Name

Twitter is in many ways a slimmed-down version of blogging, where tweet-feeds are a streamlined form of RSS. As such, it’s a very fast way of getting information from and to large numbers of people – even from your mobile phone.

It’s very easy to find and follow people on Twitter – and equally easy to unfollow them if you change your mind. This means that tweets flow quickly, and connections form just as quickly. Whereas a blog post requires quite a bit of time and effort, a tweet can be a throwaway comment – but somehow the cumulative effect of a tweet stream has considerable appeal.

Twitter for Musicians

So how can bands leverage this new system? Ariel Hyatt (Twitter id @CyberPR) posted an introduction to Twitter for musicians over at Music Think Tank. This is preceded by an interesting piece on the general Twitter environment by Laura Fitton, who is one of the Twitterati – a celebrity in the sphere of social networking.

These are two people who ‘get‘ Twitter, and have had success in using it to further both their business and social lives. The case for using social networking to promote your band/brand is compelling, and will certainly be essential in the years to come – so don’t waste any time getting on board, at least to test the waters. If you feel like keeping up with the world of music technology on Twitter, I will be using @podcomplex and @musictechnology to explore this arena…