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A Seven-Step Formula to get 50% Lead Generation on Twitter

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A Seven-Step Formula to get 50% Lead Generation on Twitter

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.

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.
Anatomy of a Tweet Courtesy http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/tweet-anatomy_b45620

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!

Tweepforce Roundup (23 Sep): Twitter Trending , Customer services and Multiple Accounts

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Tweepforce Roundup (23 Sep): Twitter Trending , Customer services and Multiple Accounts

Tweepforce Twitter Roundup brings together all stories related to Twitter applications and platform updates and how these developments can help businesses to leverage this platform for business and product development.

Brands maintain multiple Twitter Accounts

Brandwatch analyses how over 250 leading brands are using Twitter. This includes how many accounts a brand maintains on Twitter. They found that:
•The number of brands using multiple Twitter accounts has increased from 7% to 63% over the last three years.
•In 2012, 35% of brands used multiple accounts, while the majority had just one.
•A common use of multiple accounts is to have one that allows for engagement – mostly in the form of customer service – and another for offers and company news.
•Dell has the most Twitter accounts (44), each of them covering a different department.

Takeaway for businesses:

Small businesses can also take a leaf out of the growing popularity of multiple accounts among big brands, to cater to various audiences in a distinct way. However, small businesses with limited resources might have to use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to make sure all accounts are synced and managed properly, as managing multiple accounts can be very time consuming and costly.

Twitter Finding New ways to Suggest Who to Follow!

Recently, Twitter launched a mysterious account called “Magic Recs”. This account delivers real time, tailor-made recommendations for users and content via direct message. Its foundation is straight forward: Twitter users that follow “Magic Recs” receive random direct messages that highlight accounts that people in your Twitter network have recently started following.

Takeaway for businesses:
Magic Recs is a unique initiative to discover relevant new Twitter accounts and tweets, beyond Twitter’s current features such as on site/application suggestions and an email newsletter. Businesses must be aware of, and make use of, innovations like “Magic Recs”, to ensure that they keep on top of Twitter advancements to grow their follower base, especially when it is free.

Secrete Behind Twitter Trending Topics

To be featured in Twitter trending is the ultimate aim for any marketer to get some real traction on Twitter, and knowing the popularity of Twitter trends, the company has also launched its most expensive advertising product so far: Promoted Trends.

According to estimates, Promoted Trends cost from around $100k/month, so it is far out of reach of small and medium-sized businesses. However Cision Media has done some recent analysis of both global and local trends and given some insight into the logic of trending topics.

Takeaway for business for Trending Topics:
1.Choose a non-peak times, like early morning, when people aren’t tweeting along to TV programmes.
2.Use a new hashtag so that its rise is more pronounced.
3.Hit as wide an audience as possible in a limited time – the sharper the peak, the more chance you have of trending.

Twitter Advertising has Made Customer Service Very Public and Real Time

Annoyed with the way British Airways was tackling the issue of his father’s lost luggage, businessman Hasan Syed decided to shout about it on Twitter. But rather than just a normal status update, Hasan bought a promoted tweet. Six hours after the tweet went live, it was picked up by technology blog Mashable and then read by thousands of Twitter users, retweeted and commented on.

But BA took another four hours to react with the following message:

“Sorry for the delay in responding, our Twitter feed is open 09:00-17:00 GMT. Please DM [direct message] your baggage ref and we’ll look into this.”

In other words, for British Airways the damage was done as this tweet was also picked up from BBC to CNN, and reached a huge audience.

Takeaway for Businesses:
1. The good news is that Twitter has made customer service real time and a two-way stream, but if requests and queries are not dealt with promptly, brands can incur substantial reputation damage.
2. Use Twitter advance search or tracking tools to ensure relevant tweets are picked up as soon as they go live, so that appropriate action can be taken.
3. Identify Twitter as one of the preferred mediums of customer management, so that queries made on this can be dealt as soon as possible.

