Noticed a posting over at MarketingBreakdown.com where Allen Woodstrom feels that hip-hop artists are not having any particular success marketing themselves through Twitter. Which is true, except that it’s not. He states, for example:
MySpace and Facebook have two major things that Twitter does not: users and features. It was estimated that Twitter has about 3.5 million active users. Compare that to Facebook and MySpace, who respectively have 175 and 110 million users and it’s clear which network has the greatest opportunity for exposure.
Unfortunately, he bases this judgment largely on major, established artists, (who are really not even trying to market themselves much on Twitter in the first place. They don’t need to.) It’s a little strange that he wonders about whether Twitter can launch a career like MySpace did to Soulja Boy and Sean Kingston, but his ‘research’ doesn’t take strong upcoming artists into consideration, when many (@charleshamilton, @mickeyfactz, @asherroth) have a good presence on Twitter, and smartly so, as Twitter users skew to include bloggers and journalists, the exact crowd who have been hyping the next generation of hip-hop artists in the first place.
What Mr. Woodstrom doesn’t realize is that the discovered-through-MySpace-buzz phenomenon is turning into the discovered-through-blogger-buzz phenomenon, which is fueled more by the type of folks who are heavy Twitter users, then by the regular MySpace users, regardless of how many there are. To say that hip-hop artists are not finding success using Twitter is not quite accurate, and premature.
Email This Post
a) First of all, please don’t forget about @ylove.
b) Like I said on Mr. Woodstrom’s blog – and here’s where I disagree with you – MySpace, Facebook and Twitter do 3 different things, and are meant for 3 different “points of the artist-listener relationship”: introduction, engagement, and “deepening the relationship”.
This model, however, is not something that “has yet to prove itself”, on the contrary: from the outset, microblogging has provided that extra “conversational” level of interaction, something that is always good for any artist who hopes to grow their fanbase. Ever since RightOn! and other teen magazines began publishing “fan club addresses” and “what size shoe does X wear?” info, fans have wanted to interact with artists on a personal level — and Twitter provides us with that opportunity, and did from the get-go.
It can be nothing but good for an artist to maintain that level of engagement, buzz generated anywhere is still WOM.
ylove -
No, I agree with you totally, my comment on the original post went into more detail about how Twitter is just one piece of an integrated online marketing campaign…
I do think Twitter interactivity can help certain artists more than just a website or Myspace presence and I think Twitter will indeed become a more influential factor.
But in reference to his original question, whether Twitter can be *fundamentally* effective in helping launch a career, in of itself, or at least be the *primary* online factor, like Myspace has been in the past, I believe remains to be seen. In reality however, we’ll probably never know, because like you said, each avenue has it’s own distinct purpose.