It is very easy in the world of social media (and especially Twitter) to lose sight of the fact that you’re talking to real people. As your follower and following numbers increase it can be hard to remember who is who and what they liked about you in the first place. In this situation it can be easy to start to make decisions based on what you like and the kind of content that you respond to, and essentially you start marketing to yourself.
Stop!
You need to find out more about your audience and what they do on Twitter. This can sound fairly onerous especially if you’re looking at a follower list of hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter does not offer much in the way of rich data on demographics, so using an external tool can offer up a lot more answers. If you’re already using a social media management system like HootSuite you can find out a little bit about your audience by the way they respond to your content. However, this doesn’t really give us a full picture of your audience.
Using a free online tool like Followerwonk [http://followerwonk.com/] will give you a real insight into your audience, including their activity and timings, which could seriously improve the reach of your content on Twitter. This data will really help you to bring your strategy back into line as you learn more about who the majority of your followers are.
Finding out who you are tweeting to will determine the quality of your ausidence. Numbers aren’t everything and although having a large Twitter following looks impressive, if they aren’t engaged with your brand then you are just marketing to yourself. If you find that your audience is completely wrong for your brand, don’t be afraid to unfollow and start building up the correct audience. The results will be the same. Unless the people following you find what you do interesting, they won’t interact with you.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment box below.
By Harriet Thacker
Harriet is a marketing expert, social media enthusiast and Shake Social’s champion blogger. Struggling to maintain your own blog? We can help!
Kate Tyler is the founder of Shake Social and our long time social media expert. A regular speaker at events, Kate offers consultancy and training on a range of digital marketing topics, in particular safeguarding and using social media in an educational setting.