Any business can, and should, be getting more out of their twitter account simply by utilizing monitoring techniques. There are many sites and services out there that let you search all of twitter for certain keywords. The benefit of this should be obvious to any decent salesman. If you can sell on a cold call or shotgun advertising techniques, how hard would it be to close someone who is actively talking about your product or service? Twitter marketing doesn’t have to be difficult you just need to be vigilant.
We did a simple study. A friend runs a small chain of cell phone repair stores in eastern Massachusetts, and he agreed to hand over the reins to his Twitter account for a day. When we started, he had a handful of followers that saw his daily tweeted link. As far as he knew, Twitter had NEVER resulted in any kind of converted sale. Using simple monitoring techniques, we got him two customers, paid in full, the same day.
To start, we isolated his target key words. Much like SEO, for monitoring to work you need to have a strong grasp on words and phrases your potential customers are using. Since our friend specializes in cell phone repair, we made the following short list.
Broken cell phone
Broken Iphone
Cracked Screen
Wet Phone
As you can see, we went with the owners top four guesses. If this was an ongoing endeavor, we would try out a variety of phrases and cull the good from the bad. You can of course use more than four phrases, it all depends on the amount of eyes you have available to keep watch. With just four phrases, we were easily able to keep tabs on Twitter activity while going about our normal daily routine.
Once you have your keywords, pick a monitoring site. One of the best free ones to get started with is http://monitter.com/, but there are plenty to choose from. Once on your site of choice, simply punch in your keywords and start looking for opportunities to sell. If you’re a local or regional business like our friends, be sure to add a radius. We used 50 miles, figuring that’s about the max someone would drive for this kind of service.
We responded to all applicable tweets, and pretty quickly stumbled on this tweet (personal info removed):
“My heart broke when i saw my screen was cracked on my phone -_-”
We responded with a professional, but conversational:
“Don’t be sad! Come to our store, we can fix it cheap while you wait!”
A couple replies later, and she was on her way.
Our second customer was attained in the same fashion. This isn’t to say you’ll get customers every day, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool that’s going underutilized by both small businesses and national juggernauts. If you’re willing to put forth the minimal effort needed to scan the monitoring page even once an hour, you’ll definitely see results. If you’re a salesman and you’re not using this feature, you’re just plain crazy.
Want to know more? Interested in what a Wikimotive twitter takeover can do for your business? Contact us today!