Twitter is not only my absolute favorite social media platform, but a great place to grow your follower base and gain extra exposure. It’s also an amazing platform to get more leads and increase your sales (eventually). Here’s how you can connect and lead more prospects on Twitter.
1. Know Your Prospects
First of all, you have to know your prospects. Doing proper research is the very first step in this process. You MUST know who your potential prospects are, what they are doing, and what kind of topics they are talking about.
Consider taking your existing prospect list and searching for them on the platform or typing keywords in Twitter’s search to find your targets. Then, either add them to a list or follow them. This will allow you to track them much easier.
Tip: In case you use a CRM, you may have a feature connecting it to Twitter.
2. Engage With Prospects
Start engaging with your prospects actively. You have to engage with them in a meaningful way to make this interaction work. It should sound natural and it should be about your prospects, not about you.
Don’t abuse the “@” mention feature. You may come off as annoying if you don’t add value to the message you include when addressing someone. Always remember the context of whatever you’re talking about. If you can, try to follow as many prospects’ accounts as possible to show that you care.
3. Switch to Real Conversations
It’s essential to establish a true, legit, personal connection with your prospects! This can be done by switching to real conversations that are just two humans talking. Twitter is one of the best channels for this as it provides you with all the necessary features you could possibly require.
Those lists you created earlier when looking for your prospects can be later used to quickly browse through everyone you found. You’ll be able to see what everyone is saying everyday and then find opportunities for interacting with them.
The point is to offer your prospects relevant and valuable content that will be useful to them. This will help build your reputation and establish yourself as an authority in your particular industry!
4. Check What Your Competitors Do
Checking what your competitors do by specifically searching for tweets about them will help you find relevant conversations. Then, you’ll be able to contribute to these discussions. An easy way to do this is use use branded hashtags of your competitors to check conversations, or check out the Replies tab on your competitor’s Twitter profile.
But remember, it’s not about stealing someone else’s clients! Instead, simply offer free advice aka the most value you can deliver and this won’t make you look bad.
Oh and bonus: If you see that someone had a bad experience with your competitor, you can step in and say that you are sorry they experienced that, but offer your free advice at the same time…
5. Give Advice
As mentioned in the previous point, free information and advice can be very helpful… And on the rare occurrence (this actually happens to me one or two times a year) you’ll need to interact with users that don’t speak English, I’d recommend using an online translation service like The Word Point if you need to. It’s not that hard and it will help you reach all the segments of your target audience.
There are two types of tweets you should be looking for to give your advice in a manner that sounds natural and non-promotional:
- Tweets That Request Recommendations: These can mostly be found by searching for certain keywords and hashtags. There’s even a special Advanced Search function on Twitter that allows you to look for keywords with the phrases “looking for” and “recommendation” included with them. You can even specify the location for these.
- Tweets With Industry-Related Questions: Industry-related questions are even more specific than the general recommendations tweets. Get original with these though!
6. Participate In Chats
Twitter has a feature called Twitter Chats. You can participate in these to get even closer to your prospects and gain their trust, loyalty, and respect. The only problem is that finding live Twitter chats may be a bit challenging, though you can still do it if you use special tools found in abundance online.
Later on, consider hosting your own Twitter chat and promoting it wherever you can so that more people join. You can create your own small community this way and build deeper connections with your current customer base. It’s a win-win for everyone.
7. Use Relevant Hashtags
Hashtags are everything these days. If you use them wisely, you’ll be able to kill it on Twitter. BUT you’re not the only one using them, so get creative with the hashtags and keywords you plan to use.
Your competitors will definitely be using the same or similar hashtags, which is why it’s important to make your tweets stand out! Even one or two hashtags is enough to generate leads and get retweets, don’t go overboard! And remember to hashtag only RELEVANT words.
8. Build a Separate Landing Page
The best way to get Twitter prospects into your marketing funnel is by building a separate landing page specifically for your them. Creating a separate page will allow you to track Twitter leads and prospects more accurately. So instead of sending your Twitter followers to your website’s homepage, send them to a landing page!
9. Implement Lead-Generation Cards
Twitter’s chats are cool, but almost nothing is better than its lead-generation cards. It’s a great feature that will help you tremendously in achieving your goals.
Lead generation cards let you add more details to your tweets. When someone clicks on your tweet to expand it, they’ll see your offer and be able to respond to your call to action in one click. Some of their personal information will be automatically submitted and they’ll be more likely to continue filling out the form.
10. Continue Engaging
Lastly, you go further with your engagement and continue interacting with your prospects. There are two ways you can do this:
- Outside of Twitter: Taking the conversation outside of Twitter will allow you to engage with a potential lead even when they have left the platform. Direct messages on other social media, messengers, and email are some of the best options.
- Follow Prospects: This was mentioned earlier, but remember to keep following your prospects on Twitter and keep in touch with them on a consistent basis.
To sum up, these are all effective techniques you can use to connect and lead more prospects on Twitter. You don’t necessarily need to use all of them, but try them out and decide which one is for you! I’ve had a lot of success bringing in clients from Twitter, so master it, serve your audience and they’ll serve you back!
