Using Twitter to Sell Small Business Owners

Twitter is a platform I am particularly passionate about, even though I haven’t been able to be as active lately as I would like, my personal twitter profile has roughly 180,000 followers. I have never paid any money for fake followers so all of my followers have come as a result of some of the secrets I will share with you today.

If you are looking to sell small business owners on twitter, here are my three tips:

#1  Target, Follow and Engage Personally. If you are looking to get your twitter profile off the ground, you need to find other profiles that are local and that might be followed by business owners in your area, follow their followers and then engage personally. Don’t worry too much about making lots of great tweets when you get started. One or two tweets per day is fine since no one is really listening at this point. Instead, spend time strategically following business people and connections locally. Read their tweets and re-tweet or @mention them back. Show them that you are listening. DON’T TRY TO PITCH THEM! Try instead to connect with them and show them you are following their content, this will cause them to follow you back.

#2  Post re-tweetable tweets. Once you have a few hundred followers locally, try to make one tweet per day that is re-tweetable. The easiest and most effective way to grow your follower count on twitter is to create tweets that your followers will RT or retweet. Even if you only get 2 or 3 people to retweet your message and they have 300 followers each, your message will be in the feed of 600 to 900 people and the odds are that a few new people will follow you as a result. Although famous quotes can certainly be a powerful tool, it is better to make some original content. If you post your own quote or interesting picture that is retweeted, people are more likely to follow you.

One very effective strategy is to take pictures of interesting things you see in businesses and then make a compelling tweet about it. I did these all the time when I was selling locally and they were very effective, many times generating conversations on twitter about local business issues. Also, you can post links to local news stories you found interesting but with your own text like, I can’t believe what this business did to get new customers! Link? or Why don’t more businesses in Pittsburgh market like this? Link this sort of tweet will not only get a click from your followers but most likely a few retweets and new followers.

#3 Engage followers, Build Relationships and Generate leads. Engagement on twitter is very rare and so just a little bit of engagement on your part will make you stand out. Just like any other marketing activity, you need to track your leads. If you see a tweet from a local business owner that you like, retweet it and then reply to that tweet with something like, Great tweet! Where did you get that info? Do you have a book you recommend on this topic? Write down the users twitter profile or track them in your CRM as a twitter lead. Check back a week later on their profile and try to engage again. If they reply positively to your tweet, you have one of two options. If you know where their store is, just stop in the next day and introduce yourself as the guy they were just talking with on twitter, or send them a direct message DM and ask them if they would be open to meeting for lunch to connect with you and talk about local business issues. So, there you go! 3 Tips for using twitter to sell small business owners, I hope these have been a help to you.

Have a great day!
James Shepherd

Read previous post:  How Much Commission Can You Make Selling Merchant Services?

How Much Commission Can you Make Selling Merchant Services?

Read next post:  5 Steps to Using LinkedIn to Sell Small Business Owners

5 Steps to Using LinkedIn to Sell Small Business Owners