Evan Carmichael breaks down two ways to find sales leads on Twitter: pull, where you share valuable content to attract followers as an expert, and push, where you directly reach out to prospects. Pull is slower but builds real relationships; push is faster but less reliable.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Anthony, who is asking about Twitter and how to generate sales leads through it, and if it's worth following people who are potential customers, if that's the best way to get leads through Twitter. So Anthony, there's a number of different ways to use Twitter, and the two main ways are either push or pull. So I prefer to use the pull method, and that's basically where you're posting value-add content so people want to follow you. So I don't know what your niche is or who your target market is. For me, it's entrepreneurs. So if you follow my Twitter feed, you'll see that I'm talking about entrepreneurship, strategies that I find interesting, things that keep me motivated, and hopefully it's enough to inspire people to then want to follow my stream. So you're providing value-add information that people who are your potential customers want to learn more about and want to follow. And it is a slow build. They'll find you through search, they'll find you through, you know, people who are retweeting you. They can find you through your website, they can follow you there. You can put it in your email. And basically you're getting people to start to follow you based on the content you're providing. So you're not pushing out, you know, you need to buy from me right now. You're not being a hard sale there. You're providing value, you get to be seen as the expert for your industry, and people start to contact you and want to follow you. And that's the method that I use, and it's been pretty successful. But it's not the only way to do it. So that's the pull method. The push The second method is when you're actually going out and trying to initiate contact with your potential customers. And there's a couple ways to do this. The first is to just start building a relationship, and this can be with high-value prospects that you think could really make a difference for your business. So you follow them, you get to know them, you comment on them, you talk about some of the posts that they're doing, you give them some retweets, you provide your opinion. If you do it a couple times, people start to take notice. And I notice it from mine too, when people interact with my tweets, and they write back, or they retweet it. If it happens enough, then I start to notice who's doing it, and I'll check out their site, and I'll check out their Twitter feed, and I might contact them. But it's a good way to get on somebody's radar. So if you have some ideal prospects that you're going after, you can start interacting with them. So you're not pitching them, you're not selling them, you're just starting to build a relationship and get them to know about you. So that's one way. It's a little bit slower build, but it's better for kind of the high-value prospects. For the other ones, if you are trying to make a quick sale, then you can look for people who have, you know, certain issues. They're posting about it on Twitter, "I have a problem with XYZ," and you can say that you can help them solve it. So it's more of a hard sale approach. I don't know how effective it is. I think if somebody's really having a problem, then you might be able to get in there and provide a solution as long as you are, you know, friendly and genuine and they think that you can really help them. It's not really the method that I prefer using. Again, I go more for the pull strategy, and maybe a couple people, if I really want to get on their radar, I could use that strategy of just following them and getting to know them. I think it's a more effective strategy for you to use on Twitter, but it's a longer-term build. So you're not going to get sales tomorrow for your company doing it, but it is a longer-term build, and it is highly effective in your building relationships. And that's where I think you would have the most effect with your business. Try it out, see what works for you. I'd love to hear what everybody else is doing for Twitter, what strategies are working and what aren't working. If you wanna leave a comment under the video, please feel free to share those. And if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up. I always love seeing those comments, so thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
