Source: https://susannagebauer.com/blog/twitter-marketing-strategies-grow-audience/
2 Twitter Marketing Strategies to Grow your Audience
There are many Twitter marketing strategies. Some new, some old. Some are a little shady. Some serve to grow an audience, some to increase reach, some to engage with your followers, and some to build a community. Some Twitter marketing strategies work better with a huge following, some work better in a small but tight-knit community and some don’t need an audience at all.
Some Twitter marketing tactics require content, some don’t. Some Twitter marketing strategies focus on specific Twitter features and others utilize all that is needed.
From my experience I would say, the best way is to combine a couple of different Twitter marketing strategies to come up with your own Twitter marketing strategy and focus on reaching your marketing goals.
To find your own set of activity on Twitter that brings new followers to your Twitter account and increase your reach on Twitter, you need to know about the tactics you could use first.
Twitter has changed a lot in the past 10 years or so. The feed changed from purely chronological to around half of Twitter users using the best tweet feed which is algorithmic.
That means that tweeting is not enough anymore. You need to build engagement on your Twitter account. Engagement has become much more important if you want to grow an audience.
Without any followers, everything gets harder on Twitter. A couple of followers can change everything. Followers add to your credibility and inspire trust that your account is not a bot or spam account. But the truth is, even with a large audience on Twitter, just tweeting random stuff is not enough. Even if it does not seem random to you, tweeting your blog posts and products will not do a lot to grow your email list and sell your products.
You need to have a purpose with your tweeting. And this purpose needs to be more about connecting with your audience and people from your niche and building community than about selling products.
But you have to understand Twitter a little better and learn how to use it to your advantage – or you can get frustrated fast.
The Twitter marketing strategies in this post are not simple tactics to get your first followers. That is a topic for another blog post.
Here are 2 Twitter marketing strategies, that will boost your reach and increase your followers on Twitter even if you already have a growing audience on Twitter.
#1 Twitter Endorsement Strategy
This Twitter marketing tactic is all about building community, increasing your reach, and connecting to more people from your niche.
This Twitter marketing strategy is about utilizing the option to @mention other Twitter accounts in and making other Twitter accounts react to your tweets. The idea is to use @mention strategically in your tweets to inspire retweets, comments, and likes from these mentioned accounts.
This will increase your reach and bring your Twitter account in front of a larger audience.
To make this work you need a reason to endorse and mention another person or business and their Twitter account in your tweets.
Do you need an example?
Let’s say you have a blog post that rounds up the best content from your niche in the past 2 weeks. In this blog post, you have a collection of blog posts from other bloggers that you recommend to your audience.
When you tweet this post, you can either mention a couple of Twitter handles of these blogs that you mention in your blog post. Or you can even create a couple of tweets that each mention one of the recommended blog posts.
The 6 most important blog posts about knitting from the past week including inspiring content from @twitterhandle1 and @twitterhandle2 LINK
Why is this a valuable Twitter marketing strategy?
Mentioning other Twitter accounts with a tweet that appreciates their work and expertise will often earn you retweets and likes from the mentioned Twitter accounts. This way you increase the reach of your tweets in a targeted audience.
At the same time, you appear on the radar of people from your niche like tool providers, bloggers, and experts from your niche. They become aware of your blog and work and will notice the awesome content you provide.
This builds community and your blogging connections.
How can you execute this strategy?
As I mentioned in the example above, you can start this strategy with a regular roundup post of the best content you read from your niche in the past week or month. The advantage of this strategy is that you easily create a new piece of content that already has a marketing strategy built into its core.
But that is only one idea to do this. There are many more content ideas that allow you to create tweets with @mentions of Twitter accounts:
- A list of your favorite tools you are using
- A list of Twitter accounts from your niche you recommend following
- A list of podcasts you are listening to
- You can create expert roundups
- Conduct interviews with people from your niche.
With all this content, you can mention the relevant Twitter accounts.
Another idea for @mention tweets is to start a discussion with a relevant question and ask some experts from your niche for their opinion. The best way is to have a friend or colleague that you can ask to join in to get the conversation going.
You see that there are endless options for content and tweets that mention other Twitter accounts.
You should not overdo it.
Don’t create tweets mentioning the same Twitter account over and over again in quick succession. That would be very annoying to the mentioned Twitter account and the positive effect of the endorsement would blow up.
Take it a step further
Creating content and tweeting with mentions of Twitter accounts is not the end of it for the endorsement strategy. So far, the idea was to mention one or two Twitter accounts in one tweet and earn a retweet and/or like. But you can take this endorsement tactic a lot further.
Here are a couple of ideas:
Involve your audience
You can ask your audience for ideas about who you should include in a content roundup or whose opinion would be of interest to them in an upcoming article.
Start the conversation and keep it going.
Keep in mind, that you want to become part of the Twitter community from your niche!
Engaging your audience is a valuable tactic to achieve that.
With the recommendations, you now have to reach out to the people and create the content.
Hopefully, some of your audience will remember the discussion about who you should involve once the actual blog post comes out. This has the power to increase the traffic to the content.
Establish a complete process
The endorsement tactic can become part of a complete process.
Here is an example:
- Invent a competition for the best blog from your niche and ask for recommendations in the comments of tweets.
- Come up with a way to select the top four of all recommendations, be creative maybe you find a way to include your audience in this selection as well.
- Now, create a Twitter poll to have people vote on it.
- You have to let the nominees know about the poll so that they have a chance to let their audience know about it and ask them to vote for them.
- Once you found your winner, announce it. Create a badge for the winner. Think about a prize you could give. Maybe 6 months free for your tool subscription? Or a free membership in a course?
Become creative! There are endless reasons why mentioning other Twitter accounts can be legitimate.
What can you expect in return?
