I often read articles which say how good social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are at getting new clients/customers. In fact most of the articles I have come across say that Twitter is far less beneficial than these other networks when looking for new clients or customers. So what use is Twitter?
For me the opposite is true, I have found most of my clients via Twitter and continue to get enquiries from Twitter users on a weekly basis. If I am completely honest I have not gained any clients directly from Facebook, and only a couple through my LinkedIn profile.
So how do I use Twitter?
At first Twitter was a little too fast for me until I started optimising my use of it by using third party applications such as Buffer and SocialOomph. I honestly thought I would never be able to keep up the pace and how the heck was I supposed to attract new clients? In so many blog articles online they say you shouldn’t sell your products and services on Twitter, it took me a while to see what I needed to do.
Here are a few things I do on Twitter which has helped me get new clients for my eBook formatting service:
- Follow authors and Twitter users who are in the book industry such as publishers and booksellers
By following people in your niche market the more chance they will follow you back and if your tweets are interesting enough they will start to see what you can do for them and start to interact with you and share your knowledge with others. - Share great content from articles aimed at people in your niche, or useful information about how they can market themselves
I subscribe to a number of blogs who provide great articles on social media and in relation to eBooks, even though I don’t write the content myself I am always looking to share this content as much as possible if it’s helpful for my followers. Help is what people want so this should be something you look at doing when trying to promote your business on Twitter. - I always, always respond to mentions, RT’s and messages on Twitter – I appreciate the time people take to contact me!
I use various ways of keeping in touch with my Twitter followers, I carry my iPhone everywhere with me so I can respond on the move, I also recently opened a Nimble account (a SocialCRM tool) which means I can keep track of everything in one place. - Interaction with users on Twitter in general
I go out of my way to look for people on Twitter using the search tool who might need my help. I have some saved searches set-up which means I can easily scroll through tweets and pick out those which I can respond to. I get most of my Twitter clients this way, if I am busy I slow down a bit, if I need some more work I do more searches and respond to more tweets. - Scatter tweets about your products and services among your other tweets
I use SocialOomph to automate some of my tweets, I have reduced it quite a bit from when I first started using it but I still have this running throughout the day with a scattering of sales tweets – not many but enough for people to see what I offer. These tweets have been favourited quite a bit recently which I hope means that these Twitter users are going to come back to it when they need help with their eBook formatting.
I have been very lucky getting so many clients on Twitter and the above advice might not work for everybody, so you need to find out what works best for you. If you use Twitter on a daily basis and interact with your followers and actively seek people out to help then I am sure your client base will increase, even just a little bit.
I’d love to know what social media networks you use and how you go about getting clients through them… On a side note, even though I haven’t gained a single client through Facebook I am still actively using it because I feel I have a lot of interaction with people on there and it’s a great way to share content. Maybe one day I’ll get the elusive Facebook client but for now I am happy with the Twitter influx!
