The Secret to Growing Your Twitter Audience

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of hanging out with some of my social media friends in Nashville. We love to geek out together about social media and marketing over some tasty burgers. Not a bad idea, huh?

Luke Stokes, who’s relatively new to Twitter, asked the group for advice about how to grow a Twitter audience. We decided to go around the table and each give our best advice for building your online network.

And you know what? I thought you might learn from this too. So, here’s our secret sauce for growing your Twitter audience:

• Be active. You can’t grow your audience if you don’t show up. Joey Strawn suggested that regularly retweeting and sharing the content of others has been a great way to get noticed and grow his audience.
• Create goals. It’s important to determine your goals and why you want to grow your audience in the first place. For Tyler Clark, Twitter is more about developing meaningful connections, than building a sizable audience. So, his efforts have been focused on that. And, once you have goals in place, you can begin measuring the relevant metrics to see how you’re improving.
• Make targeted connections. Once you understand your goals, you can focus on connecting with the right people. For instance, Kacy Maxwell wanted to use Twitter to connect with people locally, so he has focused his efforts on getting to know people in Nashville. By doing this, he has strengthened his network of contacts in town.
• Join conversations. Joey and Kacy both reiterated how joining conversations have helped them meet new people online. When they find a topic or conversation of interest, they jump right in and share their thoughts. That has been a useful way for them to meet new people.
• Determine your niche. Instead of tweeting about everything under the sun, it helps to choose topics you want to be known for online. Joel Widmer suggested that doing this will help provide focus to your efforts and help you become an authority in those topic areas.
• Introduce yourself to a new audience. I mentioned that guest posting on blogs has been a great way for me to introduce myself to a new readership. By engaging with the audience who commented and shared my guest posts, I often develop wonderful new relationships and grow my audience as a result.

This list is by no means exhaustive. In fact, I can think of several other things you can do to that will help you grow your audience on Twitter.

But, instead of doing that, I want to turn it over to you and get your thoughts.

What have you done to grow your Twitter audience? What has worked best for you?

And, if you’re struggling in this area, what questions do you have? What’s holding you back?

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P.S. The photo above (thanks, Joey) has nothing to do with growing your audience. However, it has EVERYTHING to do with social media done right.

Our little group tweeted that we were headed to Tavern for burgers and they definitely listened! They treated us great and even gave us a special little treat for coming out and trying their burger (gotta love s’mores over a flame). Yum. And, they encouraged us to vote for them in the Nashville Scene’s Best of Nashville poll. They are vying for best burger and wanted our vote.  How do you think we’ll vote?! Good marketing indeed.