The Thoughts And Ideas Of The Efficiency Coach

Prospective new clients don’t ring me. Yep, they normally drop me a direct message on twitter. How cool is that? You’ve guessed it; over 90% of all my new client enquiries comes from a connection I have made on twitter.

The challenge that every business person on twitter faces is how to tune out the noise, and just listen, engage and respond to the people who matter. Now, only you will know who are the people which really matter for you and your business. My suggestion is they may be ‘power’ users in Twitter, potential clients, intermediates or referrers for you.

In case you are wondering, my definition of a ‘power’ user in twitter is anyone with a high level of credibility AND visibility. These are the people who always seem to get daily lots of @mentions and RTs. If you went and looked at their score in a 3^rd party application like twitter grader, they would be graded over 99%. For example, the power users on twitter in my corner of the world, Bedfordshire, are myself and @mumstheboss. (Sam Pearce)

In my business I am looking to forge relationships with accountants, lawyers and consultants. Tweetdeck is the main weapon in my armoury to help me achieve that. Other people prefer hootsuite, and I am sure it has the same functionality as tweetdeck. Here are my secrets to how I do that…

I, firstly create columns of users which are important to me. So for example, I have my twitter buddy column. This is for people I have met in person, or built up a relationship with over twitter. This is where I have a laugh, smile, joke or even shed a tear with friends. Some people call this column their ‘inner circle’, it’s the same thing.

I then have a column called clients, which is for anyone who I am working with directly, or has expressed an interest in working with me, or has given off buying signals. By actively identifying these people, and highlighting and responding to their tweets, I have a better chance of developing and deepening my relationship to them. In my world of professional services, people will only buy services from me if they feel they trust and know me.

And then finally, I personally use the lists feature to identify what the accountants and lawyers are saying on twitter. I do this by using a column on twitter deck to follow a list. For example, Mark Lee’s (@bookmarklee) has probably the most comprehensive list of UK accountants on twitter.

Some people will set up a keyword search on a column in tweetdeck. I don’t personally use this feature, but if, say for example, you sold IT backup solutions, this could be a very useful feature to connect with people on twitter who could use your services.

My last three columns are very simply, the @mentions, Direct Messages, all followers and new followers. I very rarely look at the all followers column, for me, 99% of my focus on twitter is taken up with my twitter buddies, clients, and lists of uk accountants and lawyers…

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