Why the heck is it so hard to build an audience today? [how to build it anyway] [IPF #038] - Adriana Tica

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Back in 2016 or so, I grew my Twitter account (sorry, “X” account) to almost 20K followers within a few months. While the follower count isn’t spectacular in itself, the way I did it is:

I posted 1-3 tweets every day.
They were ALL posted via third-party automated platforms.
They were ALL links to my agency’s blog posts, service pages, or guest posts.
Each tweet would be posted at least once a month — this was completely automated through Sendible. I set it once and let it run for roughly 12 months.
I logged into my Twitter account maybe twice a week and spend a grand total of less than 1 hour engaging with other people.

Back then, I was using the same tactic for LinkedIn. With 1K followers, most of whom were connections and college buddies, I still got clients and leads out of my automated posts.

In the meantime, my Twitter following has shrunk to 15K due to neglect, while my LinkedIn audience grew to 6.2K and keeps on growing because I invest a lot of time in it. And I mean A LOT — at least two hours every day.

Growing an audience on social media isn’t that easy anymore — I’m sure you’ve experienced that too.

So what the hell changed and why does building an audience feel like pulling teeth from an uncompliant rottweiler?

Let’s start with the most obvious reason, which is also the most painful to admit to:

Marketers ruin everything

We do. We see something work and we flock to it with the speed, the greed, and the desperation of a seagull who just spotted you enjoying a donut by the sea.

Does posting once a day net me ~1K followers a month? Cool, let me post thrice a day now for minimal gain. Let me clutter everyone’s feed until they get tired of my mug.

We’ve all done it.

We’ve all doubled down on what seemed to work, tried to replicate our successes (or someone else’s), or pushed ads when organic growth stalled.

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This resulted in collective jadedness and blindness to marketing messages.

Yes, people see your CTA. Yes, it’s probably a good CTA. But:

No, they can’t click on, engage with, subscribe to, buy, share, or review anything else today. They’ve already done it 100 times.

The second reason is also marketers’ fault:

Social media is getting crowded

Tweets like this one are everywhere:

Andrew is half right: an audience can fuel anything. The wrong half is “nobody can take a social media following away from you”. They can and it happens every day: algorithms make it harder to reach your audience or you simply get banned from a social media platform.

His point stands, though: everyone wants a social media audience.

Just look at how social media usage has grown in the past few years and how it will still keep growing:

Of course, this is also about access to internet and social media — as more regions of the world get them, social media platforms get more crowded.

You might be thinking that it’s a good thing: more users means a bigger audience for you. It does. But remember that everyone wants an audience. And, even though you target a sliver of the total social media users, you still compete with everyone who posts anything online.

Even if you cater to B2B users, you still compete with every cat video, online news bulletin, fail compilation, and vacation photo out there. Because you compete for attention and time, both of which are limited.

Speaking of time and attention, the biggest mistake I see in audience building these days is:

You’re operating with an obsolete manual

Most “tips, tricks, and hacks” about how to grow an audience are 2-3 years old, yet they keep being regurgitated. Remember what the world looked like 2 or 3 years ago?

We were all stuck indoors, glued to our screens, doomscrolling, and trying to find ways to cure our boredom, soothe our anxiety, or learn something new. In 2020 and 2022, I broke all my Duolingo records and I’m sure I’m not an outlier here.

But the world changed. We’re all trying to make up for lost time by staying outside longer, traveling more, meeting people in real life, and so on.

You no longer have a captive audience.

They’re free to do (nearly) anything and, if you’re still buying into the “stay consistent, show up every day, and comment on 50 posts” advice, you’re going to be the only one glued to their screen. Worse yet, you won’t have much to show for it. One of the reasons for this is that:

Organic reach is declining on social media

Social media isn’t the only channel out there. There are plenty more and I encourage you to find at least a couple to use regularly.

However, social media is still the preferred channel to get started with. Organic reach is declining across all major social media platforms. This is the cycle of life of any social network:

Massive organic reach to attract new users and especially creators.
Drop in organic reach to push users to affordable ads.
Increase in ad cost, coupled with new drops in organic reach.

I wrote more about the rise and fall of social media networks here.

AI commoditized content everywhere, including on social media

With a few mediocre prompts, you can get dozens of mediocre social media posts in minutes. This used to take hours, if not days, to put together.

You can spot some of them easily, along with the AI-powered commenters who congratulate the author on the “great post”. While you may not (I hope you’re not!) doing that, others are.

So users’ feeds have become gigantic echo chambers filled with fodder content, repetitive ideas, redundancies, fallacies galore, and…yes, trash. How much time would YOU spend waddling through trash if you didn’t have a vested interest in being online?

Don’t worry, it’s not all doom and gloom, [FIRST NAME GOES HERE]! You can still build an audience online. You just have to be a bit more patient these days. And smarter.

How do you build a decent audience in less than a year?

The ubiquitous consistency advice is annoying and usually a placeholder when you have nothing better to say. But it’s not untrue: you need to show up (almost) every day if you want to build an audience anywhere.

