Two easy ways you can use Twitter to find new VA clients

Would you love more VA clients, but don’t know how to stand out in a crowded marketplace? Read two simple ways you can find VA new clients using Twitter.

Are you a VA who is frustrated by the number of small businesses who don’t understand what you do? Who aren’t aware that you can help them run their business more smoothly, and save them time and money?

Or even that you can actually help them to grow their business with your specialist skills and experience – skills that far surpass simple admin?

It’s not easy marketing your services in a crowded marketplace, especially when your target audience aren’t even aware of what you can do. Luckily though, social media, and in particular Twitter makes this MUCH easier. And we’re about to show you two simple ways you can use Twitter to find new VA clients.

But first, you need to answer one important question.

What’s your niche?

It may be tempting to sell yourself as a jack of all trades – someone who can do anything for anyone – but how can you differentiate yourself from anyone else if you have no point of difference?

Fishing in the biggest possible pool doesn’t just increase the potential number of clients you can hook. It also significantly increases your competition, making it harder to stand out, and risking leaving you in a bidding war, and lowering your prices just to be competitive.

Fish in a pool of one

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could remove the competition, and instead attract clients who want to work with YOU and are happy to pay well for your services?

To do this, you need to find your niche. So what sets you apart from other VAs? This could be:

  • The type of work you do – do you have any special talents or experience you can focus on, such as design or event management?
  • The way you do your work – are you extra flexible? For example, working to tight deadlines, or willing to travel at a moment’s notice?
  • The tip of business you work for – do you like to work for a particular type of business, or industry?

The more narrow the niche you create for yourself, the more targeted your marketing will be, and the easier it will be to find your ideal clients. You’ll also find that eventually you won’t need to find them. Once you establish a reputation, they’ll come to you!

Write your USP

Once you’ve identified your niche, we recommend writing your USP (your unique selling point). Basically this means summing up what makes you different in one sentence.

Make sure the sentence is a benefit to your clients, for example:

  • I help businesses in a mess turn around their admin in seven days.
  • I organise workshops for online training companies.
  • I enable startup foodpreneurs to focus on growing their business.

When you’re clear about your USP, you’ll find the next two steps much easier.

Two ways you can use Twitter to find new VA clients

So how can Twitter help you find new VA clients? Here are two ways.

1) Twitter makes it easy to network without leaving home

If you’re running your own VA business, you don’t have much time to go out and network to find potential new clients. And when you do, you’re limited to the people you can meet within reasonable traveling distance of your home.

Twitter enables you to widen your net considerably – and save time. By growing your online network, you can reach clients all over the country, and even overseas, without leaving home. Automate some of your tweets, and you can even be searching for new VA clients while you sleep!

So how can you use Twitter to network and find new clients? This is where knowing your niche/USP comes in handy, because you need to make sure everything you do is targeted to the right people if you want to see genuine results from your efforts.

Here are some ways you can use Twitter to expand your network and find VA clients:

  • Follow your ideal customers.
  • Follow accounts your ideal customers are influenced by.
  • Use relevant hashtags that your ideal customers will notice.
  • Join chat hours that your ideal customers are in.
  • Engage with people and build genuine relationships.
  • Be proactive – don’t wait for people to engage with you.

By following these tips you can quickly build an engaged following of the right audience. And that’s when our second tips comes into play.

2) Use Twitter to establish yourself as a trusted expert

So now you have a following that includes your ideal customers, and a clear idea of your USP. It’s time to turn your ideal customers into actual customers by demonstrating you have the skills and experience they need!

And to do this you need to showcase your expertise – something that Twitter makes really easy. How do you do it? Firstly, you retweet and mention the accounts your ideal customers are influenced by. These may be experts in their industry, official bodies or websites or magazines that cover their sector.

Why do this? It gets you noticed by your ideal customer, and it shows you have an interest in, and knowledge of, what they do.

Secondly, you write a bank of tweets that talk about what you can do. Vary the content of the tweets so they don’t sound too similar, and include a mix of messages that educate businesses about what VAs (and you) can do to help them – focusing on the benefits to the business, and messages that highlight your unique skills.

Always include a call to action in your tweets, whether it’s a link back to your website, examples of your work, reviews and case studies of your services etc, to another social media account or to contact you. If you don’t tell people what you want them to do, you risk them doing nothing!

Then automate these tweets so they are going out regularly, while you’re getting on with work and life. (Don’t forget to balance these self-promotional tweets with plenty of genuinely helpful tweets, so you don’t come across as too me, me, me.)

How this method worked for us

When we first ventured onto Twitter three years ago, we were a startup business with very few readers (beyond our family and friends) and even fewer followers.

We started applying the tips we’ve just taught you, and within a year we had over 11,000 engaged followers and hundreds of hits a week to our site from Twitter.

Our two tips may seem simple, but if you start using them consistently, we promise you they do work. And if you’re a VA, they will genuinely help you to get noticed by the right kind of customers.

“I have new clients who found me on Twitter”

If you need VA clients NOW, we can help you achieve success on Twitter even faster. Join our online course Twitter Tune-up and you’ll master everything you need to know to find your customers and sell your services on Twitter.

Here’s how Twitter Tune-up helped one digital marketing VA, Carolyn Strand from CJ Strand:

“Twitter Tune-up showed me how to use Twitter for my business without having to go through a social learning curve.

The course completely refined my view of what Twitter actually is and what it does. I was trying to match it to a Facebook or LinkedIn model when in fact, Twitter is completely different.

I now realise how amazing Twitter is for creating a network of contacts in both very niche and widely general business sectors. I also have an online retail business and am now using Twitter to reach consumer influencers and awareness of the brands I sell.

My business following has gone from 51 followers before I started the course to 643 today – so nearly 600 new followers in six months. I am pretty sharp on the quality of my connections, I am only following 478 and am quite specific what I tweet and retweet to maintain quality so I am VERY happy with those numbers. 

I have also taken some accounts from zero in the past couple of months – one has 122 followers and 284 likes already using the same strategies. I have had new clients who found me on Twitter, I am finding PR opportunities and meeting some well connected people.”

Add extra skills (and confidence) to your offering as a VA

So Carolyn hasn’t just used Twitter Tune-up to improve her own results on Twitter – she’s using the skills and strategies she learned to add to her own professional offering to clients, and getting them better results too.

So if you’d love to grow your own Twitter following, find new clients and add to your skillset (and confidence on Twitter) and earn more money using Twitter for your clients, join Twitter Tune-up today. And let us show you how.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re ready to start seeing more results from Twitter – including finding new clients and boosting your offering – join Twitter Tune-up now.