One strategy for growing your audience in 50% the time

Welcome to another edition of PROse, the B2B marketer's no BS guide to growing an engaged audience.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been asked the same question more times than ever by founders:

“Should I be building my personal brand?”

Spoiler alert: the answer is YES.

Let’s jump into the why & how (even if you’re not a founder)

95%+ of my feed on Twitter and LinkedIn is content from personal accounts.

95%+ of my engagement on Twitter and LinkedIn is with content from personal accounts.

Intentional or coincidence?

If anything, it’s “subconsciously intentional”... meaning I do it on purpose, I’m just unaware that’s what I’m doing.

Most people I know are like that too.

The truth is, personal accounts are just more… well, personal.

I can see a face. I can see a name. I can see a story by reading their content.

With a brand account, I get a logo and mostly marketing messages.

There’s no emotional resonance. This is where a lot of brands get stuck.

Their audience isn’t connecting with them on an emotional level, so they have to lean heavily on tactics like “15 accounts you should be following” to grow their account.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a place for strategically drumming up attention - but if you don’t have a plan for keeping people around after you get their attention, then it’s all for naught.

Even if you do, it’s also not sustainable in the long-run.

This brings me to my point.

The reason founders should be building an audience on their personal accounts?

To siphon attention and trust to their brand accounts.

People care a lot more about your brand when they know who’s behind it.

They go from supporting a random company to supporting a friend.

And there’s much more leverage for you in that transition.

Here are 2 ways I commonly use a personal brand account to support the brand account & grow the business:

1. Respond to product questions

You know what I dislike most about the household name brands?

They’re literally too big to make you feel like your interaction matters.

IF you get a response, 99/100 it’s going to be templated.

It’s not the SMMs fault. It’s just the nature of being a large business fielding 1000s of tags, questions and replies per day.

However, if you’re a small to mid-sized startup, that’s your opportunity.

No matter how big or small your business is, people are conditioned to expect the same treatment we get from the big brands: a generic response or no response at all.

So when you go out of your way to have real people answer questions, people develop a higher affinity for you AND your brand.

It’s also how I’ve turned quite a few inquiries into demos and even won deals.

2. Comment to jumpstart engagement

I use this tactic all the time when I’m helping startups build their audience from ~0.

Since the brand account doesn’t have any active followers, we use personal accounts to get the ball rolling by engaging with brand content.

It’s a low-lift tactic, but it has a huge impact for two reasons:

1. Twitter and LinkedIn will surface that comment to the person’s most engaged followers’ feed

2. It still counts as engagement. And regardless of how many followers you have - both platforms are surfacing more interest-based content (you can thank TikTok for that). If enough people comment, the platforms give you a free push

This is a solid 2-for-1 deal for something that only takes a couple of seconds to do.

Not to mention, as people see the same personal accounts engaging with a brand, they soon put 2+2 together, realizing that they’re associated.

Which goes back to my earlier point, once people know who’s behind/associated with a brand, they’re far more likely to support.

Now, I know many of you here are marketers, but may not be founders. So you might be wondering if this is any different for you.

The biggest difference is that it’s easier for a founder to go all-in on supporting the brand account.

You may not want to comment on every brand post or always jump in and answer questions. And that’s totally fine!

If that’s the case, think of ways to support your senior leadership to get involved on social.

Quiet is kept: I did a lot of ghostwriting for senior leaders when I worked in-house. I still do from time-to-time.

TL;DR: if you want to speed up the growth of your brand, connect your audience to the people behind the company, not just the product.

That’s how you start to build a community brick by brick. And once you’ve built a community, product demand will grow… fast.

Aaaaand, that’s it for this week!

If you’re on the fence about incorporating personal accounts into your brand social strategy, shoot me a reply with questions. Happy to help!