Mastering Twitter begins with creating conversations. Twitter provides artists, musicians and content creators with the opportunity to communicate in real-time. Over the years this has created a gateway to engage and connect with fans on a deeper level.

The real power is that content creators can now update the appropriate parties with a single tweet. This can include updating fans about concerts, new music releases, upcoming books and merchandise for sale.

Twitter also has the tools that allow you to segment your followers based on where they live. This demographic can provide data to gauge interest to see what cities you should book for an event or what target markets show the most promise.

Now lets deep dive into 20 facts that make Twitter a go to for artists, musicians and content creators.

Facts About Twitter

1. Twitter has 145 million monetizable daily active users.
2. 30 million (or 20%) of Twitter’s daily users are American.
3. 92% of the U.S. population is familiar with Twitter (even if they don’t use it).
4. 22% of adults in the U.S. use Twitter.
5. 44% of U.S. 18- to 24-year-olds use Twitter.
6. U.S.-based Twitter users are younger, have more education, and more income than the general U.S. population.
7. The most active U.S. Twitter users have 20x as many followers, on average.
8. 12% of Americans get their news from Twitter (71% of Americans on Twitter are using it to read news.).
9. Twitter’s site referral traffic is up 6%, year-over-year (Instagram: 56%, Facebook: 29%, YouTube: 22%).
10. Twitter users are more likely to like brands that are inclusive and transparent.
11. Twitter ad engagement is up 23%.
12. Twitter ads with video are 50% cheaper in cost-per-engagement.
13. Twitter users spend 26% more time with ads than other social media users.
14. Twitter users spend 24% more time with ads posted by ‘creators’.
15. 25% of Twitter’s most prolific users use scheduling software.
16. Tweets with hashtags gets 100% more engagement.
17. People watch 2 billion videos on Twitter per day.
18. Watching video is the #3 reason people use Twitter.
19. Tweets with video get 10x the engagement.
20. 93% of video views on Twitter happen on mobile.

Your First Tweet

Prior to letting your first tweets off, it’ll probably be helpful to be familiar with the workings of Twitter.

Step 1: Tweets are limited to only 280-characters.

At first, it will seem to short to voice anything of substance, surprisingly it is NOT.

Some artists and music professionals have perfected the craft of creating threads. This is where you’re sending out multiple tweets to elaborate on your thoughts. This allows your overall narrative to be more shareable, quicker to read and producing a stronger statement.

Step 2: Producing Twitter threads are easy to create, if you have a statement or a narrative that won’t be addressed in given 280-characters.

Select the ‘Tweet’ button and begin typing your first tweet, and select the (+) tab on the bottom right.

This will create a somewhat long form tweet, where every tweet within the thread will be separated and provide you the space to make your point.

Step 3: You can add a video, photo, audio, gif or poll as well, these options will be accessible on the lower left hand side.

Photos do not count against your given 280-characters and you will be able to add up to four photos. Videos will have to held to a limit of 500mb in size and 2:20 in length.

Step 4: When you include a link with your Tweet, your character count will decrease to 257-characters.

Pro Tip: Make sure that you leave a space between the actual text and link. If not, you link won’t be active and it will be included in your total character count.

Step 5: Hashtags are great for reach, that aid in search and help you join a much larger real-time conversation. The most popular hashtags are called “Trending Topics” and they are available to left under the ‘Home’ tab as “#Explore”.

You can click on Hashtags as well to see all the conversations happening in real-time or all the hashtags related to a given topic.

You can create your own Hashtags too. Or search for those niche Hashtags that might not be as popular but are relevant to your audience.

Setup Lists and Follow Hashtags

One of the knocks on Twitter is that it used to be hard to follow.

Overtime, the Twitter UX team has addressed those issues by making the Twitter experience more enticing for the casual user.

It used to be that if you weren’t on Twitter and someone tweeted something. You wouldn’t be able to see the Tweet until you accessed the app later. At the point, you would have to search for the Tweet or scroll through your timeline.

The overall idea of Twitter is that you’re online with other people at the same time (in real-time). Understandably, you won’t be able to see what everyone is tweeting at a given moment. This is why Twitter lists and hashtags have become key to the flow of communication on the social media platform.

Twitter is essentially a giant public chat room for all to see. The platform has improved user experience over the years by adding audio tweets, an enhanced advertising platform and timeline setting.

The timeline setting allows you to filter your timeline by ‘Latest tweets’ or ‘Top tweets’. The ‘Latest tweets’ setting will display real-time tweets and the ‘Top tweets’ setting will display tweets from the accounts that you interact with the most.

This setting can be switched back and forth, so that way you can stay up to date with everything that is happening while you’re not on Twitter.

In addition to using these tactics, here are some pro tips to help make your Twitter experience more efficient.

• You can go directly to the page of the person you want to follow and see what they’ve tweeted or set up alerts to get a notification every time they tweet.
• Search for the hashtags of the event or conversation you want to join. Then select the “Live” tab to see ‘real-time tweets’ that are a part of the larger conversation.
• Turn on your push notifications. Download the mobile app on your phone so you can get push notifications, such as ‘Popular Tweets’, Network activity and related news when it breaks. This is a great feature when you are trying to keep an eye on certain topics or content creators and can’t be online at every second.