Tweeting my #@$!! Off: 7 Tips for Using Twitter to Make Money
When I was first exposed to Twitter, I was not just negative, I was militant. The idea that a 140-character message was an effective form of communication was ridiculous. The time-suck of all-day blathering about my life, my wife, my meals, my dog, and on and on was offensive to my mid-west work ethic. Worse, I found the constant reading of everyone else’s details and their pandering for micro-fame in the digital ether numbing and nauseating.
My marketing partner is a nag. A twenty nine year-old, social-media-addicted, drank-the-Kool-Aid® of social networking, NAG. She pushed, cajoled, threatened, and bribed me into getting engaged in Twitter (and LinkedIn and Facebook, but those are stories for another day). So, I jumped in and 90 days later, here is my report from the front lines of the question: “Can you really make money on Twitter, even if you are not a PR/Marketing/Advertising/Social Media-consulting company?” The answer is YES.
I have landed three consulting/presenting deals in the last 90 days in part or in whole because of Twitter. These deals have to do with my core business of helping companies grow through large account selling and have nothing to do with being a social media expert, which is good, because I am not a social media expert. As a novice who has now sold 6 figures of consulting in 90 days, let me tell you some things I have learned along the way…
1. Be valuable. The Twitter consultants, I call them the Twitter-azzi, tell you to put your life up on Twitter as a way to generate a personal dialogue with people and to not always be marketing your products or services. Welllllll… Let’s say I think that the right mix for me is 75% providing access to valuable expertise and 25% personal. Value is the result of helping people find information that is important to them—whether your information or that of other people in your area of expertise.
2. Be specific. Choose the area in which you are an expert. You need to pick your topic and focus on the information that you’re going to help people find. If you’re talking about everything all of the time, you will be an interesting personality, but not clearly valuable in any one area. Well, except entertainment.
3. Be choosy. The Twitter-azzi sends out all sorts of ideas on how to be followed by more people, as if that’s beneficial in and of itself. There is a flaw in the assumption that if people follow me, they are listening to me. THEY’RE NOT! These high-volume followers are just trying to increase the number of followers that they have. Don’t follow everyone who follows you and don’t follow people who you are not going to listen to. Be selective. The people whose posts I read are not even those people who I am following, they’re the people who are a part of a group I have created on TweetDeck, or they are including terms that I find in my Searches.
4.Search. This leads me to the key to managing hundreds of followers and millions of people on Twitter: create searches that allow you to catch those people and topics that are important to you. For me, “Vistage” is a search because I am a Vistage speaker and I know that they have a lot of CEOs who are tweeting about that topic. When I spoke at the GrowCo conference in Orlando, sponsored by Inc. Magazine, I put the conference’s name in as a search and met a dozen people who were tweeting during my presentation. Use the searches to hone in on your most important areas of interest and to follow/be followed by people of like interest.
5. Be efficient. I use TweetLater to manage my posts. I can write a dozen posts and release them on a schedule throughout the day so that those people who are following me are not inundated with five tweets all at once. I follow a Vistage speaker who I like, but he releases 5-10 posts at a time and I skim over them rather than read them. I think he thinks that he can tweet paragraphs like an email if he just breaks the paragraphs into tweets. The platform isn’t designed for that. And, as mentioned before, I use TweetDeck to manage my searches and groups—it makes it easier to see them all and work through them.
6. Be responsive. This is not just a broadcast channel; you need to respond to other tweets and engage with other people. If someone follows you, thank them and engage with them if it makes sense.
7. Be active. Retweet good content. Visit profiles to understand people on Twitter and possibly engage with them. Put your Twitter tag on your business card and website. This is becoming an important method of communication like your cell number and email address.
So, these practices turned into money because…
People I met started to engage me, my content and expertise through Twitter. Tweets led them to my profile, my profile led them to my website and blog, that expertise led them to contact me. It sounds simple, and in the end it really was. The difference in each case was that the point of entrance was not my newsletter or my website; Twitter was the jumping-off point. You can follow me @tomsearcy.
Note from your nagging marketing partner…
Great post! I knew I’d turn you into a Twitter junkie sooner or later. But one question: In #3 you say, “The people whose posts I read are not even those people who I am following, they’re the people who are a part of a group I have created on TweetDeck, or they are including terms that I find in my Searches.”
Why are you following the ones you’re not listening to and not following the ones you are listening to? I’d say it’s time for some spring cleaning. When I see that people are using Tweetdeck I know it’s a surefire sign that they’ve built groups to listen to and groups to not. People on Tweetdeck are also most often those following the most people. I keep it real by using Twhirl. No groups, just people I like to hear from.
(Now you know better than to take my name in vein in another post
)
1I respectfully disagree, oh madame NAG. I have a variety of very specific interests- so I find new people through the search function who are speaking about the topics I have flagged. Also, the groups help me to listen specifically to people for specific reasons and have that information presented to me in a manageable way. The posts that come from people I am not following are actually those I am linked through too by someone in a group or a search who I then become interested in because of a “re-tweet.” Finally, every once in a while, I clean out my follows for exactly the reason you suggested.
2I knew you would have a good rebuttal
You win!
Signed, The NAG
3Tom wins this one. I’ve tried both and Tweetdeck beats Twirl, hands down. The ability to manage groups by contextual relevance is invaluable (its called publishing) and Tweetdeck does that, so I make sure I never miss a post from those I really want to follow for a particular set of reasons and will spend much longer reading their posts. The rest I skim mostly for interesting nuggets of work/marketing related information. I disagree with your ratio though (Tom). I think its 70-30 in favor of personal versus work-related tweets. The main reason is that personal posts are more engaging, mostly, give an insight to the person you’re following (who more than likely you’ve not met) and add more credibility to the times they do post something work-related. It usually means they’ve thought about it and it has some weight.
4Simon, do you think the ratio is in any way an issue of personal preference? I really wrestle with the frustration I have with people who inundate me with too much personal information- some, OK, but 70%? I am open to your thoughts on this… I am still learning. I recognize that my personal preferences may be out of sync with the other users of the platform… Help me out here.
5Tom, I think personal preference has a lot to do with it, and ultimately it boils down to a number of other factors – quantity vs quality (someone’s micro-movements 25 times a day will get them unfollowed as rapidly as the machine gun re-tweet biz links approach). Neither work – they interrupt and we know interruption is dead. It also depends on your comfort level – some people are just plain uncomfortable with sharing details of their personal lives with a billion of their closest friends – and in some cases rightly so, because their lives are boring
. So as ever, I really think it boils down to understanding your audience (notice how everything reduces to publishing 
) – gauging the balance between personal and business related content, frequency of updates and relevance to your audience. Ultimately if your content is relevant and either useful or entertaining (biz or personal) then you’ll get traction. In my humble opinion, anyway!
6Fine article, Tom. I’m particularly drawn to your idea of not following everyone. An awful lot of people are just time sumps, nice people though they may be. I have to constantly prune my following to avoid being buried in minutiae.
7Thanks for the post Hank. Have you been reading all of the “experts” in the social media space? They would look at yours and my comments on this topic as out of touch- But anyone who has ever gardened knows, you prune to get the right growth.
8