Depending on what you have and how you use it, content can either be your best friend or your worst enemy.

Before you start investing a whole bunch of your valuable time into promoting your music, here are a few guidelines which will help you to squeeze the most out of every one of your proverbial pennies.

1. Post new content daily: Let’s face it – the average Twitter user of today is in a pretty big hurry! If you want to stay connected with your fans and keep them coming back for more, you need to give them something to reward their attention. Every. Single. Day.

Whether you have a YouTube channel chock-full of videos, a Soundcloud jam-packed with your latest tunes, or a blog overflowing with awesome promotional giveaways, make sure your followers are getting something in return for their valuable time.

If you don’t have access to great content like this all the time, make up for it in other ways; tweet more regularly, spend time engaging with your fans, and let them share a little piece of your exciting life!

2. Use Bitly to shorten & track links: Besides being the best way to free up important tweet space, this is also the easiest and most accurate way to know whether the content you are sharing is generating interest amongst your audience.

With detailed stats on click-thru rates and sources of traffic (both geographical, and in terms of referring site) for each of your links, you can figure out the most popular content, as well as the location of your followers.

3. Tweet at least 2-3 times per day: The whole point of following someone on Twitter is to have the opportunity to be intimately involved in their life. As a general rule, the more your tweet, the more value you are bringing to your followers (within reason, of course).

4. Cater to all major timezones: As your account grows, it is more and more likely that users will be following you from all over the world. In order to maximize your reach, and ensure none of your followers are missing out on your content, try to cover all major timezones with your tweets – ie UK, USA, Australasia etc.

Setting up a world clock on your phone, or downloading a free widget/app should help you keep track of the peak periods in each region. If being up at 4am every morning to tweet for your followers in England does not fit in with your sleeping schedule, simply sign up with one of the great free tweet buffering tools available and schedule away!

5. Calls-to-action: A key part of successful promotion is ensuring there are strong calls to action (click here, download this, buy now, subscribe). Without these, your content will never reach its full potential audience. Be sure to consider this when composing your tweets and sharing your content.

6. Maintain a Signal to Noise ratio of at least 5 to 1: Signal is any content that delivers value or benefit to your audience (free download, journal entry, interview etc). Noise is any content that is directly promoting your product (buy my new single, vote for me, watch my video etc ).

While it is great to be able to constantly plug your music on Twitter, your fans need to be getting real value from following you as well. Make sure you are sending out at least 5 pieces of signal for each piece of noise.

7. Repost your best content: Obviously, all of your users will not be online all of the time – particularly with the difference in timezones. It is important to repost important pieces of content in order to maximize your exposure.

Many people will also be regularly using Twitter on their mobile; and therefore not able to view all of your content at particular times. Reposting content at different peak times will increase your chances of reaching all of your users at a time when they are able to properly view it.

There is a danger in reposting the same content too many times, so be strategic in the way that you do so, and be sure to dilute old content with plenty of new stuff.

Remember, the more effectively you manage your content and tailor it to your audience, the less promo work you will need to do; give your followers plenty of regular, quality content and you can be sure they will gladly share and promote it for you!