Brainstorm Design Blog

 There are endless books and articles being published that deal the subject of gaining followers on Twitter. Less is written about unfollowers. It’s important to understand why people stop following you on Twitter as this can alert you to things you might be doing wrong. You can be unfollowed for a number of reasons:

1. You tweet to often: Your followers feel that they’re being spammed by you with constant updates.
2. Your content of your tweets may not be relevant to your followers.
3. You tweet too infrequently: Your followers may not feel you have much to say.
4. Your tweets are just links to articles, you don’t actually say anything.
5. Your tweets are full of conversations with other tweeters that mean nothing to the people who follow you.

When I’m notified that someone is following me on Twitter, the first thing I want to do is find out who they are and what they’re talking about. If the subject matter is relevant and of interest, I will follow them, but if their Twitter feed is nothing more than links to their own articles and products, I lose interest. Even worse are followers who tweet every five minutes.

Connecting with other people on Twitter is no different than connecting with people in real life. When someone has something interesting to say, you listen, and when someone engages with you and asks you about yourself, you want to respond. Conversely, when you’re stuck in a room with someone who does nothing but talk about themselves, you want to run a mile!

You’ve just started up a new business. So how do you get more leads? 

Well, you could employ a telemarketer to make some cold calls for you that might lead to an appointment. But it typically takes about 20 calls to get an appointment and several appointments to get a sale, so that’s a very expensive option for a new business.  

You could invest in some pay-per-click adverting, but you could end up spending more on advertising than you get in sales.

Or you could invest in search engine optimisation so that people find your website, but it can often take several months and several thousand pounds of effort until people searching for your products find you on Google.

But there is one other way that doesn’t take a huge amount of effort and that doesn’t break the bank. And that’s Networking.

My recent blog post on cold calling attracted some very heated responses, with many of you arguing that cold calling had a useful part to play in new business development and that no amount of social networking could replace it.

In my professional work, I have noticed three major trends taking place during this recession:

1. Companies have cut right back on print advertising and have shifted their marketing spend to pay-per-click advertising where it’s easier to measure the return on investment.
2. Cold calling has gone out of fashion with most companies and even the sales gurus regarding it as a complete waste of time and money.
3. Networking has mushroomed, with numerous networking groups both online and offline set up over the last few years.

This last development is by far the most interesting one. Whereas in the past you would spend all day on the phone cold calling companies in order to get an appointment, today you can get that same appointment by using social networks.