As you may have seen, I was running an experiment on Twitter to see if I could provide technical consultancy via 140 character interchanges here is the original post https://neilmatthews.com/twitter-wordpress-consultancy-experiment.
I also said I would write up my findings, so here you go.
How Many Takers Were There
I was completely underwhelmed with the results, I only got two takers .
Financial Results
I made a big fat lonely zero in pounds, shillings and pence. Nada, zip, bugger all, sweet FA, nothing.
The HUGE problem
You cannot give consultancy in 140 characters. It is too small to express the problem people have, and again too small an amount of characters to give out information. In both cases I dropped from twitter to email exchange very quickly. I was expecting to give out small how to’s, pointers to other documents or plugins that type of request, but what I got were very big and complex problems or blog design requests.
I got one really meaty problem and that took up a large part of my afternoon, so trying to give support via twitter was pointless, in the end I got my hands dirty and fixed the issue.
What I learned
Although financially it bombed, I have learned quite a lot and I believe there are some great client acquisition techniques to be learned from what I did. Here are some of the things I learned
You cannot sit back and wait for people to come to you. I asked a few twitter chums to RT what I was doing and I tweeted a number of times to introduce the concept. I sat back during the morning and waited for the stream of tweets asking for help, but none came. I changed my technique and went searching for people. This is where my hits came from. I pushed the URL to my experiment in front of people tweeting about their WordPress problems. This brought action.
Timing seems to be quite crucial on Twitter.  You need to get your offer in front of people at the right time, my initial push was early morning UK time, this obviously missed the US and Canada, and on the other side the Aussies and Kiwis were off to bed. If I was doing this again, I would use a service like Tweetlater.com and setup and number of timed announcements to push to people in other timezones. I am going to take this further and time my blog posts to publish at a specific time and push tweets about them during core hours. I am not sure when that is yet, need to get out a world clock. Any suggestions when the most people are awake please drop a comment to me.
I was able to push work to other members of my twitter network which was cool. I am not a web designer and one of the requests was for prettyfication. I was able to refer that to someone in my network.
I generated a bit of of buzz. Quite a few people have noticed the tweets and are following me because of it.    This is another area I will investigate further. The ideas which come to mind are free webinars push out like this, then gaining paying clients on the back of that.
Twitter is an excellent client acquisition tool. If you know how to tap into search you can place your offering before people just at the point they are having the problem your service or product solves.
You need to develop your twitter network. A lot of the contact came from people re-tweeting my messages.
Will I Do It Again?
No I won’t. I lost a day of billable hours to the experiment, but I learned a boat load of new techniques which I will be using to push people to my blog to gain readers or even clients.
Got any more questions about the experiement please leave a comment.