CURRENT FEED · October 23, 2024 · 00:13:40
The Power of Focus: How to Grow Your Social Media Account
The Power of Focus: How to Grow Your Social Media Account When it comes to growing a social media account, the key isn't just about creating content—it's about *focusing* on one account, one persona, and one clear strategy at a time. By com…
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Open in Spotify ↗Growing an audience is not primarily a volume problem. For a small team—or a team of one—it is a focus problem.
Timmy Bauer has used the same underlying strategy to grow audiences on Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and podcast platforms: choose one account, serve one clearly defined person, and use one repeatable content system long enough to understand what that platform rewards.
The goal is bigger than follower count. When the content is created with the people you hope to reach, audience growth can also create relationships, referrals, speaking opportunities, and revenue.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- why platform-specific focus matters more than being everywhere;
- how one target persona makes content clearer and more useful;
- how Timmy grew a teacher network that helped him book school visits;
- how school presentations became a YouTube content engine;
- how interviews with writers built a professional referral network; and
- why co-created content can build an audience and a network at the same time.
Choose One Platform
The first decision is not what to post. It is where to concentrate.
Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram each have their own culture, formats, and distribution patterns. A message that works on one platform rarely transfers perfectly to another. Trying to learn all of them at once spreads a small team across too many feedback loops.
“You do your best audience-growth work when you are focusing on a particular platform’s culture, best practices, and algorithm nuances.”
Focus creates enough repetition to notice what resonates, improve the format, and build recognizable habits with an audience. It also forces a useful constraint: for this season, this is the account that matters most.
Define One Target Persona
A platform alone is not a strategy. The second choice is the person the account exists to serve.
Teachers, literacy professionals, parents, entrepreneurs, and professional writers have different questions and gather in different places. Timmy’s recommendation is to get specific, then make every piece of content and every interaction useful to that one group.
That clarity makes the message easier to recognize. It also makes outreach more natural because the people invited into a conversation are the same people the resulting content is designed to help.
Build a Network, Not Just an Audience
Follower growth without relationships can produce impressive numbers but little practical value. Relationships without any public reach can limit who is willing to engage. Timmy’s approach combines the two through content-based networking: create useful content with the people you want to know.
“The foundation of this growth strategy is co-creating content with your target audience.”
An interview becomes both a substantive conversation and a source of smaller posts. The guest brings expertise, the host brings a platform, and the resulting discussion attracts more people from the same professional community.
Timmy credits James Carbary’s concept of content-based networking as the foundation of this approach. His own results offer a practical case study in how the idea works across several audiences.
Case Study: Teachers on Twitter
When Timmy focused on teachers and literacy professionals, he used The Literacy Advocate as the center of the strategy. He invited members of that community onto the podcast, then listened back for the most meaningful, useful, or provocative ideas in each conversation.
Each episode produced roughly ten posts. Those posts were relevant because they came directly from conversations with the intended audience. Guests and their networks joined the discussion, creating long comment threads, new relationships, future episode ideas, and more potential guests.
The account grew from essentially no engagement to about 6,000 followers. For Timmy, however, the most important outcome was not the view count.
“What was most exciting to me was the long comment chains of people that I’d actually started building relationships with.”
Those relationships reached the people who make decisions about author visits: librarians, literacy professionals, principals, and assistant principals. The audience strategy supported the real-world goal of booking school presentations.
Case Study: Children and Parents on YouTube
Timmy’s YouTube channel sat at roughly 300 subscribers for years. When he decided to focus on it, he changed both the target audience and the content system.
The audience became children who enjoy books and the parents who choose content for them. School visits became production opportunities. Timmy recorded long-form read-alouds and invited students to participate in short, playful interviews after presentations.
That tight combination—one platform, one audience, and two repeatable formats—grew the channel from roughly 300 to 4,000 subscribers in about a year to a year and a half. The videos generated approximately 250,000 combined views and thousands of hours of watch time.
It also revealed the cost of focus: as a small marketing team, Timmy could not have pursued the same level of YouTube and Twitter growth simultaneously.
Case Study: Professional Writers on LinkedIn
The same system worked on LinkedIn with two distinct professional audiences at different times.
While hosting the B2B Growth Show, Timmy interviewed B2B marketers and turned those conversations into short written posts for the same community. Later, his book-production company needed relationships with professional writers and ghostwriters who could become referral partners.
He created Writing Better, interviewed writers, repurposed the conversations into LinkedIn content, and continued networking where that professional community was already active. His LinkedIn audience grew into the thousands while the interviews helped him form relationships across the ghostwriting space.
The important detail is sequence: these were not several personas pursued at once. Each period had one primary audience and a content system designed for it.
The Repeatable System
- Choose the business outcome. Decide whether the work should lead to school visits, referral partners, customers, or another concrete result.
- Choose one audience. Identify the people connected to that outcome.
