One of the questions I often get asked is, does social media really work? Can it really bring me new customers and more business?
The answer, for the majority of businesses in the UK (there will always be a few exceptions!) is undoubtedly YES!
There’s a great anecdote which really highlights the potential and power of social media, and the use of Twitter.
There’s a very successful UK entrepreneur called Nigel Botterill. Nigel has built five separate million pound + businesses in the last five years so, he knows a lot about what it takes to build businesses fast. He was one of the first business people to properly understand the potential and power of social media and he has driven literally hundreds of thousands of people to his websites and generated tens of thousands of pounds of revenue directly through social media over the last few months.
Nigel was running a Boot Camp to train potential franchisors, i.e. people that wanted to franchise their business. He was running a Boot Camp over two days at his head offices in Solihull. Tickets cost over £2,000 and the event was fully booked.
On the Sunday evening before the event, Nigel put a Tweet out on Twitter that said, “Really looking forward to my Franchisors Boot Camp tomorrow – off for an early night to make sure I’m on top form (hopefully)”.
One ‘follower’ of Nigel is a person called Jat Mann who runs a business called PC Pal. Jat has recently franchised his business out and when he saw a Tweet from Nigel (at 9.00pm on a Sunday evening) it was the first he knew about Nigel’s Boot Camp. He was very keen to get a place so he tweeted back to Nigel asking for more information. Unfortunately, Nigel had gone offline so Jat jumped on the internet. One of his emails got picked up by one of Nigel’s colleagues who called Nigel at home at 10.15pm on a Sunday evening to ask whether he would accept another person on his Franchisors Boot Camp. To cut a long story short, Jat turned up at Nigel’s offices on the Monday morning at 8.30am, paid his fee by credit card and joined the Boot Camp.
The point of this tale is to illustrate the ability that Twitter has to generate business and, what’s great about this particular one is that it is completely ring fenced, nothing else was at play here – just Twitter. Nigel has a large number of followers on Twitter and Jat was one of those people. Nigel engages with his audience on Twitter all the time. Consequently, he is seen as being interesting and interested and, so relationships are forged. When Nigel launches new products or has new initiatives he is able to let his followers know about these things in the right way, at the right time and a lot of business gets done as a result.
This kind of platform and access to this community is available to you too – IF you use social media properly.
I can help you with getting set up and using social media platforms properly…..just ask!
