- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- When information gathering, not only should you take note of what matters to people in buying or choosing a product/company similar to yours, but you can also learn from how other companies are promoting their own products however subtly and how these products are being received by the twitter audience
- When you do spot a discussion you can contribute in a useful way, then do so. If your response is seen as useful and/or knowledgeable of the subject area then people will look to you with interest and respect. Ensure you make your twitter profile as informative as possible, so that when these people look to your profile to follow you, they will also sit up and take notice of the company you work for and the product(s) you sell. At this point you have already formed a relationship with the sales lead where they have already expressed an interest in what you have to say. Then you can be proactive and call them directly. If you don’t have a name then call the company in reference to what was said on their twitter account, stressing if need be the fact that you have already been talking to them on twitter.
- Where do you do spot a potential lead, or if you’re having a twitter conversation that is turning into a lead, why not build a twitter list of leads, so you can continue to track their conversations? The list can be kept private so that only you see them.
The most important thing to remember when trying to promote your business via twitter is that you need to do so subtly. The twitter audience should not even realise they are being sold to. Most people do not like being sold to but if they believe they have initiated the product/sales conversation themselves they will not see it as intrusive or pushy.
So, what are you waiting for? Try it out for yourself and see how it impacts of your sales leads as well as your product’s/company’s profile!