- Choose their platform. Concentrate where those people already spend attention.
- Co-create a substantial piece of content. A podcast or interview creates a reason to build a genuine relationship.
- Extract platform-native ideas. Turn the strongest moments into posts designed for the chosen channel.
- Use the response to continue the network. Conversations reveal future topics, guests, and relationships.
The loop works because content is not treated as a broadcast detached from people. It begins with a relationship and creates more opportunities for relationships.
The Practical Takeaway
For a solo operator or small marketing team, the temptation to maintain every platform can feel responsible. In practice, it often prevents any one channel from receiving the attention required to grow.
“Every time I’ve grown one of my social media accounts to thousands of subscribers or followers, it has been because I punted everything else and I went super singular.”
The useful questions are simple: Which platform? Which person? Which strategy? Then comes the difficult part—continuing to answer those questions the same way long enough to build momentum.
Focus does not mean ignoring every other channel forever. It means accepting that meaningful growth usually happens in seasons, one audience and one system at a time.
Read the complete episode transcript14-minute timestamped transcript
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
The Power of Focus
This timestamped transcript was generated from the original episode audio and lightly edited for readability and obvious transcription errors. Use the player above to hear Timmy’s delivery in its original form.
Why focus matters
00:00What’s up, purpose-driven entrepreneurs? I’m going to do something today that I haven’t really done in a long time. I’m going to create a solo episode because I realized that I needed to tell this story of how I’ve grown the different social media accounts that I’ve grown. I’m putting a résumé together, and I realized that I don’t have a place on the internet where I’ve told this story and defined the strategy that I’ve used. It’s not rocket science, but it’s what worked for me, and whenever I’ve tried to do it a different way, it hasn’t really worked that well. I’ve used this strategy on my YouTube channel, on Twitter, on my podcasts, and on LinkedIn. Every time I’ve used it, I’ve grown the social media account by thousands. The article I’m writing—and episode I’m recording—is called “The Power of Focus: How to Grow Your Social Media Account.”
01:02When it comes to growing a social media account, the key isn’t just creating content. It’s focusing on one account, one persona, and one clear strategy at a time. By committing to a singular approach, you can generate the kind of engagement that drives growth and builds a meaningful network. You’re not just driving growth; you’re driving growth and building a meaningful network. When you try to do one without the other, you lose some of the payoff. If you have growth but not a network, you lose the relational payoff. If you have a network without audience growth, you have the relational payoff, but you’re inhibited in the kind of networking you can do because it’s tougher to get people to engage with you if they see you don’t have much of an audience. You need less audience than you think for network potential. I’ve found that hundreds or thousands of views and downloads is usually enough to get surprisingly high-profile people to engage with you.
One platform and one persona
02:18Here’s how I’ve applied this method across different platforms and achieved consistent results. Step one: choose one account to focus on. It’s tempting to spread your efforts across multiple platforms, but true growth happens when you commit to one account at a time. This is frustrating, but it’s the case. Whether it’s X or Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube, make that account your sole focus for a period of time. Doing this lets you dive deep into the platform’s culture, best practices, and algorithm nuances. This is a lesson I have to keep relearning myself: you do your best audience-growth work when you’re focusing on a particular platform’s culture, best practices, and algorithm nuances. Twitter is not the same as Instagram, and the stuff that works on Twitter doesn’t work on Instagram. The same is true for LinkedIn or YouTube. Step two: define your target persona. To truly maximize your growth, zero in on one persona. Who is your ideal audience? Teachers, literacy professionals, parents, entrepreneurs? Get specific. Tailor every piece of content, interaction, and engagement to resonate with that single group. This clarity helps ensure your message sticks rather than getting lost among multiple priorities.
Teachers and literacy professionals on Twitter
03:41Let me tell you some case studies. Here’s a case study of my Twitter growth through community. When I was working to grow my Twitter account, I focused solely on teachers and literacy professionals. Every tweet, comment, and piece of content was designed with them in mind. I began by using Twitter to reach out to my target audience, inviting them to be guests on my podcast, The Literacy Advocate. This approach allowed me to co-create content with them, which had two benefits. Number one: content relevance. The conversations were rich and aligned with my target audience’s interests because I was talking to my target audience. Number two: amplified reach. Each podcast episode led to a batch of ten tweets that were directly related to the interview.
04:27I would listen back to the episodes and write the most interesting, meaningful, or controversial things said in the interview as tweets. This created a ripple effect of engagement across Twitter. By focusing exclusively on this niche and engaging in meaningful discussions, I grew my Twitter account from no engagement to 6,000 followers, with thousands of views per post and long comment chains. What was most exciting to me was not the thousands of views per post. It was the long comment chains of people I’d actually started building relationships with. They would draw their networks into these comment chains, which would spark further content ideas and identify more people I could reach out to as guests. That would further grow the network and the audience.