Everything can happen. From a retweet and a like to a mention of your content on other social media channels.
I once wrote a blog post about the best marketing blogs I recommended reading.
One of the blogs mentioned on my list was Content Marketing Institute. Another was Bryan Kramer’s blog.
We tweeted about it. And Content Marketing Institute not only tweeted the post. They also posted our blog post on their Facebook Page.
That was when we were just starting out with content marketing and social media marketing. These tweets and a post on CMI’s Facebook channel were huge for us!
Other bloggers on the list also tweeted the post – including big names in the marketing sphere like Bryan Kramer.
What to consider
In marketing, we like to find something that works and then scale it – meaning do more of it. With the endorsement tactic you have to be careful not to overdo it or you could hurt your success. Here are a couple of things you need to consider with this endorsement tactic:
- Don’t mention the same Twitter account over and over again. Yes, you can repeat tweets on Twitter – but these endorsement tweets should not get boring to the mentioned Twitter accounts.
- Don’t aim for the largest Twitter accounts with the most followers. These accounts are usually not the most responsive. Your mention will get lost in the noise. You will have better results with smaller or medium size Twitter accounts.
- Don’t be afraid that someone could gain something from your tweets. You will win more in the long run!
- Always have a reason to mention someone or this tactic will turn more spammy than endorsing. Make your tweet an appreciation of the expertise and work of those you mention. Ego is a great factor to play in marketing.
If you can make it work in your favor you win 
Twitter is not necessarily about using ONE tactic. The combination of various tactics is what will give you the best results – and what will make using Twitter for marketing so much more fun!
You will get the best results if you combine the best Twitter marketing tactics that are best suited for where you are on your Twitter marketing journey.
When your audience is not yet huge, when you want to grow followers and reach, you need to focus on other tactics as when you are already famous and need to focus on keeping in touch and still building community and keeping up engagement.
#2 The Pay-it-forward Twitter marketing strategy
While sometimes marketing requires some selfishness to achieve your goals, social media marketing should also consider how we can help others.
The Twitter marketing tactic I am presenting to you now is all about promoting others. And here is why that works wonders if you are looking to increase your followers and reach.
If you are too afraid that someone else might profit from something you do on social media it is your success that will suffer!
Social media (and Twitter) pays you back manifold for being kind, helpful, and appreciative.
That is what this Twitter tactic is all about: Pay-it-forward and it will come back to you.
On Twitter, that means helping others with a tweet once in a while (or even a little more often.)
Here are some examples of what you can do to pay it forward:
- You can curate content and tweet it with a simple “via @twitterhandle” added to the tweet.
- You can recommend a tool and add a “by @twitterhandle” to the tweet.
- You can quote an expert – and don’t forget to let them know with a @twitterhandle mention in the tweet.
Why should you do this?
Because people will notice you as a nice, helpful and knowledgeable person in your niche. Even if they have never heard about you, some of them will check you out if they don’t know you yet and they will like that you mentioned, recommended, or quoted them.
One day people will in turn tweet one of your blog posts, mention you in a tweet, link to your blog, or recommend your product.
Well, true: They will only do that if your content is great, your
product useful, and your Twitter account is not-spammy and tweeting
valuable stuff. So you better have a great blog that people feel good
about sharing 
This tactic does not (only) work on Twitter. And you may already be doing it in various forms:
- If you link to other blogs.
- If you write a (positive) review for a tool.
- If you curate content for social media – or your blog posts.
- If you mention a product in a podcast – or on Instagram.
On Twitter, it is just so much easier and it does not cost you much effort. Plus, a tweet that you send to promote someone else does not take anything away from your own Twitter marketing power. This tweet does not keep you from sending more tweets to promote your own blog. Because you can always tweet more – except if you are already spamming Twitter.
And these tweets add value to your Twitter account as well. Win-win.
Plus, you will get something in return. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.
Maybe with a link to your blog in an upcoming blog post. Maybe with a mention of your blog or your Twitter account on a list of blogs. Maybe with a tweet promoting one of your blog posts.
This simple tactic is perfect to combine with the endorsement tactic. You could even regard it as a slightly simpler version of the endorsement tactic. Because it does not require you to create any content and you can still @mention a Twitter account.
To answer a question I got about the endorsement and the pay-it-forward tactic: Yes, these tactics work really well even if your Twitter account is still small and you do not have many followers.
Twitter is a very open community, and people pay more attention to your actions than to the size of your Twitter audience. They watch their notifications and notice that you mentioned them in a tweet – often they don’t even check how many followers you have and are just nice to you in return.
And yes, many people are personally active on Twitter, not everything is automated. More conversations are happening on Twitter than you may have thought.
Both Twitter tactics that I presented to you in this post are a way to become part of the conversation on Twitter and build a community on Twitter.
Yes, you may mention someone in a tweet and they don’t react.
But so what, what did you lose?
You sent a tweet that was relevant to your audience. If the mentioned Twitter account did not react, you did not lose anything – if they do react, you can only win.
Successful Twitter marketing is the strategic combination of multiple Twitter tactics to join the conversation on Twitter, build a community, and engage with your audience. That is what the endorsement tactic does for you and that is also what the Pay-it-forward tactic is all about.
Final words on Twitter marketing strategies
If you want to grow on Twitter you have to remember that Twitter is a social network. It is not a shoutout channel.
Even though you need to focus on how to get your blog, content, and message to your audience, you also have to consider how you can become socially involved with your audience and experts from your niche. For marketing success on Twitter, you need to build a community.
The two Twitter marketing strategies in this article are all focused on building community and increasing your reach and audience on Twitter at the same time. Because growing an audience on Twitter depends to a large part on your targeted social skills.
Learn more about Twitter marketing in my mini email course:
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