In this post, I will show you how I find targeted fans on Twitter. Also, I will also show you why you need to target the right fans to get best results from your Twitter music promotion campaigns.
The reason we use specific targeting on Twitter is due to the fact that we only want people that will either , engage with our content , share our music , purchase our merchandise and maybe buy tickets to our shows.
We don’t want to attract followers that don’t have any interest in hip hop music. These people will be annoyed by the content we tweet about. So if you eliminate all the people you don’t want as followers, and focus on the persona’s of Twitter users you do want to attract as fans.
Creating An Ideal Twitter Follower Persona’s List.
Follower personas are the personality traits of the types of people you want to gain as followers on Twitter. It’s important to write down similar keywords and phrases that your potential new fans on Twitter will have. This will make it a much easier process to help you identify, and target the right followers who will engage with your content on Twitter. One of the easiest places to start is to target industry hip hop artists that you sound like. So if you sound like J Cole take a look at the followers that he has and the common keywords they will use in the Tweets and in the descriptions on Twitter.
WORD OF CAUTION : You need to keep you wits about you when conducting this research on Twitter. Many artists on Twitter try to game the system by purchasing fake followers from a shady websites. So use a tool like twitter audit to be sure that an influencers profile has genuine followers .
As a hip hop beat maker at The Corporate Thief Beats , I target hip hop artists on Twitter as these users are my potential market of my rap beats. From my research, I have found a common keyword that tons of hip hop artists use in their biographies on Twitter. The keyword Booking and Features comes up on nearly every hip hop artists profile page. You can find common keyword phrases of your potential fans too. Like for example most J Cole fans will actually say in their description that they are a “J Cole Fan”. The best way to find these keywords is to use Twitter’s Advanced Search. This gives you better parameters to find your target audience more effectively. Make sure that you type common #hashtags into Twitter’s advanced search area. If you make music similar to that of Drake and you find popular hashtags that he uses like #viewsfromthesixth , then it will be easy for you to start targeting all of his active followers.Twitter advanced search
To get this to work right click on the accounts tab on twitter after you have searched for the #viewsfromthesixth hashtag. This will bring up a whole list of followers that use that hashtag. If you are using the follow for follow method to build your fanbase on Twitter, having the accounts tab open will make it easier for you to follow a bunch accounts quick and easy. This will always come back to good vigilant research of the Twitter persona’s you are trying to target. Again looking at the rap artist Logic , for example , one of his hashtags #whoisnikki went viral with tons of his fans sharing that Tweet. If you think his fans could be interested in your music it might be a good idea to start following them. Hopefully a certain percentage will follow you back.
Influential Hip Hop Blogger Outreach Tactics
Another effective way to build your following on Twitter is to find influential bloggers. The find ways to get them to tweet your Twitter page out their followers. Finding similar rap site likes DJ booth , stop the breaks and 2dopeboyz and getting them to share your music onlinewith their followers.I understand that if you are just starting off this isn’t an easy task to achieve. So build up your reputation with the smaller music blogs. A Lot of these sites need content to post every day. So just make it as easy for them as possible. Once you have a large portion of the smaller blogs Tweeting and posting about your on their website make sure you keep a log or document of this promotion you have built up. This way you can use it to show other hip hop bloggers or influencers that you have work ethic. And you have built up a following. In order to get value from rap bloggers on Twitter, you have to start giving out some value first. Even if you don’t get anything at first in return , it’s still the beginning of a relationship that might help you out in the future. The biggest way you can help these rap bloggers is to give them help with some content or some information that will help them out. Give them reviews of mixtapes or albums you have recently listened too. Show them social media tools that have helped you out and can help their audience out too.
#Note that it’s good to research to make sure that these rap blogs are worth their time. So try using tools like SEM rush or Alexa to check if they get any traffic to their sites. Also, check their Twitter streams for engagement from followers. If an account has 200k followers but not 1 like or any retweets on any their posts, this is a major red flag to stay clear.
Some smaller rap bloggers do a great job with a small following. These people take time to chat will their following on Twitter. When they promote your music to their audience, you are much more likely to build your Twitter following from their time ,hard work and dedication to creating a listening audience. To make this a little easier for rap artists reading this, I created a list of hip hop blogs on my website here.
Try and follow the communication guidelines in the cheat sheet. This way you’ll have a better outcome from the work you have to do. Be a little more professional with your interaction with hiphop bloggers on Twitter. Ask for a meeting so that you can pitch them your idea’s. Don’t spam them with links to your Soundcloud page. Act as if you are a PR agent for a record label. Permission based marketing is very powerful and plus it will save you a whole lot of the time. Compared those rap artists spamming influential bloggers that will never get any respect or results.
