There are tried and tested ways of growing your audience, none of which involve any short term or overnight routes to success. You can spend hours each week blasting links all over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media streams – but will anyone care, and does this really have any impact in the long run?

People are far more likely to take an interest in what you do, when you’ve taken an interest in what they do. Making friends with people, interacting with them, and sharing their content (as well as your own) is far more likely to lead to you reaching new people and increasing your audience.

Avoid ‘cold call’ style mass tweets to people asking for listens, RTs, donations etc. Instead, treat social media as a conversation. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with sharing links to your work, but make sure it isn’t the only thing you’re doing. If you copy and paste the same link into 15 different Facebook groups, are you active in each of these groups? Or are you only there to act like a digital billboard?