Industry news & advice blog

Hello! We’re Unsigned Muso Magazine and we’ve been asked to write a guest blog for you lovely members here on The Unsigned Guide.

 

We could use this blog space to talk in-depth about how to utilise Twitter’s relatively restricted design functions. We could talk ALL DAY about the best times to tweet, that one should resist the temptation to use Twitter to satisfy one’s need to be the martyr (‘OMG I’m working 10 hours today and it’s raining #FML’!), that constant retweets of funny things Stephen Fry says will eventually drive your followers up the wall and away from you, or the rest of the many valuable-yet-overtold perils of poor social networking…but we at Unsigned Muso want to talk about how unsigned bands and acts can use Twitter to get more gigs, convert more fans into sales, and save time doing it.

 

So here’s the inside scoop…and luckily it’s not rocket science. Searching. Twitter is unique in that you can search for what people are talking about, and Twitter users will stumble across you if you’re posting effective tweets. As an unsigned act, you can use the search function to great effect, increasing outreach to the right people and therein (theoretically) increasing revenue for your act!

 

First of all we’re going to look at how to find and obtain gigs using Twitter. To start off, make sure you’re following the right people – that much should be obvious! If there are promoters, venues, or bands/acts in your local region that you know are particularly prolific at running events that you should be on the bill for, make sure you’re following and interacting with them to increase your chance of being asked to perform one of their shows (retweets are a great way of getting Twitter brownie points!) You should use the search function to hunt down other promoters in your local area, or in areas that are on your hit-list, and I’m sure we don’t need to go into too much detail there.

 

Searching for people is one thing (one thing that, we’re sure, you are more than familiar with and capable of doing!) but, to use Twitter’s own tag line, Twitter enables you to ‘search for what’s happening, right now!’ so let’s talk about that. Here are some terms that we have found very fruitful indeed when scouring Twitter for gig opportunities: ‘unsigned acts London’ always returns with promoters who are ‘looking for some unsigned acts to play a last minute gig in London this weekend!’ Searching ‘open mic London’ this morning returned some great opportunities that, if you’re serious about getting out there and performing more, are complete no-brainers:

So you’ve got the gigs, you smashed them (obviously) and now you want your new fans to find you on Twitter. The problem is people are lazy. Like…really lazy. So I’m afraid you'll need to find them. Luckily, chances are that they got home after your amazing life-affirming show and tweeted ‘Saw this act called Calendar Coffee Stress Ball (alas I’m not very good at improvising, and these are the 3 things I can spot from my desk!) at Nambucca Bar last night and they changed my life!!’ So you need to make sure you’re always searching your own name (no it's not narcissistic in this case) to find people that are tweeting about you, and convert them into new followers on Twitter! Simple as that.

 

Now I know what you’re thinking! That you simply don’t have the time to do all this searching when you’re gigging 5 nights a week, and you’d be quite right. However I present to you a time-saving gift-from-the-Gods - Hootsuite! Hootsuite enables you to set up ‘streams’ in addition to your regular timeline, so you can have a stream that just shows real-time tweets containing ‘Calendar Coffee Stress Ball’, and another showing tweets containing ‘Open mic london’, therein saving you a LOT of time. Go sign up to this platform now and download the App for your iPhone or Android and I promise you, you won’t look back. 
 

We’re sure that there are other ingenious ways you guys are using Twitter that we aren’t aware of and we’d LOVE to hear them, so please check out our website for other articles on the world of unsigned music or please get in touch via Facebook or Twitter.

 

P.S. the band name Calendar Coffee Stress Ball is not currently in use so…you know...you’re welcome!