Especially somewhere with as tight a community as the Costa del Sol, it’s a great idea to use social networking tools, and Twitter in particular, to find new business.
Still not sure what Twitter is? If you’ve got used to Facebook, think of Twitter as a stripped-down version that lets you send text-message length updates (and not much else). It has two big differences though: firstly, you don’t need permission to follow people, and secondly, everything everyone says is public.
So if you imagine Twitter as a really big room with a massive pool of people in it, many of whom are your potential customers, how do you “tune in” to what may be benficial to you? There are various ways:
1. Set up searches for key terms – This means that any time anyone mentions (for instance) “plumber” and any of a list of areas that you cover, you get alerted. (Twitter has lots of useful third-party applications that let you use its service effectively, and my favourite – called Tweetdeck, and free – installs on your PC and lets you do just this.) You can then tweet them back with the solution to their problem there and then – you!
2. Build up a network of local people and businesses – Just by searching for the name of your town or area you’ll find lots of people to “follow” who are local. You can click on their profiles to see if you like the look of them, or to check if there’s a chance they may be potential clients. You’re not looking to sell to them now – just to get “closer to them in the room”.
Another great way to find such people is to follow their followers/followed people; on Twitter, you can see all this information, and it’s fine to follow people because they’re following or followed by someone else.
3. Be helpful and reap the rewards A very powerful part of Twitter is the “retweet”, or “RT” for short. If someone says: “Anyone know why the A7 is shut today in Marbella?”, and you know, tell them on Twitter. They may well RT your post to their network of friends. some of those people may do the same… and before you know it, your post is helping loads of people, all of whom may click on your name, read your profile, decide they like you, and follow you.
See how this works? You build up a network of people you loosely know or are interested in, all of whom are likely to read what you write. The ideas is to be friendly, useful (posting links to websites, or retweeting other interesting stuff helps here), and to trust that when you can help someone commerically, you’ll be “front of mind”.
Get used to it!
Twitter is a brave new world for many, but once you make your first sale through it, you’ll have a strategy that you know works, and which you can build on.
Don’t expect results immediately and do 15-20 minutes every day. There’s no right or wrong way to use it; the only real rule is not to annoy people, or they’ll unfollow you and you’ll have lost the chance to pitch them your goods or services for ever.