Evan Carmichael is running a Twitter challenge to generate $10,000 in new business. He built a list of 100 target companies, uses Hootsuite to organize them, and touches each one weekly with retweets or comments. About one in three to one in five prospects reply or follow back so far.
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Hi, it's Evan Carmichael. Welcome to the first edition of our Twitter $10,000 Challenge update. This all started by a friend of mine who's a local entrepreneur here in Toronto named Sean Moffat, and this is his Twitter profile. He's @TheSeanMoffat on Twitter. He says his heart's in New York City, but he's based in Toronto. I don't know about that, Sean. I think Toronto is a pretty good place to live. Anyway, I met with Sean a little bit ago and we had coffee, and he is an expert in helping entrepreneurs make sales through Twitter. And I said, that's great, Sean, you know, a lot of people are trying to figure out how they can monetize Twitter. You know, they see people updating their statuses and talking about their cats and what they ate for lunch and trying to figure out how they can make money from this. And so I said, how about this as a challenge? You help me get $10,000 in new business through Twitter alone. And he said he's up for the challenge. And so with these videos, what I'm going to try to do is update you through the process of how we're doing, if we've made some money from it, and kind of give you a step-by-step process of what we're doing and see if it works or not. So Sean's ass and reputation is on the line here, and hopefully it works. And so this is the first update. So Sean's strategy basically to start with is connecting with your potential clients on Twitter. Go and find, you know, who your ideal prospects are, see if they have an account, and start connecting with them. You know, look at what they're tweeting, respond to it, retweet, get involved in the conversation. Basically as step 1 to get on their radar screen. And so I'm going to show you what I did. I started using tools with Hootsuite, and I'll give you a quick example of what I did. If I load up my— where's my Hootsuite? Yesterday's tweets. I was trying to find a quick way to be able to follow all the people who I was interested in. Now the challenge that I found was if you use a tool like Hootsuite, some people tweet a lot and some people don't tweet at all. And I wanted to find a way to once a week be in touch with all the people who were on my ideal prospects list. So I made a list. I've got maybe almost 100 people on that list, and these are companies and key influencers who target either my market or who are my potential customers that I want to reach out to and build relationships with. Again, only through Twitter. That's, that's the goal. It's got to be through Twitter. And so Hootsuite is great at building lists. I have a list of my sent tweets, my family, bloggers that I follow, mentions in some business, some of my clients I'm currently working with. This is an example here where TELUS Business might tweet a lot and QuickBooks may not tweet as much. And so you can, you can often get your Twitter feed bombarded with some of the people who write a lot, and you miss out on some of the other ones who don't. So I found my first challenge was building a tool to be able to quickly stay in touch with all these people. And so my goal initially starting up was to once a week be in touch with every person on my list by either retweeting something they wrote or by commenting on one of their tweets. So I can hopefully stay top of mind, and when they have an issue that they need some help with, they will reach out to me. So what I did was I had my programmer build a custom tool. I started trying to do it myself, but I'm not strong enough with the Twitter API to build it. And what I did here was on my daily tasks, I built a list of lists for each day. So this is Monday up into Sunday. And every day I basically go through and see the tweets that are on that page. So today is Wednesday, so let me load up the Wednesday list and see what I have to go through. And so here are some of the people who target either my market or who are my potential customers. So Wiley Books, Crowdspring, Wells Fargo, Data.com, D&B Credibility, Verizon Small Business. And basically it shows the top 10 most recent tweets that they put out. And there's links to them. And basically what I do every day now is I spend a couple minutes in the morning while I'm eating my lentils for breakfast to go through and see how I can add value or contribute to the conversation for each of these key points. So I'll look at this, I'll see what the most recent one is, I'll check out the links, see if I have something to say about it, either congratulate them on the good post or, you know, contribute some thoughts that I may have or share a link or retweet it to my audience. And the idea is basically get on their good side, make sure they know me, and hopefully some business opportunities can come from that. So that was my first task that Shawn gave me. He was saying basically go find the list, make a list of your ideal prospects, and find a way to stay in touch with them on a regular basis. So I'm happy with my tool now and I'm following up with them. And that's basically all that's happened in my first quick update here just to let you guys know what we're doing. I find that maybe 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 people— companies will write back. So if I— this is done in Bradstreet or Verizon Small Business— if I see a post that I like and I comment on it, say great post, or give my 2 cents on it, I find that right now about 1 in 3 to 1 in 5 are writing back to me, either just saying thank you or a happy face or something just acknowledging it. I found that some of them start to follow me back. We haven't had any any business happen yet, so that $10,000 challenge is still out there. But this is just a first quick update. I'm hopefully meeting with Shawn either for some sushi dinner or coffee later this week or early next week, and we'll discuss strategy. And as I figure out what my next steps are with him, I will update you guys. And again, the goal is to get $10,000 in new business only through Twitter using Shawn's strategies, and we're going to kind of guide you through it step by step as we go along the way. So that's it for my update for today. If you guys liked the video, please give it a thumbs up below, and makes me know you are following this project and want to learn more. And if you have a question about what we're doing, a question for me, or question for Sean, feel free to leave in the comment section below. We always read those and we'll try to respond to everybody. So thank you, stay tuned for the next video, and, uh, hopefully for a good ride.