Tweepforce Roundup (27Aug): Recent Twitter Trends, Stats & Apps for Businesses

by Tweepforce 0 Comments

Tweepforce Twitter Roundup brings together all stories related to Twitter statistics, current and evolving product updates and third party applications and how these developments can help brands to leverage this social media platform to grow their business. Let’s start with, how Twitter as a platform is evolving

Twitter is embedding information beyond 140 chars

Twitter introduced a fresh approach to explain the story behind popular tweets, adding a “related headlines” section below tweets that have been entrenched on other websites. Clicking through to a tweet’s permalink page will show websites that have included those links, adding context around tweets that might otherwise be difficult to comprehend.

Tweet with related stories.

Twitter is localising information

Techcrunch has spotted that like the Trending TV feature on Twitter, proximity-based alerts are also rendered around hashtags, such as for actual, in-person events nearby rather than TV programs. This is one more example of Twitter’s play to be the platform of choice for discussions about all occasions, i real and virtual. Overall Twitter is finding ways to become a powerful player in location-based services so that they can drive revenues in the form of paid placements.

Then see Twitter Statistics, Facts and Figures

According to a new Twitter study, below are the Twitter statistics related to tweets per day to per second:

In another case study for Eventbrite (the online ticketing company), analysts started assessing the value of a Facebook share in 2010 using their own in house technology; back then it was worth $2.52. In 2012 their latest study illustrates that the value per Facebook share has augmented to $4.15 which is an increase of 65%. The most fascinating statistic is that the value of a Twitter share has grown by 330%, from $0.43 to a $1.85. LinkedIn’s value has only risen minimally, by 2%.

Furthermore according to the study, despite Twitter not generating the same level of revenue for Eventbrite, the traffic statistics show that Twitter drives more traffic per share than Facebook, with 33 visits per share compared to Facebook’s 14 visits per share. LinkedIn visits per share are not irrelevant at 10 visits per share, but sit at less than one third of the Twitter stat.

How are Twitter and third parties controlling spamming and malware?

Twitter knows spam is an issue, and their users know well that the social network has its fair share of it. Therefore a team of researchers is working to combat this problem. In a paper released this week, they explained how they’ve been working with Twitter to take a close look at how fraudulent accounts are made and how they can be stopped, and they’ve already come up with some promising results. The team, made up of researchers from George Mason University, the International Computer Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley, teamed with Twitter to buy over 127,000 dubious, automatically-generated accounts from 27 different suppliers over a ten-month period. Their aim was to try and create a way to block spam accounts before they’re created or before they’re used to spread viruses across the web. With Twitter’s help, the team were able to recognise a set of identifiers that could be used to determine when accounts were created using bots. Subsequently, when the researchers tried to buy 14,000 additional Twitter followers after Twitter implemented the suggested changes, 90% were dead on arrival.

And finally what these recent Twitter developments means to businesses:

Looking at current Twitter progress, the platform is on the rise when it comes to both sharing content per day and click through rate once content is shared on the platform. In addition, Twitter is rendering information based on interest and location with no place for spam accounts. Therefore brands can think of taking following steps to drive more traffic and revenue via Twitter:

Tip 1: Tweeting must be integrated to social media strategy

Businesses must integrate content distribution via Twitter into their social media strategy and share as much as relevant content using Twitter tools like Hootsuite or Bufferapp, which give an option to schedule content distribution based on their followers’ activities to gain maximum reach. The auto schedule feature also stops businesses from seeming to spam their content to followers. Businesses can use promoted tweets in order to reach people with similar interests, demographics and location to their product.

Tip 2: Tweets must contain relevant hashtag and location specific information

As Twitter is focusing more on rendering location-based information, businesses must include as much as location specific information via geo-tagging, setting up profile location, using local hashtags and scheduling messages as per local or event timeframes.

