Find Leads Via Twitter – Small Business Marketing Tips: Quick Twitter wins are something that are talked about a huge amount – in fact, it’s said that tweets and hashtags mentioning Twitter itself actually gain more traction on the social media channel and receive more views and wider sharing as a result.

Over the coming weeks, we at Rippleout are going to provide you with a few quick wins designed to try and bring in more business to your start-up or SME, and to try and show you that even by using the most simple of tools, you can see real benefits from social media. {Tweet}

First up: a very simple use of the search feature to find leads via Twitter. {Tweet}

Find Leads via Twitter Search

Most of your average Twitter users will tend to search for their friends, colleagues or competitors – probably by their personal or company name, or their Twitter handle (the @ element) if they know it (it’s often included on business cards these days, for instance).

However, Twitter search can actually help you find live, qualified leads, searching for your products – and even in your area if you offer a location specific service. {Tweet}

Let’s take accounting, and let’s pretend you’re based in Kent. Twitter being a social tool, people often use it to ask for recommendations as to who they should use for a specific service – and these people are most likely looking for that recommendation for a reason; they need your help. As such, they’re likely to be pretty solid leads – particularly if your company are pro-active enough to approach them and offer to help.

Finding these people is remarkably easy – simply go to Twitter, type ‘recommend account Kent’ in to the search bar in the top right. You’ll get something that looks like the below – someone asking for a recommendation within the last two hours. Ideally, I would direct message them – you’re competitors are probably following you and will see your tweet. The other option is to use a personal account if you’re not able to message your Twitter lead directly.[responsive]

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Developing Twitter Lead Generation Further

Ok, so the above is a nice little process. However, it’s quite effort intensive to have to log in to Twitter and search for all the potential key phrases that your Twitter leads may have followed. There are a couple of options to get around this. One, if you don’t use a location (i.e. remove ‘Kent’) and hit ‘near you’ on the left hand tool bar – this will bring up people who tweeted asking for accountant recommendations, but close to you rather than just those who specifically mentioned Kent.

The other option is to use a Twitter management tool such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Tweetdeck is our preferred option, but Hootsuite has a similar process.

All you need to do is set up a column on your Tweetdeck account which runs a search on ‘Recommend Accountant Kent’, and another column for each of the other searchers you might want to run – for instance: ‘Recommend Accountant Maidstone’, ‘Recommend Accountant Folkestone’. [responsive]

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With the columns setup, as soon as anyone tweets about the keywords you’re interested in, you’ll get a notification and can compose a response. {Tweet}

One final point to think about it that you also need to consider other keywords people might type in – instead of going straight for a recommendation, people might simply ask are there any good accountants in Kent, or reliable, or they may not have any qualifying words at all and just ask for ‘accountants in Kent’.

If you have any good Twitter tips, share them in the comment box below or share them with us via social media – all the details are below!

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