WordPress-based businesses need customers the same way brick and mortar businesses do. But what are the pain points of your customers? Are your audience personas accurate? How do you build relationships in a digital world? My answer: Twitter.

Twitter serves several marketing purposes including brand awareness, customer service, public relations, networking, and, of course, sales. Our customers are tweeting and they’re telling us about themselves daily. They give us valuable insights that can’t be found elsewhere. These insights help us shape personas into more accurate reflections which influences our content marketing tactics.

I’m often asked how I’ve used Twitter to help with our own marketing goals for Give. It’s not a theory; I did the work. In July of 2015, I was hired to manage and grow the @GiveWP handle with 165 followers. In two months, I had built it organically to 1,000. As of May 13, 2017 we have 4,700 followers. Our following base was built organically; we didn’t buy followers.

What’s our strategy? Our overarching goal is to build community, trust, and be informative to nonprofits. Using relationship marketing, we focus our efforts in our primary demographics and spend time being helpful. We treat them as friends — because they are.

In this talk I will focus on how to use Twitter Lists as a way to efficiently use time, focusing on your audience personas, listening, and, of course, building relationships. I’ll also include Google Analytics data to back up the ever asked ROI to build your WordPress-based business.