Free blueprint for lead generation using Twitter
Posted by Mike Harris on Wed, Jun 23, 2010 @ 01:01 PM
By Kendell Lang
Here's a quick Twitter lead generation strategy. You're going to learn how to find targeted prospects using Twitter's real time search. And you're going to learn how to get your company's great offer in front of these prospects!
Basic blueprint
These five steps are the blueprint, which is followed by more detail.
- Find or start with a cool offer related to what you're selling.
- Find twitter conversations around the problem/issue, with search queries.
- Make sure to Bit.Ly the link to your landing page URL for tracking and shortening.
- Tweet the solution (your cool offer) from your Twitter account with the attitude to help...not promote or sell.
- Rinse, repeat...automate!!!
By the way, this method can be done with a completely new account. It's not necessary to have followers.
Details & step-by-step example
Let's say you're introducing a new service that helps companies use social media to market products or services.
First, to understand search volume for these keywords, go to Google Trends and search phrases like: "social media marketing" or "social media coordinator" or "social media consultant" or "facebook intern" or "social media intern" or whatever you believe to be high-value keywords. Also look in current news stories for references to social media, etc.
You can also go into Google adwords to understand the same kind of dynamics about the volume and counts for these keywords. This will help you focus on the high-value keywords. Google the keyword phrase and then go to the Wonder Wheel...which is pretty cool if you've not seen that before. This is a tool to show users what search terms Google relates to the keyword.
Next, go to Twitter and search again for "social
media marketing" or "social media coordinator" or "social media consultant" or "facebook intern" or "social media intern" or whatever your high-value keywords were.
Important! You need to actually use http://search.twitter.com as a manual URL entry for doing the search on Twitter. Don't just go to Twitter.com. In order to remove all the marketers from the conversation, add the minus http code "-http" at the end of your search string. So, your search string will look something like "social media marketing -http". This will get rid of all the tweets in the search results which have websites associated with them (signs of marketers promoting a website). As you see the results, you can further refine by specifically excluding names, numbers or anything irrelevant to your targeted search.
You can also add a question mark (?) to your search query, which will further refine the results to people who are actually asking questions.
The key to this is building a really tight search query that pulls down just the targeted tweeters you're after. You're looking for real-life questions such as:
- "how are you managing all your social networks?"
- "what are you doing about hiring a social media coordinator?"
Make sure you're a part of a conversation with an @ reply and not participating as a promoter! Once you've narrowed this down...now you can post replies with suggestions that you can help answer their questions by pointing them to your bitlink.
When you come up for air let us know how this works for you!!!