Kaushal Gandhi
No doubt, twitter is among the top social networking sites that every savvy entrepreneur is turning to today for targeted online marketing. Thanks to the phenomenal rise and success of social media marketing (SMM). The growth of the social media has unleashed an extremely user-friendly and effective medium to capture your prospects within the gamut of your social influence. And it has become one powerful way of spreading your reach and enriching your inbound marketing strategy in an extremely cost-effective manner.
Before now leads were typically associated with email addresses. But not any more. Today using twitter for lead generation has become common place. You simply need to attract the attention of relevant prospects who may be interested in your business and then follow them on Twitter. While some may reciprocate by following you, the others are likely to skim through your profile and MAY notice if your product or service on offer, meets their requirements.
Unfortunately, finding relevant prospects in a random and unplanned manner on twitter.com can be not only time-consuming but also a futile effort sometimes. But by simply using a simple but proven technique, this process becomes less stressful and more result-oriented.
Here we want to share our top tips on how to make the most of twitter, first by finding a set of interesting and more importantly – your prospective audiences – who you can follow and interact with on Twitter.
1. ‘Search’ For Treasures
Twitter search is your key here. Play around and search for hashtags that are relevant to your specific audience profile. They are your vital sources.
2. Get To Know Who Your Prospects Are
Open new browser tabs for each of the hashtags, then subsequently enter them into the search box. Once done, this will throw up a live stream of people who are actively following or interested in that particular subject. You will also observe, that if you keep open for a few more minutes, the browser tab title starts updating and providing a live count, in brackets, the number of new tweets/posts that keep getting added on the topic.
3. Engage With Your Prospects
You can keep these tabs on and running all day, or for long as you want to. At regular intervals, for example an hour or so, and/or based on how quickly your unread list increases, do scroll down the unread tweets. Then begin following your prospects who are tweeting and discussing their opinions and views on subjects that are of relevance and importance to you.
These indeed are simply steps but if you keep at them they will help you generate a veritable list of prospective leads. Besides by doing this from time to time you will be in the loop on the latest buzz and links that are occupying prime time in your world. The result? Better business relationships and wider marketing reach.
Over to you: Are you using twitter to generate business leads? What other ways do you think twitter can help lead generation?
Twitter now is getting more useful, especially if you want to do some online marketing. It really helps!
@Andrew Walker,
Oh yes, even the offline businesses are not seeing the good in twitter and the rest of the social media! 🙂
Guys, I do agree that Twitter can be used as a marketing tool… *but* you need to make sure you’re building connections with actual people who use the service and are part of your target audience.
Otherwise you could end up with 10,000 followers who are actually marketers trying to push their own websites, and never even check your tweets… let alone provide you with any potential return for your efforts.
@Pedro Cardoso,
You’ve just made a point there Pedro. Twitter is presented populated by marketers all of whom are pushing one product or the other. Presently, less than 20% of what is going on there is networking the remaining is nothing but marketing. It’s really funny that most times affiliates promoting the same product will be sending tweets to fellow affiliates trying to sell that same product. 🙂
I think a strategy that someone advocated sometime ago is what is really good on twitter – register different accounts for networking and for promotion. This way I think you will not be offending your contacts with too many marketing messages.
@Chadrack,
Indeed! Wise marketers keep their eggs in different baskets, and their affairs neatly separated.
Other than that, one should aspire to a healthy ratio of information/promotion… at least 80/20, I would say.
I really appreciate your help Kaushal Gandhi , we all know that there are many benefits regarding the use of this social networking site called the Twitter. i consider this article the best marketing tips we should follow. my thanks to you.
@Celine,
Let me on behalf of Kaushal accept that compliment. But I do hope Kaushal will be here to do it.
Yes, I definitely use twitter for online marketing. I’ve added the URL of my product listing to my twitter profile and it is also important to diligently retweet your product postings every day. This can help get results rapidly.
@Jong Uychiat,
It does appear you have some very tactics of marketing with twitter. Will you be generous to share them with us here. You could post your guest article here. Let’s know if you will want to do that.
Great simple tips Kaushal. The only problem I find is that it can often take a lot of time for you to be able to find the users and then start engaging with them all!
BTW, my CommentLuv points to Technology Bloggers most recent post, which I do believe you wrote!
Thanks for the tips 🙂
Christopher – Technology Bloggers Admin Team
I am using Twitter and these strategies are useful for me and they are new for me to take an advantage. Twitter is good platform in my opinion to use such strategies for getting new clients. Kaushal, you have given good tips.
Many authority sites will publish a direct link to your website if you write them a unique, educational article for their blog. Get traffic from blogs with huge communities, to build your own and get more clients.
It may be good when we are starting out, but when we reach a certain level of growth, we must have the audience find us rather than going after them.Twitter searching is so effective because you can find customers exactly at the point when they’re ready to buy.
Hello there, nice article i liked it. i was like to say that at the end of the year i am 100% sure 70% of the twitter user would shift to google plus beacuse its more easy to use and faster say to get keywords.
cheers
@Noty@Sample Press Releases, I agree with you …. And I think that Twitter is a temporary trend and soon it will get tired or replace to more convenient and useful system
Nice article. I was about to give up on Twitter. What was the point of 140 character text messages? That was until I too discovered the hashtags. I’ll be following your suggested method over the following weeks. Thanks.
@Russell Davison,
You nearly gave up on twitter? You’re not alone. In fact, at the moment I hardly use twitter. It appears everyone on twitter is out to sell something to their followers. But I know as a blogger twitter could really be a great source of traffic.
Word-of-mouth has always been the best lead-generator. Have everyone you know help you to spread the word about your business..
The only one I can find is in the UK, hope it helps.- I checked it out on Companies House and cant find it??
It kind of great of you to try and talk to them, even if you feel like you have to. Not many people would bother, so well done 🙂 And yes, I’m one of those who get “these are the choices you should of made and you’ve made mistake lectures” too.
Well I don’t know that much in detail about him cause I’d have something better to do. But I know enough to say that he really don’t deserve being where he is today. I’m not a hater I just don’t like him. Come on people he’s 16, clubs, love, sex … that’s too much for a kid and people made him, he did not make himself and thinks he’s the most talented boy out there on stage with that crap childish voice (nananana….) . People just use him to get themself money and yes I agree with you that all happens in studio for commercial success…. anyway I don’t care about him. Don’t hate or like him.
If you have optimized your blog for your keywords and use articles, social media, and maybe other tools to drive traffic to it, you could get results fast.
Hi have twitter account and i add my blog link also. I only know that its really helpful for PR but i never tried it for Marketing. I heard and read from so many sites that twitter is used for inviting visitor. Now this article really helpful for me. Its really worth reading. Thanks for sharing with us Kaushal sir.
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