When Is Your Audience Listening? Does It Even Matter?

Are you a door to door salesman or do people come to you for your message?

There are two options to consider when you’re building your audience:

• Chase your audience (door to door salesman)
• Have your audience come to you (events)

I’ve spent the last nine months growing and cultivating an online audience for a local chain of restaurants. When I first logged into their Twitter account I started to follow people in the area that followed other restaurants, followed me, or were followed by me. A few weeks later I started following people that I found through specific genre related keywords.

This approach worked to begin with. However what resulted was that this account was following close to 300 people and was being followed by just under 100. I was chasing my audience individually to get them to notice me. It was a manual, singular, inefficient, and wholy NEEDED approach when I first took over the account.

I realized that I couldn’t continue to knock on everyone’s “now following you” door. Or trying to send @replies in response to someone’s update. I hate hearing that I’m a bot (because I won’t do auto-tweets/dms). I hate being ignored when I’m trying to have a conversation. I needed a way to get people to come to me, engage with me, and participate in my thing.

What did I do to fix this? I made a regularly scheduled, weekly event. On both Twitter and Facebook the same event happens on the same day of the week, at the same time, for the same reason. It could easily be daily, but when you’re giving away a coupon for a free entree item for a small business you don’t want to break the bank. So I timed it for their slow time during the week.

What has happened in the last three months that I’ve been doing this?

Facebook has almost 600 “likes” and continues growing. On a weekly basis I get nearly 20% response (and it keeps growing) to the weekly contest. Twitter is approaching a 10% response since I also started adding in a separate RT contest on top of the regular contest.

The number of followers on Twitter for this account grows every week now because of people that are participating and by new people that want to participate. Traffic in the stores is up across their locations for their slow days. I only give away 20 coupons online/week, but the increase company wide is greater than 20 people (and usage is about 50% of what I give away).

I no longer have to spam follow people and have enormously higher following to follower ratios. The conversations are becoming daily, unique, and hardly even related to eating. There’s an actual mayorship war going on in one of the locations because I said there was (seriously, the two people didn’t really think so before I mentioned them both in an update as being in competition for mayorship). Speaking of Foursquare, if you’re a business that has people checking into your location and you don’t have a special; you should. I have a checkin and mayor special and I get mentions about it on a regular basis. It also gives those dry times some content when I don’t have a coupon.

Best of all, it’s no longer me growing my audience. My audience is doing it for me.

Stop chasing your audience and give them a reason to come to you.