3 Responses

1. Heather Townsend

   02|Feb|2010 1

   I have – just in the month of Jan alone – won business worth over £25k from my networking on twitter. I’ve looked back and all but 2 of my clients have come from a social media source – which is normally twitter.

   From my perspective, people don’t know HOW to use twitter & find it tough to get started with the right mix of personal vs business tweets. They then get disillusioned and give up within the first 3 months.

   From my own experience, trainers need to realise that twitter is great for creating alliances & meeting people – like any networking group or medium, if you build up relationships & give into a relationship, the work will follow. If used properly, I think every trainer can gain work via twitter within 6 months.

2. Margaret Middlemiss

   02|Feb|2010 2

   I wholeheartedly agree with you both. In the relatively short time I have connected with people on Twitter I have built relationships and had a number of leads through Social Networking to potential business opportunities which are now turning into contracts!

   This aside I have ‘met’ some fantastic people and received valuable free advice from experts which will help my business grow.

   Heather is certainly right about how to find the right mix of Tweets it is a learning process. I think it is important to be authentic, build relationships and not approach it with ‘hard sell’.

   Have a go and stick with it the rewards are great on a personal development and business level.

3. Will Kenny

   03|Feb|2010 3

   I think there are many reasons why freelance trainers may not use Twitter in greater numbers. To start with, many freelance trainers do not do any systematic marketing in the first place, so there is no reason they would do it via Twitter.

   Many of the trainers I have worked with over the past couple of decades never set out to be in the training business. They worked for a corporation, became noticed for their knowledge or skill in some area, and were found to be effective at sharing what they know. Eventually, they went out on their own.

   But they started by working for their old company, or familiar contacts and easy referrals, and they never learned about marketing the way someone does when they more formally come up with an idea for a business and set out to establish it.

   I would also say that some get discouraged when they look into Twitter because they do NOT understand it, or see what it could do. Much of the “How to” stuff around Twitter falls either in the technical — “here’s how to tweet, etc.” — or the abstract — “build a community of like minds”. It can be hard for someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff to find good advice that meets their needs and doesn’t make them feel stupid.

   And, of course, when they look at what is out there on Twitter, if they get that far, they find 100 instances of Twitter as a “frequent drivel machine” for every one that they could imagine following.

   Finally, Tweeting is, in the end, a writing task. It may not seem like much to people who are comfortable with that task, but I continue to be astonished by trainer clients who are brilliant in the classroom — engaging, conversational, able to make the complex clear and simple — who produce, only after great labor, the most stilted memos, the most convoluted written explanations, whose handouts and summaries and other written output are just dreadful.

   Many of these people, who think nothing of standing up in front of a room filled with dozens of high-level executives, are just terrified of writing. And things like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs depend on frequent output, which is even more terrifying: “I don’t have that much to say, what would I write about day after day?” Even worse, Twitter requires writing effectively in a very small space, which is more challenging than rambling on.

   I believe a lot of freelance trainers need help understanding marketing, learning how to take an appropriate and systematic approach to that. And I believe that Twitter will be useful for some of those people, and not at all useful for others. These freelancers need help from consultants who will help them use their time well, and who can honestly assess which tools are good uses of their time, for each individual case.