Twitter is a growing news source for people who are on the go. Customizable, portable, and to the point, users can stay up-to-date by “following” their favorite friends, celebrities, and companies, whose updates — limited to 140 characters — are delivered directly to a user’s phone. Keeping up with friends is important, but Twitter can be leveraged as a work-horse too. In this case, to make sure you never miss a concert again. Whether you are a long-time concert lover, or are just getting into the music scene, use these tips to make sure you don’t miss out on your favorite bands coming to town.
With more than a hundred-million users it’s difficult to decide whom to follow. Too few people, and you risk missing important information, too many, and you can’t possibly see it all. The key lies in finding the fewest, most important accounts, and becoming a loyal reader.
Follow Your Favorite Venues
Start with the basics: your local venues. Forget the places you swore you’d never go to again, and anywhere you wouldn’t drive to on a half-hour’s notice. Worried about missing your favorite artist’s performance that’s happening in the next state over? We’ll get to that later. For now, choose just a few accounts, so that you can hear who is coming to town, receive reminders of when tickets go on sale, and get notified of cancellations and/or date changes.
Follow Your Favorite Radio Stations
Follow the station, not the individual shows. Station accounts will announce opportunities across the board, tweeting ticket sales, contests, and events that all of their radio personalities are hosting. On the other hand, individual show accounts usually only focus on fan interaction, and will clutter your newsfeed with anecdotes about that day’s segments.
Follow Your Favorite Bands
Don’t follow every artist on your iPod, just the ones you’d drive 3+ hours to see. For these, you qualify as a die-hard fan, so you’ll appreciate the bonus info, like back-stage pictures, stories from the road, and television appearance announcements. Of course, your favorite artists’ feeds also keep you posted on new tour dates and locations, so you’ll know just when to fuel up the fan-van.
To be sure you hear about all the best concerts without crowding your home page, choose accounts with low “following” numbers. Many accounts are run by marketing departments, and they follow thousands of people, in the hopes that those people will follow them in return. It’s a low-cost way to gain access to a large audience. Unfortunately, this practice also results in lots of useless tweets, re-tweets, and @messages that people don’t generally care about. Strive for double-digits. Taylor Swift does a tremendous job, following only 71 people; Blink-182 follows only 17. Also, be sure to confirm the account’s authenticity. Taylor Swift’s user name is TaylorSwift13. Hardly official sounding, it’s the type of name a die-hard fan would choose — the 13th die-hard fan to be precise. But sure enough, the content reveals its authenticity. ZZ Top’s, @ZZTopNews, is actually run by a fan, and hasn’t been updated in ages.
Take your time, poke around, check past tweets, and be selective. You want to be sure that an account will post useful information. With Twitter, as with other areas of life, it doesn’t pay to blindly “follow.”
