Twitter & LinkedIn - How starting from scratch has generated lots of new clients ...

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I mentioned in a previous post that since October I've really got into using Twitter and LinkedIn on a daily basis, it has really paid off and been a great source for new clients. I have been a member of both for over three years and had many thousands of connections/followers, but in the previous three years I can count the number of new clients generated through Twitter and LinkedIn on one hand, yes less than five!

So why am I now getting regular clients on a weekly basis from the same sources with a lot less connections/followers?

The answer is fairly simple, I started from scratch... But with a plan!

I removed all my LinkedIn connections, deleted my twitter account and reopened a new one. So at the start of October I had hardly any connections or followers.

Why get rid of thousands of my followers?

Simply because before I was one of these people just trying to get as many followers as possible, I thought it looked good that I had over 10,000 followers. But none of those 10,000 were potential clients so it meant nothing. Also with all those followers I couldn't interact with my followers because I was getting swamped with tweets and direct messages (and I hate twitter DM's, but that's one for a different post!!).

With a clean slate I also decided to use LinkedIn differently to Twitter. I very much think of my LinkedIn account an extension to networking, so 99% of my LinkedIn connections are within a 50 mile radius of where I live.

Now that I had a clean slate I could target the Twitter followers I wanted - potential clients!

Did I use any software?

No! Now I know that a lot of people swear by certain software like tweetadder, etc. But I felt that if I went down that route I'd be back to where I was, lots of followers but not really knowing who Iwas following or (more importantly) who was following me. Before I started targeting followers Imade sure my profile was good and then spent an hour every night for 2 weeks searching for people to follow and doing nothing else.

99% of followers will look at your profile only once!

And that once is when you follow them or they follow you, so your profile needs to be a call to action or something that will make them want to click that link. Try to think what would it take for you to click on someone's link? If on someone's profile it said 'Get more sales with this' and a link, you would be very curious to see what it is, I know I would.

So after that initial 2 weeks I had already got over 250 followers, and since then I have spent every day interacting with my followers and it's paid off. Now I get people following me (I've got over 500 as of writing this), without me having to target them. That's because when you start to interact with your followers they will mention you, retweet your tweets, etc and all their followers will see this and want to follow you aswell. So that boring hour every day for the first two weeks is now paying dividens as my message's are now going viral. One thing I noticed when researching who to target, was that people in the same industry follow each other. For example if you target a photographer to follow then a lot of their followers will be photographers aswell and when they see them interacting with you they will follow you aswell.

So for me it has come down to this - "Quality is better than Quanity"!