Turning an audience into school visits
05:25This focus not only grew my audience but also built relationships that helped me secure book tours, which was my ultimate goal. At that time, I was trying to book as many book tours as I could. I was using this as a way to build an audience, a network, and relationships with the decision-makers who say yes to an author coming to speak at their school. Those are the literacy professionals at the school: the school librarian, assistant principal, and principal. They are laser-focused on literacy initiatives, and they are the gatekeepers and decision-makers for who gets to speak at the school. They are also the people who would say yes to coming on a podcast called The Literacy Advocate.
Children and parents on YouTube
06:14The next case study is YouTube—a totally different thing. When it was time to grow my YouTube channel, I used a similar approach but with a different persona: the consumers of kids’ books, which are children and parents. It took me a long time to decide to grow the channel. It sat at around 300 subscribers for almost all of its life. I would book school visits and turn those visits into content opportunities. I produced read-aloud videos as my long-form content, and my short-form content was fun, 60-second interviews with kids. I would visit a school and, as a prize, pull random names from the students who had filled out flyers and brought them back. The students selected would get to be in a YouTube video with me.
07:09I would typically do two to three presentations and end up with around twelve or more children. I would then make two or three 60-second videos with them. Both the read-alouds and short interviews resonated with the consumers of children’s books: pre-K through third-grade children and their parents. By maintaining this laser-focused content strategy, I grew my YouTube channel from 300 to 4,000 subscribers in about a year to a year and a half. I generated a combined 250,000 views—a quarter of a million views—and thousands of watch hours. This deep dive into a single platform and a single persona is what yielded those results. It’s frustrating to admit this, but as a team of one, I wouldn’t have been able to do this and Twitter at the same time.
Content-based networking
08:22Step three: co-create content to maximize engagement. The foundation of this growth strategy is co-creating content with your target audience. I didn’t come up with this. It’s a James Carbary idea called content-based networking; he wrote the book on it. I’m basically a really good case study for applying his book. It’s all about co-creating content with your target audience. Whether it’s teachers on Twitter, professional writers on LinkedIn, or entrepreneurs on a podcast, collaboration is the key for this strategy to work.
Professional audiences on LinkedIn
09:00I did the same thing for the Writing Better podcast. The micro-content it spun off became written content for LinkedIn. I also did it with B2B marketers when I was the host of the B2B Growth Show. I turned that content into micro-content on LinkedIn. Now I’m doing it with entrepreneurs for the Purpose-Driven Entrepreneur show. The strategy is to pick one thing, one place, and one persona. When I was fully focused on being a host of the B2B Growth Show, I was creating content with B2B marketers and turning it into written short-form content for B2B marketers. That grew me to an audience of around 2,500 B2B marketers on LinkedIn.
10:15Then, for my companies, it made a lot of sense to use this strategy with writers. I needed to meet every ghostwriter in the ghostwriting space because they were referral partners for my book-production company. So I started a show called Writing Better. I interviewed professional writers, turned that content into short form, and used it to continue networking on LinkedIn, which is where all the writers play. Now my LinkedIn is around 4,000 or 4,500 followers.
Build a network, not just an audience
10:55Build a network, not just an audience. The beauty of this focused approach is that it doesn’t just build followers; it builds a network. By consistently creating content with and for your target persona, you establish credibility, trust, and long-term relationships. That’s a network. The network becomes a community that engages not only with your content but also with each other, amplifying your reach even further.
The magic of singular focus
11:18Final thoughts: the magic of a singular focus. The secret to social media growth—at least for me, when you’re a team of one—is singular focus: one account, one persona, one strategy. It’s easy to get distracted by the potential of being everywhere at once, but true growth happens when you commit fully to one platform and one audience at a time. This approach has helped me achieve tangible growth, build strong networks, and drive real-world results like booking book tours and increasing sales. Using this strategy for Purpose-Driven Entrepreneur, I probably owe about $300,000 in revenue to using content-based networking—to using content creation as a means of building a network and an audience.
The single takeaway
12:31By staying focused, you’ll not only grow your audience but also build lasting relationships and achieve your broader business goals. The single takeaway here is that it’s so difficult to do this as a solopreneur. I’m not a solopreneur, but at least in terms of marketing, I function like one. Every time I’ve grown one of my social media accounts to thousands of subscribers or followers, it has been because I punted everything else and went super singular: that platform, that persona, that strategy—and I’m only going to do that. That’s what did it.
Closing
13:03It’s time to get back to that, probably on YouTube. I’m hankering to get back to growing my YouTube channel. The content is kids’ content—mostly children’s books and getting kids to think like entrepreneurs. My YouTube channel is Timmy Bauer; if you type Timmy Bauer into YouTube, you’ll find it there. If you like this podcast, please do me a huge favor: scroll down to where the stars are and tap the number of stars you think this deserves. If you’re on Spotify, there’s a similar version. Thanks for listening. See you next time.