Do you ever sit there staring at your Twitter account, gazing into the “What’s Happening” box and wonder to yourself…. What shall I say?
If you do, then you’re trying way to hard. Just think about the question in front of you. Just ask yourself “what’s happening…?”
You don’t need to be some kind of genius to master Twitter, you just have to be yourself. Over time, you will come across so many ways to use Twitter to market and develop your business. In my business, I have come across a number of client projects associated with Twitter and have experimented and tinkered around with a number of different approaches and techniques, but there is one that I favour over all others.
I think that the best technique is not to have one, actually. But I do have a tip for you which I use when I am looking to do a new client intake, of which I am going to do a live demonstration for you, so you can see it in action, in the video that goes with this post.
I have discovered that nobody of value to your business will seriously listen to you or really interact with you, unless it is YOU. I try to stick to a general rule of thumb doing several “Real” tweets, for example answering the question “What’s Happening,” or re-tweeting something from a follower, or re-tweeting a good blog post. Then in between, I scatter my links and business tweets in small numbers. I try and keep these in perspective however and I never run the risk of boring people with too many business tweets. I never send more than about one in every 10 to 15 business tweets, as compared to other tweets.
I wanted to actually show you how being real can really work, so while I’m sitting here writing this now, I am going to go on Twitter and answer the question, “What’s Happening?” This will be my Tweet:
“I am writing an article about Twitter and I want to do an experiment – If you see this can you tweet back? I will love you forever if you do!! Thanks!”
Because that’s exactly what’s happening right now. However, as far as your own VA business is concerned, you could say…
1. “I have an opening in my VA practise for a new client, does anyone know of someone who needs help?”
2. “Is there anyone out there interested in a complimentary hour of admin services?”
3. “I am writing an article on how to use a VA for your bookkeeping – what do you use a VA for?”
You get the idea, I have done this many times, and I have had quite a few really great leads.
Go ahead right now and look at the video that accompanies this post to see “my ACTUAL Seesmic Desktop application,” where you will find video proof that this can all work.
It has been 20 Minutes now, and I am checking back to see how many real @reply responses I have got from my experiment – 20 minutes isn’t very long, but Twitter runs at a fast pace so it’s about right for this kind of tweet – (I received 16 in total, and you can see the real life example in the video – it’s not very clear on the upload to YouTube so I will place a screenshot below for you). As I also sent out a tweet to thank people who had done this, my original tweet got pushed to the back somewhat and is difficult to see right now, so it’s best to wait a little while before you send a thank you out, in order to leave your original tweet in a visible position. I placed all these people on a specific Twitter list because they were so fabulous for interacting and they are now on my “Awesome Twitter Experiment” list! The second part of the video explains how to do this.
So, very simply, be yourself, and be honest… Twitter wasn’t originally designed for business – it’s the users who saw the loophole and made it that way, so rather than market your business directly, the vital key is to first market yourself as a person — then see if these people would be interested in what you do for a living, or if they know someone who might be. So whether you’re considering a virtual assistant program now, or you’re thinking about getting involved with a virtual assistant program in future, or even if you’ve already had some sort of virtual assistant program experience, drop by for a visit and see for yourself what other like-minded people have to say within the extraordinary field of Virtual Assistance!
In order for this to be really effective, you need a good following on Twitter and tomorrow I will be showing you the criteria I use when building followers, and I will also be busting a Twitter Myth!
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