The results of going viral - new business or waste of time?

Hey 👋 - Brandon here.

Happy Saturday to 1,546 growth-minded accountants.

Here’s one growth tip for you and your firm.

Today’s issue takes less than 5 minutes to read.

Does going viral help you land new business?

Today I’m going to share with you two tweets of mine that went viral and what they did for my business.

Tweet #1 - The Beer Tweet:

• Views: 1M

• Likes: 6.1k

• Bookmarks: 765

Tweet #2 - The G Wagon Tweet:

• Views: 997k

• Likes: 3k

• Bookmarks: 1.9k

How many new followers did I net?

The G-Wagon tweet netted me roughly 3,000 new followers.

I was sitting at ~9500 followers prior to the G-Wagon tweet in January. A couple days after I was up to 12,500.

The Beer tweet netted me around 200 followers.

How did these tweets translate to sales?

The G-Wagon tweet netted roughly 1,200 newsletter subscribers.

The Beer tweet netted roughly 130 newsletter subscribers.

Admittedly, I wasn’t using proper link structuring to track attribution when the G-Wagon tweet launched. So, unfortunately, I have no idea how many of those 1,200 newsletter subscribers became clients.

How long did it take you to write these tweets?

The G-Wagon tweet took a couple hours and some planning.

I wanted it to hit hard and knew that if I could write in a compelling way it would get high engagement (though I had no idea it would net ~1M views).

The Beer tweet was off the cuff and took about 10 minutes to write.

I was drinking a beer, at the beach, and thought it would be a fun analogy to make to the housing market.

Does going viral help grow your business?

Yes, absolutely.

Though I didn’t have proper link structure to attribute revenue dollars to each tweet, there’s no doubt getting this much exposure expands business opportunities.

As my followers have grown, so have the opportunities I’ve had to build relationships with other X users.

Additionally, I’ve had several large real estate tax/accounting opportunities come through my X DM’s from operators who don’t tweet much and are just following along.

Going viral gives you reach.

Reach = new followers.

New followers = easier to go viral in the future (and the cycle continues).

And even though the Beer tweet significantly underperformed the G-Wagon tweet in terms of conversions, the Beer tweet opened up doors to new relationships with X users I thought were out of my league.

How can you write viral (or highly engaging) content?

First, decide what type of content you want to produce (written, audio, video).

I’ve grown to love the writing process.

I learned to write better tweets by hand writing viral tweets from Justin Welsh and Dickie Bush.

I’d pick 5-10 per week and literally hand write them into a notebook.

The purpose was to learn how to write hooks, how to frame stories, and present information.

I’m looking at getting into TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts next.

And to learn what works, I’ve downloaded creator videos that got a lot of engagement and I’m hand writing their script and transitions.

This learning style has worked pretty well for me… it might work for you too.

I will say, it takes a long time to build a following on a platform.

Don’t get discouraged (like I used to) if you have low engagement.

Keep executing, daily.

That's all for this Saturday. See you next week.