Growing Your Audience: How to Increase Your Social Following

Do you use social media to build an audience for your business?

Are you wondering how you can convert your audience into customers?

To learn how to grow an audience that wants more and more of what you have to offer, I interview Jeffrey Rohrs for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jeffrey Rohrs, co-host of the Social Pros Podcast and author of the new book, Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers. He's also the vice president of marketing insights at Exact Target.

Jeff shares why an audience is so important for marketers.

You'll learn about seekers, amplifiers and joiners and how these audience types relate to your business.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Growing Your Audience
Why an audience is so important for marketers

Jeff explains that in his book Audience, he homes in on the concept of proprietary audience development. It's what people in social media, email marketing and even mobile have been doing, but he approaches it from a different angle.

When Jeff talked to marketers about their audiences, which included Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube subscribers and email subscribers, they didn't seem to have a strategy. In most cases, strategy was an afterthought or the outcome of a momentary campaign.

Marketing was traditionally organized around a campaign. Jeff refers to it as a beginning, a middle and an end, then a cake to celebrate the results and then repeat it.

You'll discover why audience development is a responsibility, primary to marketing.

Originally marketers delivered the promise via email, but now you have to take that style of thinking into the social and mobile channels. Proprietary audiences will only be there if you build them. If not, you'll have to pay in the form of advertising.

Jeff's message is to take a look at everything you do in marketing and try to optimize it to build a proprietary audience, because it gives you a huge competitive advantage.

Before the Internet, creative thinkers only had to worry about great creative. They didn't have to assemble an audience because mass media did that for them.

The difference today is not only coming up with the creative, but also thinking about distribution and building an audience that belongs to you—one that nobody else has access to. So when you have that great piece of content, you are able to push the button and reach your audience.

You'll hear Jeff explain why it's important for businesses to have people in charge of audience development across all channels.

Listen to the show to find out why proprietary audience development is the flipside of the content marketing coin.

The definition of seekers, amplifiers and joiners

Jeff explains that these are the three top-level audiences that marketers have exclusive access to.

1. Seekers

Seekers are people who look for information or for entertainment. For example, you're a seeker when you turn on your TV and flip through the channels to find something to entertain you.

You're also a seeker when you use Google or Google Maps. Search engine optimization is all about the process of delivering seekers to your website.

Seekers are momentary. Once they have their fill of entertainment or find the information they need, they go away without a trace.

You'll find out what you need to do with this audience type.

2. Amplifiers

Amplifiers are what social media is built upon.