twitter – Fiona Z – The Musician’s Five Star Assistant

This blog post is interrupted by…[Social Media updates]

I was ready to share with you all about a task I’ve been tackling for my clients especially this year, but two new updates for all of our social media profiles happened this week that I wanted to make sure you knew about!

What were they? Can you guess? Okay, I’ll tell you!

1) Twitter Verification is now open to everyone. That little blue badge let’s followers know that your account of public interest is authentic.

You’ll need to confirm your email, phone, and make sure all the details are there. In addition, you will have to send them 2-5 links, plus a paragraph on why you should be verified.

Click here to get started on the verification process and join the blue badge club! It’s about time, Twitter!

2) Facebook Pages got a new look. Have you noticed? Here’s a shot of my favorite musician’s page with the new layout:

What to notice? First off, the banner image is no longer (unnecessarily) covered up by the profile picture. Second, the call to action button is shining through in Facebook blue and larger on the page. Overall, things have shifted around on the page, giving us something new to get used to.

What this means for you? You can get more creative with your branding on Facebook with the more visible banner. With the larger call to action button, that gives you more leverage to whatever you need to promote – mailing list, album, video, etc. so make sure it’s set to something you want your followers to be aware of.

I for one am enjoying this update and I think everyone else will too.

Social Media - 08/04/2016

Twitter rolls out a fresh new look.

I hope you’ve had a wonderful week and the start to your weekend is going great. I’m so happy spring is FINALLY here. I’ve had quite a week with events kicking off the spring and summer season, so I’m happy to be enjoying a little down time to balance out the festivities.

To add to the excitement, Twitter has rolled out a whole new look for its users. Part of my position as assistant is to keep my clients updated on social media – if there is a new feature, a new rule, or in this case, an entirely new look. As you know, this happens quite often.

First things first, have you seen it? (You have to – I love it!) Check out the first two featured musicians who switched over: John Legend and Weezer.

Here’s what you need to know to keep your profile updated with Twitter’s new look.

Larger, customizable header photo – You will notice on the two examples that now the header is larger and more prominent, and they got rid of the background image. John Legend uses the space to promote his latest album and makes his profile picture a photo of him, while Weezer, a more established brand, focuses on featuring their band members in the large banner and their infamous logo as their profile photo. Either looks great, but you will want to figure out what you want to feature.

If you have a new album that you really want to push, you might want to have a header featuring the release. Or if you have an upcoming tour, you can highlight the band and dates on your header.

The size of the new template is 1500×500. TWELVESKIP offers great advice on the dimensions as well as a really good template to help you build your best looking header, which includes invisible vs visible space. Check it out here.

Filtered Tweets – Social media platforms are all about featuring only the best of what they have, so it makes sense for Twitter to start filtering, pinning and featuring tweets. Your best tweets (ones that have received more engagement) will appear larger than the others. You can now pin tweets, so if you want to make sure everyone sees your tweet on your new concert date, or what you had for lunch, you can pin it to the top. Lastly, you can choose from different timelines when looking at profiles. Select from these options: Tweets, Tweets with photos/videos, or Tweets and replies.

If you haven’t seen the option to switch over yet, don’t worry, it is coming. You can prep ahead and have your team design a new header photo while you wait!

Are you ready to make the switch? Log into Twitter, then visit this site. Scroll all the way down and click ‘Get it now’. The change will be instant!

Enjoy the rest of your Saturday!

Social Media - 05/02/2014

You don’t need social media. (How a Twitter chatroom changed my mind.)

Hey there,

I hope you are having a great day and gearing up for some serious turkey eating this week! I’ll be heading out to New Jersey for a Friendsgiving since home sweet home (Tyler, Texas) is just too far away.

Before the holiday, I wanted to share with you a recent personal discovery of mine that will really boost your Twitter presence and also might shift your mentality on social media, as it definitely did for me.

I recently became a BIG fan of joining in chat rooms, more specifically, Twitter chatrooms. To be honest, I always felt as if I don’t need to be THAT involved in social media; that somehow followers would come to me just because I was posting articles or sharing my tips.

