How I Got 175K Followers and Local Sales Leads From Twitter

If you are a sales person, you have probably been feeling the pressure to use social media in order to increase your sales.  Unfortunately, while you may enjoy social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram personally, you just don’t know how to convert these social channels into commission checks.  

I am going to provide a free workshop training session.  I will walk you through the process of creating a twitter profile that will generate sales.  I am going to guarantee that you will have 300 new, targeted followers and 10 sales leads within two weeks of this workshop if you follow the steps I will give you.  There is no charge for this event.

In today’s post, I simply want to share my twitter journey with you to provide some insights that will better prepare you for the CCSalesPro Show this Friday.  On the show I will be providing step-by-step actions you can take.  Even if you’ve never used twitter in your life, these actions are practical and can be followed by anyone.  This post is simply my effort to share with you how twitter has impacted my business over the last seven years.

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER

I found twitter about seven years ago.  This was just about the time I was getting started selling merchant services in my local market and about a year before I started recruiting and offering sales training.  The first thing that struck me about twitter was how open the community really is.  The idea that I could publicly post an @reply on twitter to a celebrity or accomplished business person or, more importantly a local business owner and potentially get a response was pretty cool.  This is something that no other platform really offers except SnapChat right now and Instagram to a lesser extent.  On twitter, the entire world could see your tweets.  You could join in on a conversation using hashtags.  You could reach out to anyone on the platform and at least take a shot at making a contact.

I started off by focusing on posting motivational posts and tweets about my faith which is something about which I am passionate and something that over half of my target audience (small business owners and sales professionals) is passionate about.  I found several mega-church pastors who were big on twitter, and I started following the people who were following them.  On twitter when you follow someone, twitter sends him or her a notification.  This notification will often cause the person being followed to pull up your profile and see who you are.  When this targeted audience saw I was posting good content that they would enjoy, they started following me as well.

I posted content that was specifically created to be “retweeted.”  This simply means that my followers would want to share the tweet with their followers.  When their followers saw my tweet, they would click on my profile pic to see who I was.  Then they would follow me as well.  I used this cycle to grow from 0 to 100,000 followers in about one year.  I got very good at understanding what my target audience wanted to share.  I remember one week in particular where I had two “trending” tweets in one week.  This means that my tweet was in the top ten most shared tweets for a period of about an hour on the entire twitter platform.  This happened twice in one week for me.  I was pretty pumped about it, not to mention I picked up around 2,000 new followers as a result.

What I started realizing early on was that behind each of the twitter profiles following me was a real person who had linked his or her twitter account to a personal email address.  I also learned that on social media, everyone wants to talk and no one wants to listen.  When getting started on twitter, you may feel like part of a big crowd where everyone just has a mega-phone on which they are all talking at once with no one listening.  Most people try to shout louder, I decided to engage with my audience.  I started listening.  I spent hours every day on twitter connecting with people and building trust.  I responded to tweets about things I cared about in a sincere way, and this sparked conversations and connections.

While all of this was going on, I was building my local merchant services portfolio and realizing that the industry I was in needed more online training resources.  My issue was simple.  How do I make money from this need while also providing value?  As many of you know, I accomplished this objective by starting a YouTube channel and recruiting a team of sales people.  What many of you don’t know is why it was successful.

My YouTube channel was successful because of my Twitter profile.  On YouTube, your videos are ranked primarily based on views.  Every time I posted a new video, I shared it on twitter and asked all of my dedicated followers who were in sales or business to take a few minutes to watch the video.  Within one day, my videos would have 1,000+ views – a lot for a video about selling credit card processing.  This allowed my channel and eventually my website to be the top ranked searched result for all sorts of keywords having to do with selling merchant services.  That is probably how you found me and why you are reading my post today.

Twitter is still my favorite social channel today!  I use many others, but I just love the opportunity that twitter presents.  I can’t wait to share my step-by-step process with you this Friday to build your twitter following and create your first ten leads from twitter!

Let’s make twitter work for you moving forward.  The time has come to build your twitter audience and leverage it to generate legitimate, local sales leads.

I hope you enjoyed reading my twitter journey!

James Shepherd

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