Twitter 101 for Jazz Musicians

I'm thrilled to see so many jazz musicians joining Twitter. This morning, I saw a tweet from @RobMader:

Trying to teach @avejazzer how to use Twitter. Please say hello to him. He is eager to learn! (great jazz vocalist)

This inspired me to finally write down some of my suggestions for jazz musicians who are just getting started on Twitter.

• Include your web site URL in your profile. The first thing people will want to do is hear you. If you don't have a web site, you can link to a MySpace or even a YouTube video, but it's important to make it easy for people to hear your music.
• Include the word jazz in your bio — "jazz musician", "jazz trumpeter", etc. People do much more scanning on the internet than actual reading. Jazz fans want to know if you play jazz.
• Check your mentions. It's important to acknowledge when people mention you in their tweets. Click on Home, then look at your right-side column. Click on @TwitterName, (directly above Direct Messages), to see tweets you were mentioned in. Twitter has acknowledged a problem for many users not seeing all mentions — it's been an issue for some time, and they're trying to resolve it. Another way to check mentions is to run a search using your Twitter name. You'll see all of your tweets as well as those you were mentioned in.
• Replying to other peoples' tweets — When you want to reply to someone, start your tweet with @TwitterName.
• Talk about your art often.
• Make lists. The key to all social media is lists. It's a good idea to start making lists before you have a lot of followers, because at that point it becomes a royal pain.
• Check our lists to find jazz fans and jazz musicians (and you can contact us to be added to the list.)
• Interact with fans — they'll be much more likely to retweet your tweets.
• If someone says something nice about you, retweet it.
• If you have a show coming up, tweet a show announcement.
• If you played a great show, tweet about it.
• In terms of who to follow, don't worry about geography. If you're in California, that tweep in Switzerland might just have people in California in their network.

Any other suggestions for this list? Talk to me.