We retweet positivity about others, this is in sync with our #SpreadTheLove philosophy. We get tweeted everyday by artists and promoters saying how amazing they/ their event are/is, we retweet the tweets from artists/ promoters telling us how amazing another musician is. Tweet us positively about someone else and we’ll retweet it (‘self promoting’ about your son/daughter, the artist you manage etc does not count), long term we hope by doing this to increase the amount of love spreading and so generally increase positivity about the Nottingham music scene on Twitter.
It also means we avoid spamming our followers because if we retweeted every tweet we get ‘self-promoting’ we’d soon have no followers left. In fact Twitter actually enables followers to ‘turn off retweets’ for specific users, so no one wins by us over-tweeting, we’d just get turned off. Oo-er.
Oh whilst we’ve got you, we also try and avoid repeating tweets, if you do a spread the love tweet about specific good news for an artist, and we don’t retweet it, that probably means we’ve already tweeted about it. And yes, it is hard to do this and have a life, so we don’t have a life.
We:
– Aim to reply within three days, to relevant tweets.
– Always credit our source.
– Spread The Love.
– Respond to constructive feedback.
– Are human. And sometimes f-up.
We Retweet:
– Positivity about others (#SpreadTheLove.)
– Positivity about Nottingham’s music scene.
– Positivity about other musicians within Nusic content.
– Crowd Funder campaigns. Once.
– (Genuine) charity events, heavily featuring Nottingham musicians. Once.
– Tweets about new releases. Once.
– Relevant tweets by our #NusicVolunteers, sometimes.
– Relevant tweets by Mark Del or Sam Nahirny, sometimes.
– Irrelevant tweets by Mark Del or Sam Nahirny, never.
– Tweets relevant to current Spread The Love campaigns, these will mean a higher than usual focus on just one artist, for the one relevant week.
– Musicians searching for fellow musicians, in the spirit of the SpreadTheLove sessions at our Workshops.
By the way we ask all our team to adhere to these principles as much as poss, but obvs none of them are employees so we can’t make em.
We Tweet / Repost:
– Significant opportunities, using the hashtag #OpportunityAlert.
– Good Vibes / Press Vibes of national relevance (definition below), crediting (where relevant) the source.
– Breaking News.
– Good luck to artists about to play a nationally relevant gig for the first time. (And footage for the artists playing said gigs if it’s out there on the interweb.)
– Answers to questions that may be of interest to other members of our audience.
– Where appropriate, big ups to our #NusicVolunteers, for their help making Nusic happen.
– Happy Birthday tweets to #NusicVolunteers, as a wee thank you and acknowledgement, of their efforts.
– Our Release of the Week and Video of the Week.
We Favourite:
– Nice things.
– That #FF thing.
– When we want to end a conversation, let’s be honest we all do it.
We reply to:
– Nice tweets about our content, to say thank you. We avoid being one of those egomaniacal organisations that only retweets tweets saying how amazing they are. Cos obviously we get loads of those *cough*.
– Questions from local musicians, that we haven’t answered before, and we have an answer to. 90% of these will be answered in our FAQs.
We do not retweet:
– Loads of ego tweets.
– Gig tweets (charity exceptions). Gig info must be emailed as per FAQ No. 6 of our FAQs (nusic.org.uk/faq.)
We ignore:
– Musicians from outside Notts (if we have ignored you and you are from Notts do you say something different on your social media? Born and bred Notts musicians who’ve moved elsewhere often don’t make clear that they are originally from Notts).
– Non music related tweets.
– Abusive tweets, to us or others.
– Repetitive / Spammy tweets.
– Tweets we’ve already responded to.
– Tweets that ignore / fall outside of, our clearly outlined Twitter policy which we’ve wasted an evening of our lives making clear.
– A gazillion, billion last minute tweets about gigs, releases or your new cat. Get organised and tell us four weeks in advance, we can then plan things in and give your music the attention it deserves.
– Stuff by accident, cause humans forget sometimes don’t we? It’s always worth tweeting again if you are tweeting something that is relevant to us, if it’s blue tablets, russian wives or derby related then probably don’t bother.
We regularly use the following hashtags:
– #SpreadTheLove.
– #NusicVolunteers.
– #GoodVibes & #PressVibes.
– #NusicSchoolTour.
– #NusicFAQs.
– #OpportunityAlert.
– #MissedVibes.
We follow:
– Artists we have played on the New Music Podcast.
– Artists that we notice spreading the love regularly.
– Industry people we think could have useful insights for our audience.
– People who have helped us keep doing what we do.
– Fellow ‘Nottingham musician helpers’.
#GoodVibes
– Firsts of National relevance.
– Getting signed to a professional label (definition = at least two human beings working full time on the label).
Re #GoodVibes. We define ‘National Relevance’ as:
– Something that would be of note to National media outlets like Radio One, XFM & NME, plus the most respected, biggest audience attracting, music websites such as Drowned In Sound, PopJustice and Noisey.
– Something that is new / unique / first. For example every time an artist first gets played on a big Nationally relevant radio station like XFM we mention that, BUT if an artist has already been played on Radio One we wouldn’t mention their first play on XFM as that is not a…
– Step up. If you’ve been played on Annie Mac and then get a play on Huw Stephens we wouldn’t mention that as Huw’s show has less listeners. But if you’d been played on Annie Mac and then got played on the Breakfast Show we would as that is a step up. Same with progressing from one-off plays to playlist features. Once an artist has been played on R1 many times we will not mention them any more e.g JAKE BUGG getting played on R1 is not news.
– Announced on the line up of a Nationally relevant festival for the first time. JAKE BUGG playing Glasto is not news, an unsigned Notts act doing so is. The latter playing Y Not Festival, as awesome as that festival is, is not Nationally relevant as it is a regional festival with lots of Notts acts playing. This could change, in that we can see Y Not one day becoming a Nationally relevant festival, it’s that good.
– Top 40 positions in the OFFICIAL (and iTunes) main national charts, and Top 20 in the OFFICIAL (and iTunes) main genre/ sub charts.
What is our Facebook policy?
We post:
– Each main piece of Nusic content – twice (Future Sessions/Podcasts etc.)
– #PressVibes – closely related to our #GoodVibes policy, if a Notts artist gets a “decent” feature in a Nationally relevant magazine (for second mention onwards, this equals quarter of page upwards), we will post with an image.
– A soundcheck photo during the recording of each Future Session – linking to the artists social media, and the latest two Future Session artists.
– #SpreadTheLove campaigns. These are launched on FB at the same time as Twitter. We lead with the banner, linking to a page with all relevant info on the release. We then change the cover photo on both the page, and the group to this banner.
– New issues of Leftlion Magazine – A local magazine with 50 000 readership, that consistently gives a large amount of coverage to local musicians. We will post on the day it comes out, revealing which Notts musicians are featured. And let’s be frank, they give us a lot of support, so this is kinda reciprocal.
– Noise Floor – Notts TV’s New Music Show – broadcast to their viewing audience of 209,000 viewers, the show heavily features local musicians. We will tell you when it first airs, ONLY if it features local musicians.
Yours in Love of New Music,
Team Nusic x
