How To Use Twitter To Generate Sales Leads

Inbound Marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads. It is much simpler to implement than you thought. It has many different subsets of marketing processes, of which, one of them has been very relevant and is widely used in today’s commercial world—social media. Social media is constantly evolving, connects people from all around the world, and most importantly, used largely in today’s development (74% of all Internet users).

Within the Inbound Marketing strategy, one of the commonly used platform is Twitter. Twitter is easy to create and use. Sounds like something that could be of advantage, but how do you stand out and generate sales leads?

1. Finding people to follow

You can start off by looking at who your target audience is, and who they are specifically. Put in effort to research and identify keywords, hashtags and phrases which your potential clients will use. With this list, proceed to use the inbuilt Twitter Search, type them in and follow anyone who matches with your target customer profile.

Tip: You can also follow your competitors and look at who they are following, or who their followers are. (Hard work done for you!)

2. Look out for buying signals

As the number of people you follow grows, you can put them in Twitter’s Lists. From there, monitor and keep track of them and identify those that are most open to your products or services. Some buying signals include:

- Dissatisfaction with your competitor
- Exhibiting a need which your products or services can fulfill.

You can also search for terms to look out for this group of people, primarily those who are seeking immediate assistance. These terms include:

- “any recommendation”
- “any advice”
- “does anyone know”

If you can’t help them, you can retweet his or her tweet to your followers, and someone in your network might be able to help. Not to worry, you still assisted in the problem solving hence will still get the credit or attention.

If the prospect is following you, you can communicate with him/her privately with Twitter’s Direct Message tool. This is a chance to also exchange contacts and communicate through that (i.e. email, whatsapp, etc.)

3. Build on your following

Have a clear and focused bio illustrating your areas of expertise and explain what your company does. Make use hashtags, but make sure they are related, not just trending. Your Twitter account should be active, the more you tweet, the more followers you have and this increases your credibility. Some content that you can share include 'live' tweets about events or comment on current subjects that are relevant to your company, product or brand.

That being said, you need not come up with loads of content all by yourself. You can curate and retweet others’ tweets and comments as well, so long as you are not stealing them.

4. Posting

The 60/20/20 Ratio is a simple yet important formula which you can follow while posting on Twitter—60% educate, 20% inspire, and 20% sell. This is because while you educate and inspire, it will motivate them to purchase in future.
Get on top of or alongside current trends which are relevant to your industry, do not ever lag behind. You can start conversations or quickly join into any when you see them. Whenever you have a great blog idea, post the link to Twitter ASAP. You don’t get to be first every time, people catch up. Also, don’t forget to include relevant visuals to illustrate and liven up your tweet. Make yourself known and prominent in the industry.

5. Give away the ‘Why?’ and sell the ‘How?’

Take the chance and time to give away the ‘why’ of what you know, then save the ‘how’ for your paying customers. Surely you do not want to provide them with nothing, as that leaves you with practically nothing to sell. This ‘how’ gap attracts them to want to achieve more.

For example, your company is providing Inbound Marketing services. Your client asks, “How to generate more leads”, you’ll tell them a small piece of what can be done, and leave the big piece unsaid, in hope for them to engage with you. Remember, with generosity, it builds your brand and is a form of a lead generator.