I came across a blog this weekend that reinforced my thoughts. This post, written by Christian Fea, CEO of Synertegic, Inc., started off with a this statistic that he found on compete.com: Twitter had around 3 million people visiting the site in 2008, and it grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.
Ok, so how do we harness all of social media’s potential and use it to build a lead generation system?
Well, I’ve started to use my Twitter account a lot more, and I’ve found some productive uses for the application:
- Sent mini survey question and got answers quickly
- Promoted new blog posts and upcoming webinars
- Shared articles, resources, and blog posts that I found interesting
- Learned what topics my network finds interesting faster
- Discovered some useful blog posts and resources by using tweetscan
There are lots of great resources out there if you want to learn more about how to use Twitter to generate leads, and I’ve include links to several of them at the end of this posting.
But, first, let me give you a summary of Christian’s blog. He offers six effective ways to use Twitter as a lead generation tool:
1. Target your market to follow the right people. Christian says to ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Even if you’re
in a broad spectrum market you’ve got to narrow down your focus to an
industry, niche, or demographic.
2. Offer actionable advice. This is where being relevant sets you up us as an authoritative resource. Focus your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares or problems that your target audience may have. Anything that will help your audience do their jobs better, easier, or more efficiently will hit home with them.
3. Use your 140 character wisely. Just because you have 1,000 followers doesn’t mean they are all going to read your tweets. Your tweets – which you are forced to keep at 140 characters - are in effect your headline and become the reason someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet. Use defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet.
4. Your offer and call to action. Obviously, you can’t provide a solution in 140 characters. Christian
suggests providing a link back to your blog before directing them from
Twitter to another site.
5. Frequency of your tweets. If you’re serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool,
Christian suggests that you tweet a minimum of three times a day. His
reasoning is that your target audience is online at different times of
the day, so a tweet in the morning, midday and at night raises your
chances of getting to more people.
6. Tracking your results. Christian says a good way to track tweet subjects is to name your blog
post the same as what you use for your tweet post. He uses Google
Analytics to track website traffic by copying and pasting Javascript
code into the blog page header and then every page on his site is
tracked.
Additional Resources:
Don’t have a Twitter account?
This site also offers help in getting started: “Using Twitter…‘The
Smart Way’” by Mark Ramskill on TwitTip.
Looking for more Twitter followers?
Read this post by Guy Kawasaki: Guy offers
some great tips for using Twitter including Twitter etiquette and how
to write headlines. He also addresses the importance of links, and
tells you the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as
possible.
Need help organizing the world of microblogging?
TweetScan will give you daily or weekly email alerts on topics or people.
Have questions? Just give me a tweet! http://www.twitter.com/brianjcarroll
December 15, 2008
8 MUST HAVE Social Media Tools
I recently attended a social media marketing conference in San Diego. It included some very well-known social media gurus, such as Mari Smith and Denise Wakeman.
I picked up some really great ideas. I also learned of eight new online tools that will help your social media marketing efforts. Here they are:
TwitterBar: This browser add-on that integrates with FireFox and allows you to effortlessly Tweet about any page that you are on, making it very easy to share new resources as you find them.
UStream.tv: This is like YouTube, but LIVE. With just a webcam and the Internet you can stream anything live. During the event, one of the presenters was streaming his presentation live to all of his followers (Very cool!).
Ping.fm: This amazing site allows you to post text, images and video one time and it will take that content and post it on ALL of your social media sites. Forget maintaining FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and the dozen other accounts you have—this site does it all.
BudUrl: This really cool tool will shorten any weblink (useful for Twitter) AND provide detailed tracking that reveals which websites picked up your link, allowing you to determine where your new traffic is coming from for any webpage (yours or someone elses).
TweetDeck: Following a ton of people on Twitter? Want to filter the real important people from your stream of tweets? TweetDeck is your solution.
FriendFeed: Let’s say there’s a few people you like to track, but don’t like to bounce around to all their social media sites to keep up to date. FriendFeed centralizes everything, across a wide range of social media sites, so you can quickly see what’s going on. (NOTE: Would love more info from folks using this. Please comment).
AwayFind: Overwhelmed with Email? Try AwayFind. This service will allow urgent messages to get through to you, while allowing you to get away and get productive.
12seconds.tv: What if you could effortlessly create a video, but only had 12 seconds? Kinda like YouTube meets Twitter. Check below to see how I created one using my laptop’s camera.
Michael Stelzner using 12seconds.tv. on 12seconds.tv
There’s a ton of useful services here. If you use any of the them, tell my why you like them. ALSO, if you want to follow me on Twitter, click here.