Leads brought you here. We all need leads. In fact, a lot of them. Why? Let's take a look at the numbers. On average, 33% of active Twitter accounts have DMs open. So, if you're looking to reach the inbox of 100 people, you'll need about 300 Twitter accounts (assuming none of the target accounts already follow you).

This is supposed to be a document about hunting leads, but we'll also briefly talk about actually running a personalized cold outreach campaign at scale later in the document.

An important piece of the puzzle is answering the following two questions about your business diligently:

Once you have an answer to the above questions, you now need to roll up your sleeves and find them.

Let's understand an effective way to approach this, which is also something that we’ve been using over the past couple of weeks as our only source of leads and has been working very well for us.

Finding hotspots of your target audience

Think of it as the concentration of a similar profile of users around a tweet or a twitter user.

Followers = leads

Followers of a competitor

This is based on the thesis that if someone follows your competitor, the person is likely to share one or more of the following relationships with them:

1. Is a customer

2. Is interested in the product or service

3. Is interested in or enjoys the content created

There can be more motivations behind a person following your competitor but the above three are the ones we’re interested in.

If you’ll give it a thought, this can be a big opportunity for YOUR product or service. You can either use your competitor’s name as a conversation starter or dig deeper, understand the gaps and pitch exactly what your prospect might need.

Imagine why companies like builtwith exist. This is very well deployed with cold emails but there's just not enough people trying it with DMs over twitter.

Followers of a non competing company

Let’s say you’d like to target SaaS founders. Try to find genuinely popular companies amongst SaaS founders.

Chartmogul is a good example. Check out their followers, randomly investigate 20 of them. Can you spot some fit? - you have the answer.

Another example: @SaaStock - popular amongst SaaS founders and investors.

Targeting content site enthusiasts? See @nichedown

You can also reverse engineer the process from here.

Open one of your prospect’s twitter accounts, observe what kind of accounts they follow. Investigate if a good number of the newly found account’s followers fall into the kind of audience you’re looking to target.

Engaged accounts with <5k followers are the best. Why? It’s likely they have a super targeted plus living audience.

Tweets with a lot of engagement = goldmines

Core principle: It’s likely if someone has taken the effort to engage with a tweet, the content of the tweet must’ve interested them.

Expanding on the above axiom, if we find a tweet has a large number of likes, replies or retweets, we’ve essentially found a hotspot of people with common interest.

Next? Find a tweet that seems to have lured your potential customers. Use the participants of the tweet (i.e. users who liked, retweeted or replied to the tweet) as a source of leads.

Look at the one below 👇

I can see 2k+ UGC creators or people interested in UGC gathered at one place.

300+ people interested in understanding how a Stefan bootstrapped Y to X in Z.

If someone’s tweeting about it, they must be passionate about it

Twitter search is your friend. Search for appropriate keywords and hashtags. Use the advanced search for a more precise result set.

Step 2 - Extract the leads

You now know where you can find your potential customers in bulk.

Next, you need to save them somewhere. You’ve got two options here. Scrape the data, save it in a spreadsheet or use

If you’d like to scrape the data, there are several youtube videos that’ll redirect you to tens of chrome extensions that can help you achieve this.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can do this using

You will need a free

Go to https://app.colddm.me/contacts

Click ‘Create’.

Add a name to your list for your reference.

Click Followers of a user

Enter the username of the desired twitter account

Input any optional fields for better refined results (Minimum number of followers, must have keywords in bio, minimum number of tweets, etc.)

Select number of followers to fetch in one go.

Click ‘Get Contacts’

Fetching participants of a tweet or people who posted a tweet is as simple.

Hit ‘Save’

Step 3 - Send those DMs

Before that, create a message template

Go to https://app.colddm.me/templates

Click ‘Create’.

To start sending this message template to the above list, you need to create a new campaign.

Go to

Click ‘Create’

Give your campaign a name.

Select the recently created message template.

Select the recently created Contact List.

Click ‘Create & Run’

Next? Watch your DMs get sent in multiple batches. Profit!

Send us a cold dm at https://twitter.com/JoinColdDM for any questions or a litle discount code 😇