Introduction
People usually agree with me when I say that Twitter is a great place to meet interesting people, but they typically dismiss my claim that it is also a great place to meet potential leads and customers as a joke. That is until I tell them how I use Twitter to find new clients.
To begin, claim your Twitter handle and your company’s handle if you haven’t already (if you run a business). You can sign up for either one on Twitter.com. You can expect to have URLs like twitter.com/accountnameyoupick and twitter.com/companynameyoupick.
What Makes Twitter Tick
Let me elaborate if you are unfamiliar with Twitter or the concept. You need to sign up for Twitter first, and then you can start following other users. You can find people with similar interests in any country on Earth by searching the database or visiting Twitter.com/search. The FOLLOW button is where you can select a user to follow. After that, whenever they send a tweet, you’ll see it in your timeline (once you’ve logged in). You don’t need to create an account to view public profiles. You can also view the direct messages sent to this account by the people this user follows. This means observing multiple threads of conversation from a single user’s perspective is possible.
If you are having a conversation and choose to view your home page instead of the followee’s page, you may be missing out on messages from people who the follower follows. You can follow the other users on the followee’s page to see the whole conversation on your Twitter home page.
Networking Through Twitter
In case you are completely confused at this point, let me give you an illustration. Twitter can be compared to an endless social gathering room in many ways. The lights are always on, and the doors are always open. If you’ve ever been to a leads group meeting or a business card exchange, you know that these events happen on a set date and time and last no more than a couple of hours.
Twitter eliminates the need to set a cutoff time for socializing or conducting business so the party can continue indefinitely. Let’s pretend you’ve entered the room now. Lots of talking is happening right now. The trick is to participate in a few of them, allowing you to initiate conversation. This is the kind of thing you’d do. You’d approach a few people, listen in on their discussions, and join in on the ones about which you already know something. The conversation may eventually lead to a panel of your services or products, at which point you may have the chance to generate a lead or close a sale on the spot.
Twitter provides equivalent possibilities, but as I’ve already mentioned, the door is always open, and the lights are always on. Twitter users typically use a computer to send their updates (or “tweets”) to the world. They log in, compose a post in the primary input box, and hit update to broadcast it to their homepage and, if they have any followers, to everyone following them.
Twitter users, however, are not restricted to using only computers for tweeting. If you prefer to use your mobile device, you can send an SMS message instead. My phone’s address book now includes a contact I’ve labeled “Twitter,” which consists of the number I use to send tweets. This means I can wait in line at the grocery store and update my status with whatever comes to mind.
How to Search for Twitter Followers
The most common Twitter query is: “How do I discover new users to follow?” You can find them by searching for them on Twitter (which I’ve already mentioned) or using one of the other tools I said.
TweetLater is the online tool in question. Too numerous to list in a single article, I will eventually go over many of TweetLater’s features and discuss how I use them to make the most of Twitter and increase my social interaction on the platform.
The topic of this article is Keyword Tracking. Tweetlater.com/alerts has more information.
It serves as a Twitter conversation tracker, reporting back at specified intervals. After you tell it which keywords to look for, it will locate ongoing discussions that include those terms. Then, at regular intervals, it sends you a summary of the conversation, complete with links to the actual users who are having the conversation. Now is your chance to introduce yourself and share some thoughts:
For example: “Hey there, @mrtwitteruser! I saw that you asked your followers to recommend the best hosting on the Internet, and since that’s what we specialize in, I’d love it if you’d check out our site or give me a call so I can fill you in…”
You can now see how to use Twitter to find potential new customers and convert them into followers. Remember that people tend to return the favor when you show them some support by following them. Some users even have their accounts set to auto-follow, so they’ll follow you back without you having to do anything. In a later post, I’ll explain how to set up automated responses and whatnot for such an occasion. But how do you ensure that they continue to trail you?
Get your fans to return for more.
The key to answering this question is to give them new topics of conversation regularly. You must show them that you can always keep the conversation going. However, how do you determine what will pique their interest? If you think what you have to say is interesting, how do you know that others will? It takes time to develop the wit, humor, and social skills necessary to succeed on Twitter. However, if you plan on using your account professionally and want to be taken seriously in all aspects of your life, you should be mindful of the words you choose to put into cyberspace, where they may as well be etched in stone.
When it comes to my wit and humor, I prefer to play it safe. But I promised to give you something that would be reliable and provide you with material to share with your followers regularly, and here it is. Digg.com has the answer. But before I show you, let me rewind and tell you why this method is effective.
If you recall, I suggested that you try to locate a group of people who engage in conversations about topics that pique your interest. This means that they share your enthusiasm for essential things with you. Let’s look at an illustration. Many others on Twitter share your interest in political debates. Things are always happening, being discussed, and being written about from various angles in politics. You don’t have to agree with what other people are saying all the time, but there’s no harm in starting a conversation about it.
If you’re interested in politics and want to learn more about what people are talking about right now, Digg.com is the place to go. Sufficient knowledge to recommend and share a wide range of articles with your current audience. You both share common interests, so it stands to reason that they are also following you. Therefore, they will appreciate it when you reveal a story about your shared interests and may even turn on other followers to you. A domino effect, if you will.
Facilitating One’s Captivation
You may be thinking, “Damn, are you telling me that I should keep going back to Digg every few minutes to find out what story is breaking news in my interest?” The good news is that you can add a tool from Digg.com to your browser that will automatically update you whenever anything new is posted on the front page. You may or may not know that when someone, anywhere in the world, finds an exciting blog post, news article, post of any kind, video, or photo, they can submit it to the social news aggregation site Digg. They log in to their Digg account and submit the item there, giving it a headline, a topic category, and a description.
The popularity of a post on Digg grows as more users share it. The closer a post gets to the Digg front page, the more attention it receives. When it reaches the homepage, the browser extension is notified and displays a 5-second pop-up window with the article’s headline (for those categories that you have subscribed to). As a result, Digg tailors its content recommendations to your interests, which coincidentally align with the topics currently trending in your Twitter feed. You can finally engage in meaningful conversation.
Send out tweets as quickly as a bullet.
The remaining question is how to quickly share that news item on Twitter without interrupting your thought. I also make use of a web-based application available at http://twitthat.com/. This tool installs a bookmarklet in your browser. When you click it, a window appears with prewritten text and a link (already compressed using TinyURL, another web tool that shortens long URLs to manageable sizes that will fit into Twitter’s maximum length) ready to be tweeted.
If you sign up for Twitter, please visit our company page on Facebook (link provided below) and add your Twitter ID to our Twitter discussion there. Everyone who follows us will also follow you, giving you a more extensive fan base. Don’t forget to like our company’s page while you’re there!
Axsys Technology Group, which provides web hosting, web design, and e-marketing services, was founded by Ken Ramirez. Ken frequently gives talks on topics such as online marketing, website development, and hosting. If you need to contact Ken, his email address is Ken. Ramirez (at) axsystechgroup.com.
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