My phone was bonging like crazy last night…

The reason? I won Theo Paphitis’ (from BBC’s Dragon’s Den) “Small Business Sunday” competition. For the uninitiated, you essentially tweet him your pitch/opener, and he retweets his favourite 6. And luckily, last night, out of the thousands that participate weekly, I was one of them! So I’ve now been retweeted to all of his 148,000+ followers, which is just superb.

This now means that all through the evening, my phone was red hot! In this short timeframe, I have now gained about 75 new followers, and been ‘mentioned’ on Twitter about 90 times!

Overall, for me, it was just a bit of fun, this, but it’s rather nice to have a mass of free publicity for doing nothing but writing a quick tweet! However looking at it from a business perspective, what Theo has actually done, indirectly, is validated me and my business as someone worth talking to/following – the kind of publicity and marketing which you just can’t pay for.

So Theo – if you’re reading this now, thank you very much indeed!

My winning tweet, incidentally, was the following:

“@TheoPaphitis Professional rent-a-gob here. VoiceOver for businesses of all sizes. Have voiced many things from builders to bacteria! #SBS”

Not a bad marketing achievement for a Sunday evening!