How To Promote Your Tour through Twitter

As users shy away from using Facebook in their daily lives, more and more bands, venues, and promoters have fled to Twitter in order to help promote their shows and tours. It might seem weird — tweeting can seem like sending a thought into a giant void, but in reality, there are a lot of ways to get known on the site, and help your tour attract an audience. Many bands and venues have been using twitter to help promote shows and tours, which can make or break a successful turnout. These days, Facebook is making it harder and harder to reach a wider audience, whereas Twitter helps you reach millions of users all with one tweet.

Consolidate!

So, first things first, what are you tweeting about? A good way to promote a tour is the have all of the information in one Tweet, so that users can reference that instead of an entire thread about different shows. A good way to do that is have a tour or show poster along with the tweet.  It can be easy to scroll past a quick 240 character tweet, but incorporating eye-catching graphics and art into your tweets can help your tour get the publicity it needs. You’ll want to be sure that poster includes all the info someone would need to attend the show, so they don’t have to go snooping around Facebook to try and find an event page. This way, everything someone needs to know is in the tweet and the tweet can be pinned so users can easily favorite and come back to it. A good tour poster is bright and easy to read, with the names of the band clear and at the top. The recommended size for twitter photos is 1024 x 512 pixels. This way, the whole image can be seen without having to click on it, making it more user-friendly.

Tagging, Timing, and Targeting

Once you’ve got your images down, you’re ready to draft a tweet. While you can and should use hashtags, tagging venues and supporting bands in your tweet is actually a better (and less cluttered) way to get more attention. Venues know their demographic well, and their followers are normally dedicated (and local). Be sure to not only tag promoters and venues (an RT would not hurt them at all) and even send a quick email to ask for their help. Odds are good they will be happy to draft a tweet helping a band promote their own tour, since it will bring in money for them, too. This way, you are not only reaching their audience, but also other people in the area who would have not known about the show/tour in advance. Another great way to get the word out is to tag local papers or music blogs. They will be able to promote to their readers, and maybe even offer coverage about the event.

Something you might not have considered in the past is the timing of tweets, and how that can actually impact how many people are seeing it. Think about it this way, if you are tweeting about a show in New York, but you post about it at 9 pm California time, the target demographic is probably fast asleep. Be sure to be mindful about what time you’re sending tweets, and use twitter scheduling sites like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite to schedule tweets ahead of time so you don’t need to worry about it. Send follow up tweets about tour dates and tickets so that users will be reminded about the shows and keep it on their radar. Twitter Analytics is also a great tool for seeing exactly when and what type of tweets your followers are looking for. You can easily check analytics on Twitter, and see what is successful about your account, and what you need to work on. Now, you’re ready to tweet. Where do you go from there? You might have thought about making a targeted advertisement, but maybe you should think twice about it.

Targeted ads work pretty well for Instagram and Facebook, but the success rate of a promoted Tweet is a little ambiguous.  While it might seem like a good idea to get your Tweets seen by a larger audience, targeting a certain demographic on Twitter is a lot harder than other social media sites, so it’s best not to waste time and money, when a simple retweet is free and can have a similar effect.

Keeping it Going

Once your tour is up and running, interacting with fans is the best way to keep up with engagement and hype. By retweeting fan reactions and even posting pictures of the show, you are promoting the event in the best way– by showing people that they will have a good time if they see this band. Isn’t that what it’s all about?

Overall, the main focus with Twitter is getting to know your audience, being attentive to what they want, and reaching out to venues and promoters in order to work with them to gain traction about said tour. Just let them know that they will benefit from twitter promotion just as much as you, and it doesn’t hurt to help each other out.  And don’t forget to keep tweeting!