We all know that Twitter is a great networking tool. It’s great to follow news, celebrities, your friends and get your thoughts and opinions out to your followers. If you’re using Twitter for you business you need to be doing much more than that. Social media outlets should play a big part in your marketing strategy. Here’s a few ways to use your business Twitter account to nurture prospects who are not ready to buy your product or service yet:
1. Always reply to questions and interact: remember that all of your Twitter followers are leads. If they mention you or re-tweet your content, thank them or reply! These small interactions can yield big results.
2. Post all of your content on Twitter: If you write a blog, post your content daily on Twitter– preferably multiple times daily. Most people just look at their running timeline and don’t go to personal Twitter profiles so posting multiple times daily optimizes the chances that your content is seen.Don’t worry- you don’t need to remember to post throughout the day– use a Tweet scheduler like Gremln or Hootsuite and schedule them all at once. Most scheduling programs like this will also let you run a report on the link clicks, which is a great tool.
3. Post special offers: If you are going to offer a free month of service, discounted products, host a webinar or have a white paper or case study to give out post a link to a sign up form on Twitter. Requiring a prospect to sign up means that you will get their name and e-mail. If you are using a form from a marketing automation tool to do this, you can easily start them on a sales or nurturing e-mail campaign as well.
4. Use Twitter’s search feature and lists: find the right people to follow and potential customers using these tools. Lists are one of the most underrated social media tools. One use is to develop a whole list of competitor businesses and have a running feed of what all of your competitors are posting. Another is to put all potential leads or all of customers into their own list. Then you can look through the list and easily reply or re-tweet things that you like. Use the search feature to filter for potential leads (example “small business”, “insurance”, etc).
Remember that Twitter can be the best customer service tool if you are using it to reply back and have conversations with your followers. Happy Tweeting!