As we outlined in How To Succeed At DJing, Part 11: Promote Yourself Online, as a working DJ a lot of your activity will involve interacting with the event promoters who are most likely to book you for future events, as well as with your audience. The best way to do it in today’s world is to utilise social media networks such as Twitter, among others.
Speaking through Twitter, posting relevant updates about your gigs, productions and services, will help to keep you at the top of the social network ladder. But while Twitter can be a useful way of communicating with your fan base and promoters, it can also hold you back if not used properly.
Here are a five tips (four tips and a warning, really) to help you effectively use Twitter to its full potential, for hopefully seamlessly mixing it into the rest of your combined online social media self-promotion.
1. Share DJ bookings and new releases
If you’ve just got an amazing new booking, have just put out a new release, or have attended a mind-blowing gig, your Twitter followers will want to receive updates of the event, or the track’s progress. Perhaps you could upload a photo of the gig or a two-minute snippet of the track you are working on, and link to them from a tweet. These updates on Twitter can help your followers feel connected to you and your work and will help to keep your DJing activities fresh in their minds. A couple of good examples of DJs currently doing this are @pauloakenfold and @DJJohnDigweed.
2. Connect with fellow DJs
An important part of being a successful DJ is connecting with like-minded people within your genre. These connections can help improve your technical skills as you pick up tips and tricks by learning from others, but they can also act to open the door for collaborations with other DJs on future projects. Perhaps you might pick up some remix work or get the chance to DJ back-to-back at an event for example.
If you get mentioned in a tweet by someone, take the time to personally reply. If you are successful enough to be inundated with @ replies, make sure you dedicate a portion of your time to replying to some of the best ones. Twitter is an ideal place to network with other DJs and to follow those who you find to be the most inspiring. @onephatdj is a particular DJ that has worked with me and has also helped to inspire me over the years.
3. Be entertaining
No one really wants to know what you had for breakfast each morning so it’s a good idea to not go on too much about pointless or unrelated things. However, if you can inject some humour and convey your personality online in your tweets then this will help you to stand out from the rest and you will be remembered in what you tweet. Be yourself, be relevant and be fun. @funkagenda is a DJ who always makes me smile with his humorous outlook on life and occasional ranty updates.
4. Share your online activity
If you run your own website or blog then your Twitter followers will want to know when these sites get updated. Your firing out a simple tweet saves them the time and effort of having to constantly visit your pages to find out the latest information.
Perhaps you have just updated your blog with a new post, or maybe there’s a new video of you on YouTube; whatever it is, make sure you let your audience know. Be careful not to overdose your followers with too many of these updates, as flooding their Twitter stream with tweets every five minutes can cause more harm than good. Try to keep your updates fairly spaced apart and relevant.
5. Don’t abuse your followers’ trust
People will begin to follow you on Twitter because they are enjoying the information that you provide. But bear in mind that they can unfollow you as quickly as they followed you in the first place. Don’t go overkill with sales pitches and adverts for your next gig, or dilute your useful content with pointless updates.
Final tips…
Yes it’s true that an aspect of your tweeting is to advance your career as a DJ, but you must also respect your followers by providing them with information that they can actually use. For instance, if you tweet about a booking, don’t forget to include the date and a link to buy tickets. If you post a YouTube video, include the title or description in the tweet along with the link.
• Paul Velocity is a funky house DJ who releases a podcast each month on iTunes. Follow @paulvelocity on Twitter and Like him on Facebook.
Do you use Twitter to promote yourself? Do you follow DJs who do a good (or bad) job of it? Please let us know your DJing, promoting and music Twitter stories, queries and triumphs in the comments below!
Paul Velocity
