Twitter is a data powerhouse to capture consumers’ interest and intent for businesses. However, most brands still use this tool mainly for reputation management and customer service, to ensure they are not getting any negative publicity or to update customers with their latest offerings. Twitter has launched three advertising products, promoted tweets, accounts and trends, but they are not open to all the businesses yet, especially outside the USA, and studies show that Twitter conversion is around 0.1%. Also, due to Twitter’s 24*7 real time nature, businesses really need deep pockets to leverage this social network.

However, based on our trial with clients such as MusicEventOne and Regus.com, we have come up with seven very economical steps that businesses can use on Twitter to increase their lead generation and sales conversion by 50%.

Step 1: Create an impressive Twitter profile

The first thing businesses must do is create a very eye-catching profile, and to create a formidable Twitter profile, brands must:
1. Add images and designs with the right resolution
2. Use bold, dynamic wallpaper with an informative sidebar
3. Have a noticeable header image and a unique profile picture
4. Complete their profile text in full and not use too many Hashtags in the bio.
5. Maintain a healthy ratio of following to followers.
6. Not automate Twitter followership; rather do the work themselves.

Step 2: Configure Twitter Lead Generation Cards for your websites and applications

After setting up profile, businesses should configure the Twitter Card feature in order to make their users’ experience richer. According to Twitter, who have recently launched Twitter cards for all businesses:

“Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.”
Twitter also introduced a new analytics feature, which allows the downloading of leads straight from the Twitter ad into a CSV file. Advertisers can also see important metrics now, such as cost per lead.

Using Lead Gen Cards, @RockCreek drove 1,700 new emails subs in 1 wk. "I was thrilled with the cost per new email" https://t.co/NtzTsrrULS

— adam bain (@adambain) August 29, 2013

Setting up Twitter cards is very easy as Twitter provides you with some code to place on your site or application, and once that is verified by Twitter, your Twitter update will have extended info from your website and/or App with a call to action.

Step 3: Use Twitter advanced search to capture consumers’ interest and intention

Once your profile and Twitter cards are configured, use Twitter’s advance search to find potential customers based on keywords, locations, timeframe and sentiments.
Perhaps Twitter advanced search is one of the most underrated data mining tools for businesses, because, if businesses can really filter 400m+ tweets posted by people talking about their industry, breaking news, interests and intent, they might not need any other lead generation tool. You can see the Twitter support page on how to use various advanced search operators to find meaningful data.

Step 4: Filter out spam and bots (machine generated tweets) from search results

Twitter search results can provide you with loads of relevant tweets. However Twitter is full of very repetitive data and the Twitter open API enables the public to automate their status updates periodically, meaning lots of data is loaded by machines rather than humans. Therefore, it is very important for businesses to filter out duplicate and bot-fuelled information.

To filter data redundancies, businesses can use the Twitter advanced search feature that removes retweets from the search results.

Step 5: Profile search results based on users social influences

Once businesses have searched and filtered unique data, they must profile Twitter users based on their Klout, FollowerWonk, PeerIndex or Kred score to categorise them into advanced, medium or basic users, so that corresponding action can be determined to generate leads.

For example, users with a low Klout score are not very active on Twitter i.e. it is better to send them @mentions than just favouriting or retweeting their tweets.

Step 6: Further categorise search results based on sentiments

Before taking engagement actions, businesses must determine the sentiments to tweets so that if a person is asking the question, the interaction should have enough information to satisfy their query and if they are moaning about services then the interaction must contain apologetic text with a solution to their problem.

Step 7: Now engage with consumers using Twitter Anatomy

Steps 5 and 6 have already touched on how we should act once tweets are filtered and categorised based on social profile and sentiments, but to elaborate further, businesses must understand Twitter provides various engagement meta data to interact with customers i.e. it is not only through @mentions, but also by retweets, favourites, following, adding people to a list, that brands can also trigger an interaction with potential clients.

In other words, you don’t need to spam everyone with @mention, as making one of their tweets a favourite or adding them to a list can also attract users to come and view your profile and select the URL, if the whole proposition is compelling enough.

Try steps one to seven and you will get over 50% Lead Generation via Twitter; and don’t forget that businesses and brands can use Tweepforce lead generation campaign management features to group and automate all these seven steps in one campaign, which means 50% lead generation with far less time and cost associated to it!