I’m sure you already knew that. Let’s look at a few things you may not already know to help you stop the scroll.

Stand for something but also AGAINST something

I know, polarization can be scary. What if they hate you for it? Well, they might but do you know what’s worse than hate? Indifference! Your goal is to make people FEEL something when they read/watch your content.

Bland content gets you indifference; they see it but they scroll right past it.

Better yet, you already stand against something:

If you’re FOR inclusiveness, you’re also AGAINST racism, ageism, and other nasty -isms.
If you’re FOR environmental action, you’re also AGAINST pollution, mindless consumption, and more.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

So think about what you stand for. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something business-related. It can be a social cause, for instance. Write about that, tell your audience why it matters to you. Your audience is more likely to stick with you, share your content, and buy from you when they can identify with your values.

I stand FOR sustainable, future-proof marketing and business strategy, which positions me against growth hacks. I talk about this as often as possible and, despite the popularity growth hacks enjoy, this contrarian take helped me meet a lot of people who are sick of reading about the same mindless growth hacks. We stand against something together, and in doing so we’re building a community.

Use self-promos in moderation

You need to sell your products and your services, I know. But talking about them non-stop will annoy your followers and prevent potential leads from following you. Do this instead:

Aim for no more than 20% promotional content.
Mix CTAs within relevant, insightful posts. E.g.: “Three reasons why you need better content for your social media channels. [List reasons.] Don’t have time to create it? I’m just a DM away, message me to get engaging social media content.” This mix gives people who don’t want to buy anything from you a chance to engage with the core of your message and debate what makes social media content good in the comments.
Add your CTAs and promos in the comments. If you notice a certain non-promotional post take off (i.e. it gets more views and engagement than usual), you can add a CTA in a comment below it.

Partner with other brands/peers

I wrote about this before and I’ll keep writing about it because I believe it’s the easiest, cheapest way to tap into new audiences:

Create posts together that you publish simultaneously and tag each other.
Promote each other in your newsletters or on your social media channels.
Refer others to your partners’ content whenever relevant. “Are you interested in learning more about measuring social media performance? Jane posted something interesting about this today, here’s the link.”

The options are endless. The biggest hurdle is finding people or companies who can promote you back. Bonus points if you find someone who offers services or products that are complementary to yours — web designer and copywriter, for instance.

Mention your main channel on podcasts, interviews, everywhere

Use all your other channels to drive people to your most important one. My goal, for instance, is to add people to my email list. So I mention my newsletter every chance I get, either organically (“I wrote about this in a previous issue of my newsletter”) or as blatant self-promos when the context allows it. (The context rarely allows it, though, so I’d be careful with that). Some ideas you can use:

On one social media platform to attract followers to another. “Are you following me on X/Twitter, too? I post more often there.”
In your newsletter sign off to attract followers to your social media profiles.
On social media to build your email list.
In your email signature. (I’m willing to bet that not all your current contacts and clients know about the channel you’re most invested in.)
On every interview or podcast.
On your blog.
On your website — social media icons or sign-up forms.

Pay to play

Have you ever considered ads to boost your visibility? If not, I encourage you to think about them. There’s an ad platform for anything, from search and social media to newsletter sign-ups.

Even on a small budget, you can make a significant difference in your audience growth. For instance, $100 a week could net you the same growth 3 to 5 hours of organic engagement would. Sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on the organic reach of the platform, how the algorithm treats you on a specific day, how much competition there is for ads targeting the same audience, and many others.

Join non-peer groups

“Birds of a feather stick together“, don’t they? They do, but they also fly separately to search for food or prime nesting real estate.

My point with this analogy: join social media groups or forums outside your area of expertise. Better yet, join groups where your audience hangs out.

Personal example time: I’m in a lot of copywriting and content writing groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. They have been great for networking and even for business growth — the connections I made there sent referrals to my agency.

BUT I’m also in a lot of SaaS groups, cybersecurity groups, and so on. When SaaS and cybersecurity were my agency’s top focus, being in those groups helped A LOT. I was the only copywriter there and guess what? Most of these companies needed a copywriter.

The key is to avoid spamming and blatant self-promos. My agency got a lot of clients because I asked genuine questions like:

“I’m a copywriter looking to put together an article about reducing churn in SaaS. Can you tell me how you do it and I’ll quote you in the upcoming article?” Bonus points because this creates connections with people that you’ve already helped with visibility.
“What is your #1 challenge in educating non-business users about cybersecurity?”

See where I’m going with this? If you give people an opportunity to vent OR offer them some visibility, they’ll remember you. They’ll follow you AND they’ll buy from you.

One last thing before I sign off: if you get discouraged, remember this: no one built an audience overnight after the pandemic. If they did, it was either sheer luck or they threw A LOT of money at it. That money could have gone to ads OR to expensive, exclusive masterminds where members form extremely efficient engagement pods.

You’ve got this!

That’s it from me today!

See you next week!

Here to make you think,

Adriana

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