A while back at my day job (front desk at a hotel), I discovered a phrase that always gets a smile out of regular guests during check in:
“I know you know your way around by now, but is there anything else we can do for you?”
It’s a small thing, but I realized that even something as trivial as saving someone 30 seconds by not giving them the same information that they have heard a hundred times goes a long way. This is because by doing so they understand that I see things from their perspective. And me doing this stands out among all the repetitive service industry spiels that they hear constantly during every business trip they take- from flight attendants, rental car agents, or at the front desk when they check in to their hotel.
This is a lesson that can be directly applied to cold-tweeting. Unlike other forms of social media, Twitter is a platform entirely free of any barriers to reaching out to someone. This is both good and bad. Good in that everyone is accessible, and bad in that people are less trusting when you first contact them.
It might sound strange, but the best way to get in touch with people you find on Twitter may be to not tweet at them at all. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are some great resources out there to help you find people on Twitter. Then it just becomes a question of how to craft those 140 characters in a way that is engaging and genuine. When I gathered my list of potential developers, the first thing I did was look for a link to one of their other social profiles in order to find an email somewhere. I think “snooping around” in this way is the perfect amount of stalking- doing the work to find them on a public platform but not going so far as to find them on Facebook and write on their wall.
So let’s assume that there is no additional information in their profile and your only option is to actually tweet at them. Going back to the story from the beginning, when you are actually composing a tweet it’s best to think about things from their perspective. That is to say, make your request of them in a way that shows you understand it’s a little weird to get a random tweet from someone you don’t know. I settled on something like this:
With this tweet, I tried to establish a few things:
1. That I am a beginner and see this person as an expert
2: That I realize they have better things to do than respond to my request for help
3: What’s next if they say yes. Or, let them know that if they agree to help me I’m not going to spam them with a long, public string of tweets- it would be a simple direct message that they can check out at their leisure.
One last piece of advice to consider if you are going to launch a cold-tweeting campaign is to avoid sending a bunch of similar tweets to different people at once. This is because you don’t want someone to get your tweet, click through to your profile, and see that you sent the same tweet to a bunch of different people. If you do find someone on Twitter and the only way to get in touch with them is by actually tweeting at them, mix it in with some “regular” tweets. To borrow a line from Mad Men, “No one wants to be one of a hundred colors in a box.”
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