Tip 3: Disengage bogus followers and focus more on engagement

Recently, Twitter has been doing everything in their power to reduce spamming, through tightening their API usage rules and working with data scientists to identify patterns that indicate spamming, so that they can offset those issues. This means that to grow their following, businesses must do more engagement by identifying potential customers using Twitter advance search or relevant hashtags, or use tools that can identify a target audience and subsequently leverage various Twitter actions such as @mention, Retweet, Favourite or adding them to lists, to overcome the Twitter API limitation.

Twitter is the best lead generation tool for businesses or brands

by Tweepforce 0 Comments
Twitter is the best lead generation tool for businesses or brands

In so many ways, the potential of Twitter for business, social CRM and sentiment analysis is obvious. Twitter is, after all, a real-time open system with more than 200m active users and 1bn tweets every two days. It’s a place where people talk about their intentions, interests and planned social engagements, and it’s also where industry experts are continually ready to give information on the latest topics and trends. According to a recent study, however, Twitter all too often fails to convert content into leads, with even such a relatively antiquated option as email marketing proving to be of greater value. So, how can businesses use the information garnered from Twitter for lead generation, while avoiding spamming?

Determining the best way to do lead generation

The good news for struggling social media marketers is that various Twitter tools exist with sentiment, location and social influence filters, which when used along with keywords, can filter the right people. Filtering people based on location, sentiments and social influence, then only on keywords, can be done via Twitter’s own Advanced Search page or with Tweepforce. A company specialising in holidays, for example, may need to find people who are looking for a holidays package to the place for which they sell packages, rather than all holiday seekers or those who have already bought packages.

Engaging with the right people, but not spamming

The key, therefore, is to engage with the right people in a non-spammy fashion. Once you find the right people, you should try to engage them depending on their social profile, or in other words, attempt to get their attention. For example, for those users who have only recently adopted Twitter or who are unfamiliar with Twitter other than tweeting, you may simply use the @ symbol, paired with their username, to respond to them.

In the case of more experienced users, more opportunities exist to engage them, as these users check their @ connection tabs more often, alongside other Twitter activities. You could therefore favourite their tweet, follow them, add them to a public list, retweet them or accompany a retweet with a quote. Don’t forget, either, the great power of geo indexing, which allows you to determine where tweets are sent from – a technology that only becomes even more powerful when automated.

In Tweepforce, for example, an advanced location identifier option allows you to detect location within tweet text, tweet geo location or user’s location. By adopting these methods, your business will attract attention, but not at the cost of appearing to be a spammer. However, you will also need to make sure that the profile or tweet is very precise after you have performed any of the aforementioned actions, so that the target customer only needs to take one quick look to ascertain what exactly you do, and how you can cater to their interests.

Introduce an automation element to lead generation

However, it also makes sense to introduce an automation element to your lead generation from Twitter CRM. After all, with 1bn tweets being made every two days, you don’t have any hope of manually tracking enough of them. What you can do, however, is use certain social CRM tools in order to fully or semi automate this process. Tools exist that can filter keywords based on such parameters as social keywords, social influence, locations and sentiments, in addition to setting appropriate actions against each tweet found in this process. For instance, if someone is looking for a holiday package to Greece, you could automatically send them a tweet with a link to a page on your website for a Greek holiday package, possibly with a discount code included. For automation, you could use Hootsuite search, the Buffer app or the Tweepforce lead generation tool. Indeed, there is a very advanced search option in Tweepforce that enables you to filter tweets based on location, sentiments, social profile and keywords. On the basis of the subsequent sentiment analysis, businesses can set an appropriate response, ensuring the high conversion statistics that only precise action can bring.

Twitter: the economical and very high conversion lead generation tool

Twitter is open to all of the means by which a business can filter the right tweets or people to find leads, and with the use of some smart technology such as engaging people with a response to their tweets, endorsing or appreciating their thoughts, those leads can also be converted into business. Such personal and precise ways of engaging with target customers ensures a very high conversion rate, and guess what? This particular lead generation process is also far cheaper than running Pay-Per-Click or social ads. By making use of Hootsuite search, Buffer app or Tweepforce for the automation of lead generation, you can achieve so many more conversions and generate more revenue from your social CRM campaign.