UNSIGNED HYPE

Twitter has emerged as one of the most powerful social networking tools.  Twitter is the home for many hip hop artists around the word.  Even though Twitter is fairly new, there are already hip hop artists such as Sean ‘diddy’ Combs who had success with marketing on twitter.  However, there as also been quite a few people who have made some mistakes when it comes to branding themselves on twitter.

I have compiled a list of the 10 most frequent mistakes hip hop artists make while using twitter:

Adding too many people at one time. So you want to brand yourself, yet you’ve got 50 people following you, while you’re following 2,001?  How does that really portray you?  If not only makes you look extremely desperate but it also shows that you’re not on twitter to build relationships with people, only to gain a vast amount of followers in order to spam them with your links.  Take it slow, let the follows come naturally. Bad photo. Using photos of inanimate objects on your avatar or profile picture, even worse-not using any profile photo at all.  People feel more comfortable interacting with people online when they know that they are communicating with a real person. Posting nothing but totally random drivel daily. While this could work if you are only using the network to connect with family and friends, if you are using Twitter for business then you should post meaningful messages that can help you grow your brand.  You can post promos, updates, and links to articles that provide value to people within your network.  You can also post humorous tweets and other more personal tweets just make sure that they are interesting. Using the default twitter layout. If you are a professional and want to be seen as so, take a few minutes to either create information packed twitter background, or at least something with some style.  Who knows, you might even get featured in an article about twitter layouts and end up gaining a lot of subscribers because of it. Carrying on long conversations between two users. The temptation to use Twitter like an IM service is there, but to fill a timeline with replies to a single person in a short span of time is aggravating enough to make other followers reach for the unfollow button.  If you sense your convo will drag on, use direct messages, or better yet, just call the person the phone. Not making regular Twitter updates. If you want to gain followers on Twitter, you need to post updates or tweets at least once a day.  You can’t expect people to follow you if they see that the last message on your feed was posted a month or two ago. Failing to add yourself to twitter directories. You want to gain followers but you don’t add yourself to places to be found.  Directories such as Blacktwitters.com and Hiphopontwitter.com or powerful places to add yourself and be found by twitter users.  Blacktwitters is a twitter directory for African American twitters. Tweeting famous people. Nothing looks more obscured then to see unknown hip hop artists tweeting things to Jim Jones like “I sent you my mixtap but you didn’t respond.”  This makes you look bad to your network and it’s unprofessional. Selling in your tweets. You want to tell people about your brand?  Do it in your bio.  Put your URL there and leave it at that.  Focus your time and creating quality filled tweets.  If they like you, they’ll look into what you do because they enjoy what you’re saying and believe you are a valuable source, not just someone who spams the twitter world with random “buy the hot song” tweets. Dising other hip hop artists. Internet beef are super weak.  Beefing with other hip artists on twitter is just dumb.