How Amanda Natividad became Twitter's favorite marketer

Hey friends,

We’re a week away from the holidays, which means all the travel madness is yet to start. But before you’re en route to your holiday destination and all you can think of is sipping egg nog in the company of people you love, we’ve got one last piece of audience building inspiration for you.

We’re ending the year by bringing you the story of someone we’ve long admired.

Amanda Natividad is VP of Marketing for audience research startup, SparkToro. She’s also a contributor for Adweek, a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a former journalist. Amanda previously led marketing for Growth Machine, led marketing for Liftopia, built Fitbit’s B2B content program, and led content and communications for NatureBox.

In the span of a little over a year, Amanda has become one of the most prominent marketing voices on Twitter, accumulating a following of over 120K and driving multiple opportunities her way. Let’s see how she did it.

Tell us about your audience building journey: how and why did you decide to do this?

First I had to. Then I wanted to. My first foray into audience building was on behalf of the content marketing agency I was working with, Growth Machine. We needed to increase the pipeline, nurture our leads, and generate overall awareness of our services. Focusing on modern content marketing and my being the face of the brand was our strategy to do all that. And having the safety net of an employer is what helped me overcome the first hurdle of starting: getting permission.

People who are reluctant to begin audience building are often waiting for some kind of calling, some kind of permission. I was certainly one of those people. And having an employer open the door for me was a safe way for me to start. After getting into a regular writing cadence, launching the newsletter, and relaunching the Growth Machine Marketing podcast, I started to get more comfortable with creating and I started to uncover my own personal reasons for building an audience. One of those reasons was wanting to create more career serendipity for myself.What impact has audience building had for you?

After writing daily about organic marketing (with occasional detours into food and life) and getting close to 10,000 Twitter followers within six months, my current boss, Rand Fishkin, followed me back. I continued to tweet about marketing, but I also became more comfortable tweeting about my other interests, like food, cooking, career development, and parenting. Even though I had every reason to feel self-conscious about one of my marketing heroes following me back, I found comfort in realizing that Rand followed me back to hear my unique perspectives — not because he needed content marketing 101 content.

Aside from eventually joining my dream job and team at SparkToro, I also continued to pursue my personal endeavors. I codified everything I know about content marketing into an intermediate Maven cohort-based course called Content Marketing 201. I also grew my personal newsletter to over 8,000 subscribers.Now, let’s get in the weeds. What were the tactics that helped you grow the most? Why?

I'll say the most impactful thing I've done is master the art of social media replies. When you don't have many social media followers, your own reach is low. And social media is an impressions game. So what can you do to increase your impressions? Go where users are, fish where the fish are. If you comment on the tweets of accounts that are larger than yours, you'll increase your amount of impressions. It's also important that your comments are additive to the conversation. Take a "yes and" mentality to how you comment. And if you disagree, be sure to stay respectful and on-topic. Everyone brings all kinds of baggage to social media and your written word read by complete strangers is ripe for misinterpretation.

But put another way, it's just good manners. Think of social media as a party. You wouldn't barge into the room and start shouting over everyone to pay attention to you. You'd make your way through the room. You'd introduce yourself to acquaintances and strangers, joining existing conversations. Social media is not that different.What is one piece of advice you wish someone gave you in the beginning of your audience building journey?

I wish I knew that you don't need to be officially invited in order to join the public discourse on the timeline. Sure, don't run around pretending to be an expert in something you're not, and don't be overbearing in how you interact with strangers. But don't be afraid to jump into conversations with people. After all, that's why they're posting on social media. They're trying to have public conversations.

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