Category: Twitter

• Are your customers having conversations about your product on twitter?
• Are you monitoring these conversations and responding or joining in the discussions where appropriate?

To use twitter effectively you need to do more than just tweet about your company. You need to first identify those twitter users who might be interested in your producs or services.

So how do you find these sales leads? And how do you get them interested in your product?

1. Firstly monitor twitter users who are talking about your product area, industry, a competitor or even your own actual company/product. You can do this via the search or advance search facility in Twitter. Simply type in a keyword or hashtag and Twitter will filter the results with the relevant tweets. Or even better, use a tool called Hootsuite that enables you to create separate feeds, each one tracking up to three keywords or Hashtags.
2. Some comments and discussions will contain useful information whilst others should present an opportunity for you to subtly persuade people to look at and talk about your product. e.g. If you’re selling a product that cures back pain, you might track the keyphrase "my back is killing me". When people talk about their back problems, you can ask them whether they have tried any products to ease their pain and what the outcome has been.

Are you trying to use twitter as a sales tool? If the answer is yes then you need to look at what and more importantly how you are tweeting.

• Do your twitter feeds look like nothing more than news feeds?
• Are you giving out lots of information but getting little interaction or response back?
• In other words, is your twitter feed increasingly resembling a monologue?

If the answer to any of the above is "yes", you need to make some drastic changes to the way you tweet or you’re wasting your time!

Lets take a regular offline social environment, say a networking meeting: if someone talks to you all the time without giving you the chance to respond, the conversation becomes dull and most likely fizzles out to an awkward silence. The same applies if you fail to tweet in a way that encourages your followers to interact with you.

Do you use twitter for your business?
If so, what’s your objective?

• To raise your profile?
• To boost your credibility?
• To stay in touch with your customers?

But how about using it to attract some new customers?

This is an issue that is proving to be frustrating for most businesses. In fact many business users I speak to seem to be wholly unconvinced when it comes it comes to attracting new customers with twitter.

But it’s not that difficult. The reason most businesses struggle to attract new customers is because they expect followers to simply send them an order on the basis of a tweet they wrote. In reality, very little business gets done that way.

Where Twitter is most effective is when it’s used as a means to an end.

Fed up of seeing the same messages and promotions in your social media channels? Well you are not alone. There is a growing backlash against repetitive or pointless promotion of businesses in social media. As Facebook and Twitter users get inundated with incessant sales messages, increasing numbers are either un-following and un-fanning these nuisance business pages.

But don’t let this scare you off from running a social media campaign. What works in your favour is the fact that most businesses don’t understand how social media works. Follow the following simple rules, and you’ll stand out from all the spam and sales messages:

1. Remember what social media was originally intended for. Its purpose was to create online communities where people with common interests could share ideas, information and chat to each other. It was never meant to be an advertising billboard. People simply don’t like being sold to.
2. With this in mind, target the right online communities and join in their conversation. So for example, if you’re a personal injury lawyer, talk to the support groups for people with injuries. Ask sufferers about their situation, provide some tips, and offer to answer their questions. 

Did you know that your audience are most likely to click on a hyperlink if it’s 25% of the way through your tweet?

Why? Because your audience will be scanning each tweet from left to right and are far more likely to notice a link that appears near the beginning of your tweet. 

Having a hyperlink early in your tweet breaks the message into two halves. For example, the section before the link can ask a question. And the section after the link can summarise the answer (as contained in the preceding hyperlink).

Getting a link 25% of the way into your message may be tricky, but at the very least, try and put links in the first half of your message. See the example below.