What is a Cold DM?
A cold DM is a direct message sent to someone you don’t already know on social media.
Like a cold email, a cold DM is a way to reach out to potential customers or collaborators you want to work with who you’ve never had interactions with before or with whom you’ve had minimal interactions.
Cold DMs can be sent on any social media platform, such as 𝕏/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, or others.
Since you’re contacting people who don’t know you, they will almost always check your profile to find out who you are. So, it’s a good idea to have a solid profile so that you can make a good first impression.
How to Successfully Cold DM on Social Media
Here’s how you can send cold DMs that will make you stand out from the competition.
1. Offer value first
Most successful Cold DMs offer value first, regardless of whether they will receive a reply or not.
You’re about to ask someone for something, it’s only fair that you give them something of value first before they even consider responding to you.
So, genuinely give them something that will help them.
You can give something for free and be valuable to someone in many ways. You can give them advice or recommendations or do something for free.
If you’re a web designer, you can check their website and suggest improvements or point out issues and bugs.
If you’re a graphic designer, you can create a few infographics that they can use and post as their next content.
If you’re a marketer, you can suggest ways how they can improve their conversion rate.
And so on. You get the picture.
It’s so much easier for someone to reply to your DM when you offer something of value first. It shows that you took the time to understand their business/brand.
The only thing is that you really have to offer something of value. Don’t offer generic advice or share generic things that you created and sent to every cold DM.
If you can offer nothing of value, then the least you can do is start hanging around in the comments of the prospect that you want to DM.
Share helpful comments and ask meaningful questions. This will make them notice you, and later, when you send a DM, their chances of replying to you are higher because they have noticed and seen your profile before.
2. The pitch (+ showing your expertise)
Once you’ve offered value upfront, you’re ready to proceed with your request.
Just imagine how easy it is to convince a person to hire you as their marketer when you already offered them upfront value that resulted in a 1% increase in their conversion rate.
See the logic? The most important part is providing the upfront value. Once that is done, it’s downhill from there.
One thing to keep in mind is to go directly to the point and not beat around the bush.
You will also need to showcase your expertise by answering any questions that you might get asked.
Nobody wants to hire someone and find out that they wasted money and time hiring the wrong person.
3. Follow up
People have lives outside of social media. And it’s easy to miss a message from someone you don’t know.
So it’s up to you to follow up until you get a reply or flat rejection.
Most influential people get a lot of DMs, and 90% of them are spam, so your messages might get lost in the noise.
So you must follow up. After your initial DM, you can wait at least 3 days before following up, and after your second follow up, you can wait up to a week before following up again.
If you’ve reached out three times already and within a decent time frame (not all within a day), then you’ve done all you can, and it will just be spammy if you keep following up with the same topic every day.
But this doesn’t mean that you can no longer DM the same person. It may mean that they were not interested in the offer that you presented, so in the future, if you have a more enticing offer, you can reach out to them again. Or it may also mean that your DM did get lost, and maybe in the future, after a couple of months, if you try again, they will see it.
3 Common Cold DMs Mistakes
Here are some common mistakes that many people make in cold DMs
1.Generic/Unpersonalized DMs
This is one of the major mistakes many people make when sending cold DMs.
They create a general template and mass-send it to everyone they know.
These DMs don’t work, and they’re a quick way to be labeled as spam and blocked.
2. Not offering value upfront
You’re reaching out to someone who does not know you; you have to offer value upfront.
Asking for something first is just selfish. Don’t do it.
3. Not following up
Many people make the mistake of just DMing one time, and if they don’t receive a reply, they never follow up.
Your DM can get lost in a sea of spam out there, so you have to follow up.
Examples of Successful Cold DMs
1. First example: How I got to work with Yannick (Hypefury co-founder)
Yannick didn’t agree with all the ideas I suggested. He only agreed with one, and we ended up implementing it.
This shows that you don’t need to be that much of an expert. I just provided value and stood out from others. Imagine how many DMs he gets from people saying plainly that they just need a job.
1. Second example: How I got to work with a founder
This second example is a DM that I sent a long time ago, back when I didn’t even have much experience.
As always, the key thing is that I provided value upfront, and the founder saw that I put in the time to create something for him.
