Let us talk about how to convert your Twitter followers into customers.
It’s all very well having hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter but what are you doing with those followers? Are they actually generating business for you?
I think sometimes on social media you actually need to be a little bit mercenary; you actually need to say ‘what are we actually getting out of this?’ Running a Twitter campaign doesn’t take a lot of money, it may not cost anything at all apart from the person you are paying to run it but what it is costing is a lot of time and that is time you could be spending quite wisely to get results.
So how can you convert a Twitter follower into a customer?
The first step is to ascertain who on Twitter is going to be the right sort of contact for you. That is quite an easy thing to do because on Twitter you can monitor conversations. What Twitter is basically is one big room for having conversations and all you need to do is identify the conversations that are relevant to you.
Let’s say for example that you offer some sort of speech recognition software. What you can do is on Twitter, on Twitter you can monitor conversations that people have about speech recognition or conversations people have about transcribing conversations or people might talk about the fact for example that there are lots of meetings and they need somebody to transcribe their notes. There might be all sorts of conversations about business communication.
What you can do on Twitter is you can set up key words to monitor those conversations, so every time someone is talking about the word transcribing Twitter will actually tell you if that person is having a conversation. All you do is search on Twitter for transcribing and you will get a feed with those words in it. What you then do is monitor whether there is a conversation that is relevant to you and then what you do is you join that conversation.
Someone might say ‘oh my gosh I am finding it a nightmare to actually transcribe these notes’ and what you can say is, you can then answer them and say ‘what are you doing to do that? Are you using any software? Have you thought about this software?’ Or you can be even more direct. Let’s remember that Twitter is not an end to itself; it’s a means to an end, places to research what people are talking about. If you see a conversation that is relevant to you, why don’t you just go up and talk to that person.
Sometimes on Twitter you can actually see the contact details of the person you are talking to. It will give you their website and what you can do is click on their personal Twitter profile, you can click on their website and then you can contact them.
So my advice on Twitter is to cut to the chase. If you see someone that is having a conversation that is relevant to you answer them or ask them a question or if possible just look up their contact details and speak to them saying ‘Look I saw what you were saying on Twitter, I think I might have a solution for you’. It’s that easy.