Last week, I participated in my first Twitter chat room, hosted by GoGirlsMusic‘s Madelyn Sklar. And it proved me wrong.

How did it work?

For this particular chat, it lasted one hour on Thursday night, starting at 9PM EST, and you simply tweet with the hashtag #ggchat. If you follow this hashtag, others will be joining in the conversation and BAM, there’s instantly people to connect with!

There is typically a moderator who welcomes everyone (and you can welcome others who ‘join’ the chat) and brings up topics to start conversation – such as common questions or recent trending articles pertaining to the chat rooms purpose. In my case, #ggchat brings musicians and music industry pros together to discuss the latest topics and issues in the industry! This past Thursday we discussed which is better, releasing singles one by one or just waiting to drop the album.

Why Participate?

It’s exciting because you have access to a group of people you might not have been able to connected to otherwise. It’s a friendly environment to say “Hello” and an open invitation to network! The pressure is off!

From just doing a chatroom twice, I’ve already connected with a referral partner, setting up a call with a potential client AND grew my mailing list by 10%! Also, now I’m more established on Twitter, more people know about me, and I’m gaining more trust with my followers, which is so crucial!

Think what it could do for you! You could meet a person looking for your type of music to perform at their venue. You could ask advice on how you should promote your next single. And always, at least most of the time, the chatroom will allow you to share your latest projects (shameless plug) giving you the opportunity to target what you want to boost – whether it be Twitter followers, Facebook likes, newsletter sign ups or song listens!

Pro Tip before you join a Twitter Chatroom

Twitter chatrooms can be intense. Without the right tools, it will feel overwhelming and impossible to keep up with all these tweets coming in every less than a second. What I use for participating in chatrooms is Hootsuite. It’s free and you can create streams of both people tweeting with a certain hashtag, so you can follow a conversation, and also create streams of tweets at you, so you can answer anyone reaching out to you. It’s super helpful and highly recommended.

So, I hope you will take action and participate in a chatroom this week! Join us this next Thursday if you’re around for #ggchat chatroom! Who knows where it will take you!

Social Media - 11/25/2013

Don’t Lose Followers Over This.

Twitter is a wonderful tool for quick shout-outs, headlines and direct communication with your fans.
But unfortunately, your account can get hacked pretty easily if you are not careful, and you’ll find yourself sending DMs (direct messages) to friends and fans such as:

This may not seem like an immediate issue, but this is really serious. Why?
Think about if you had received a spam message, what would you do? You’d worry that your account is hacked. You’d worry that the message would affect your account. You’d think that the person who sent it to you is not updating and keeping up with their twitter account. And you would probably un-follow them.

This is a threat to you as a musician if you have a Twitter account that is spammingfollowers left and right. You are easily risking un-follows and more importantly, losingtrust from fans in your account.

If you are on this side of the fence and are sending these spam messages to yourfollowers, here is how you can stop it right away the first time.

1.     Go to Settings > Applications.
2.     Deactivate ALL applications that you are not using, even if it seems harmless. Applications are usually authorized when you first sync them to your Twitter account to post and message on your behalf. Outdated or ones you are not using probably were hacked and therefore sending spam in your account.
3.     After you’ve deactivated unnecessary applications, change your password.

Usually folks think that only changing your password will stop the spam, but with my experience, you need the combo of deactivating unused applications and changing your password.

This should take care of any messages being sent in the future. However, to fix the damage that’s been done, be sure to tweet out an apology to your followers. Something like:

·      Sorry, everyone! Account was hacked – ignore all strange DM from me!
·      Man, got hacked. Please ignore/delete all strange DM sent from me! Sorry to everyone!
·      My apologies to everyone – was hacked and sent strange DM to a bunch of you. Please delete!

If you caught it in time where only a few DM were sent, it would be worth it to mention people in your tweet to make it more sincere. However, everyone will understand the general apology if you were hacked and sent 100s of spam DMs!

Social Media - 11/10/2013