Social media can be a powerful growth engine for entrepreneurs. My first entrepreneurial venture, JBS Partners, was founded in 2002. Five years later (in 2007) Twitter and the Boston Social Media Breakfasts became a part of my experience.
From these two seeds my network and this business have expanded far more than the first five years. Let’s look at how one of the shining stars of social media, Twitter, impacted my business.
Tweeple
Twitter impacted my business by connecting me with new clients and colleagues.
Clients
I have never met any of these clients in real life. I had never met or heard of them outside of Twitter and that remains true today. This ruled out a lot of folks that I met on Twitter and then met in real life at Boston or Cambridge area events for example.
- Three WordPress migration projects and hosting clients and one WordPress MU project in California
- Three WordPress migration projects in Tennessee
- Three WordPress design and custom programming clients in Massachusetts
- One custom WordPress project in Texas
- Two WordPress MU projects in Arizona
These clients have received web services in the area of website or blog hosting, blog migration, custom WordPress design and programming, Thesis theme customization, merging a blog and website and a custom WordPress MU and BuddyPress installation.
Colleagues
The following list is again very restrictive and includes only folks that I know through Twitter and have never met in real life.
- Two colleagues in Colorado for total of 12 projects
- Three projects out of Arizona
- One project out of Texas
- Two projects out of Wisconsin
- One project out of the Netherlands
- One project out of Illinois
- Two projects out of Florida
- One project out of Michigan
Partners
My entrepreneurial spirit has also grown since 2007 thanks to social media. In April 2009 I joined with a partner to form BlogWranglers and we have completed at least 10 projects as of this writing. Our introduction came through a mutual friend on Twitter. Our work focuses almost entirely on blog platform migration and blog moves. For example migrating from Movable Type to WordPress or from one hosting provider to another. He also became a hosting reseller for JBS Partners and has brought in many new hosting clients.
My go-to guy for a lot of development work on WordPress is in Oregon. Once again we met through Twitter somehow. We have worked on nearly 25 different projects together since March 2009. This has added a lot of horse-power to JBS Partners’ ability to take on new client work.
Summary
The above are solid numbers that add up to thousands and thousands of dollars in services and revenue that are a result of using Twitter effectively. It may not be for everyone but I really like Twitter and social media and it has been very good for my business.
These numbers are not something that happened just because I am on Twitter. The numbers represents a lot of hard work and I will admit it is work that you could do on Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin or wherever you choose to spread your entrepreneurial wings in the social media space.
You can find me on Twitter as fairminder
What’s your take on social media and entrepreneurs? Can it be useful?
