With Twitter being one of the most widely used social media channels by SMB owners, your business can't afford to miss out on the opportunity to use this site to connect with customers, gain valuable feedback, and increase brand awareness.

We often share valuable Twitter marketing tips on our blog, such as how to make your profile . While it can be easy to get caught up in the technical details of online social networking, some of the best advice that we can offer is to focus on growing your audience. Do you want to know the secret for growing your Twitter audience? Attend a #hashtag friendly event.

These days it seems that every conference you attend is somehow tied to a social media hashtag, so finding a social media friendly event that is relevant to your industry should not be a difficult task. Considering that most people in attendance at these conferences share the same two goals that you have (to learn and to network), Twitter is a highly effective tool for allowing both of these to happen.

If you simply don't have the budget or time to break away from your office to attend an event, joining a Twitter chat is another great way to converse with others around a specific hashtag. Both methods of networking will allow participants to share ideas relevant to the hashtag as well as hear powerful content from others surrounding the topic.

As you can imagine, participating in engaging conversations surrounding a specific hashtag will help to get your name and brand in front of people that you may not have connected with otherwise, making it the perfect way to grow your Twitter audience.

Here are some more specific ways that participating in a hashtag friendly event can help you to grow your base of followers:

It can allow you to build relationships, even if you can not physically attend the event.

While you may not necessarily feel in your comfort zone walking up to a stranger at a conference to strike up a conversation or reaching out to a colleague online, tweeting about a hashtag that is relevant to the conference makes it easier and less confrontational to make connections and build relationships.
If you really want to focus on growing your audience, set some goals ahead of time, such as the minimum number of tweets that you plan to engage in at the conference. This will help to hold you accountable for actively participating in these online conversations.
Also, make yourself aware of all hashtags related to the event. Since hashtags allow you to sort online engagement, you can stay in the loop with what everyone is saying about the event as well as get your brand involved in these conversations.

It can get your brand in front of an entirely fresh audience.

Ideally, you will tweet something that is incredibly witty and proves valuable to your audience. As a result, your content will earn some retweets, likely from people that have just decided to start following you. As a result, your content that was retweeted will get in front of these fresh new audiences, helping to build awareness for your brand. Some of these people may even decide to start following you too.
While tweeting is done in real time, knowing some of the event hashtags ahead of time can help you create the rough draft of a few tweets that will really resonate with your audience.

For more ways to grow your audience, please register for the Twitter for Business Workshop on Wednesday, October 15th from 3-6pm.