The hardest part of any freelancing business is getting more clients. You have a skill and expertise, unfortunately you don’t have enough people to show it to though, and you’re not having the kind of growth you want.
We get it.
When freelancers think of obtaining new clients on social media their minds often drift towards LinkedIn and Facebook. Twitter is a highly underutilized platform for obtaining high-quality clients for your freelancing business, which is being overlooked by most freelancers right now.
The problem is, most people don’t use Twitter for the right reasons and they don’t treat it like a business platform, and that is what’s killing your outreach potential on the platform.
In this article, we’ll show you how to find clients that are dying to work with you.
Have a Professional Profile
Before you ever send a message out to anyone you first need to take a look at your profile. If the picture is you in a coconut bra and hula skirt drinking a margarita, then you need to assess the situation and realize it’s time for a change.
You also want to take a look at your cover photo and pinned tweet. Make sure that when someone lands on your page, they immediately know what you do. This will help when you are sending messages out to prospects. The first thing they will do is hop over to your profile to see what you’re all about and if they feel that you are not a professional in your craft, they’ll probably ignore your message.
If you have a website, you want to make sure to include that in your bio with plenty of relevant keywords that tell a prospect what you do and why they need to hire you. In the same way that you search for clients on Twitter, someone might be searching for your kinds of services, and they’ll never find you if your profile doesn’t clearly tell them that you can solve their problem.
Stop Selling and Start Providing
A big mistake business owners and freelancers make when it comes to social media is selling too much. How many times have you gone onto Twitter or Facebook and you see an ad for some business, and it’s simply them, telling you what they are selling and why you should buy it?
That never works.
We are not on social media to buy things; we are on there to feel something. We want to look at pictures of something and feel love; we want to read a story and feel compassion or watch a video and laugh. Even as a freelancer you can create these emotions in people without actually selling to them.
For example, if you are a web designer. You could make a video of you sharing your screen and showing your followers the importance of mobile optimization. If a website owner sees that video they might take a look at their website and feel something if it doesn’t look good right?
They might feel embarrassed or ashamed. The result could be them reaching out to you for help.
Build Your Following
Once your profile is ready to go and you have plenty of excellent content on it you can start building a huge following by simply following everyone you see on Twitter.
Just kidding.
You need to build a following of quality followers. These are people who are interested in what you are doing and may become promoters of your business when they see how much amazing content you are posting on Twitter every day. When you give away free value to people, they are more willing to support your cause because it shows that you are “likable.”
So, how do you get quality followers?
You need to get involved in the Twitter community. It works the same way when local business owners need more clients in their local area. What do they do?
They network with people who might buy what they have.
You need to engage in relevant discussions so you can show your expertise. Even better, when you are posting content that helps people on your page regularly, you can direct potential leads to your Twitter page and use it as a portfolio.
Consider Paid Advertising
Twitter offers a paid marketing opportunity that allows you to display your tweets above the competition and you can target a specific demographic with these tweets. This will enable you to drastically increase your reach within your target market so your following will increase as well.
Paying for a spot on Twitter also gives you the ability to host a viral conversation. If you can create enough buzz around a topic relevant to your industry you can almost instantly become an authority on the subject.
A Final Word
The reason why Twitter is so powerful for freelancers is that it is underutilized. This opens up the opportunity for people willing to step into uncharted territory and do what others are not willing to do.
Treat Twitter like another platform to get the word out about your service. You can never have too much marketing and for the most part – it’s free, so get on it!