How To Turn Passing Tweets Into Opportunities For Collaboration

In part one of this interview Stu Heinecke and I discussed how you can find and reach out to influencers on Twitter. My question was: Once you find them how can you create conversations that grow your business instead of becoming just another follower?

Here’s part two of our 8 Unedited Minutes™ Interview. Some lessons I learned from Stu are below:

How To Become A Valuable Connection

If you want to leverage Twitter to make valuable connections you need to BECOME a valuable connection during the process. First, you MUST interact with people. Interaction is a two-way street – that means they talk to you too. One popular bragging right people claim is being retweeted by famous people or influencers.

“They retweeted me!” is like “They saw my billboard!!” Yeah, and then they kept driving and forgot about it. They didn’t INTERACT with you. Without that, it’s just a fun story to tell your friends.

Let’s look at how to follow up with people in ways that can create collaboration. It starts by…

Finding Ways To Keep Their Attention

Stu is a cartoonist for the Wall Street Journal. He’s also the author of “How To Get A Meeting With Anyone” and two other books. Cartoons are often the key to everything for him. When he sends someone a cartoon they look him up, see his credentials and he has their attention.  

I’m going to guess what you’re thinking right now: “What if I’M not a cartoonist or an author?”  The strategy is to create content about OTHER people – There are blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts and more that you can leverage. People share content about themselves which means now you’re getting the attention of their friends.  

Once you have someone’s attention beyond “hello” you need to overcome a LOT of distractions…

Be Interesting & Impactful

Many people don’t have a plan of what to say AFTER that introduction without immediately asking for something or trying to sell something.  So, what can YOU do?

Consider one of Stu’s stories from the video.  People will reach out to him and say, “I just read your book today”. Then Stu asks them: “What are YOU working on these days?”. If they share an interesting story Stu might end up bringing them onto his radio show or introducing them to someone they need to know. Being interested in other people makes you interesting. Sharing their genius through content and helping with their projects makes you impactful.

Find ways to collaborate with people and the business will follow. Here are a few things you can start doing TODAY:

  1. Read, watch or listen to THEIR content and then reach out to them about how it helped you.
  2. Create your own content that features OTHER PEOPLE and share other people’s content.
  3. When people reach out to you find out what THEY’RE working on and look for ways to help them before you pitch anything.

Keep in mind those crossovers can lead to client relationships. Sometimes the help they need is exactly what you offer. It STARTS without a pitch and then grows from there.

Connect With Stu!

  • He’s passionate about sales, marketing, and connecting people. Reach out for interviews with him like this one so he can share more advice!
  • He’s working on his next book about weeds and how their resilient growth applies to content strategy. He’s looking for business leaders to interview.
  • You can find him on Twitter as @byStuHeinecke and at www.CartoonLink.com

Stu’s short bio:

Stu is a Wall Street Journal cartoonist and best-selling author of “How To Get A Meeting with Anyone”. He’s dedicated to producing unfair advantages for B2B clients using “Contact Marketing” that enables sales reps to connect with virtually anyone.