LinkedIn may be the leader when it comes to finding and connecting with B2B sales leads, but Twitter still has more to offer than many salespeople realize. When used correctly, it can be an effective prospecting tool all its own. Here’s how you can leverage this social network to find, research, and connect with online retailer leads.
Finding Qualified Prospects
The best way to find prospects is to identify and search for what they might be talking about. Once you find their conversations, you can find them. Begin by searching Twitter for industry terms, hashtags, product names, competitors, and even competitor product names. For best results, uses words and phrases your leads are most likely to use (avoid internal sales lingo) and take advantage of Twitter’s advanced search options to narrow your scope.
Other tools like SocialMention can also help you identify who is saying what around a particular topic.
Once you find relevant conversations and identify the prospects contributing to those conversations, the next step is researching those prospects.
Researching Qualified Prospects
Start with what’s in their bio and then carefully analyze their feed, paying attention to whom they are interacting with, what types of articles they’re sharing, what authors they tend to read, and especially what they’re retweeting.
All these little pieces fit into a big picture that can help you better understand what their problems might be and what solutions they might be looking for. What a lead shares typically reflects the knowledge he’s interested in and/or the problems he needs to be solved. You can find out a lot about a person just by seeing what he or she is talking about online.
Connecting With Qualified Prospects
Once you know where the conversations are and why your lead is involved in them, the next logical step is to start participating in them so your lead becomes familiar with you and/or your brand.
The best way to do this?
Retweet your lead's content, respond to his questions and comments with professional insight, share other content using hashtags you know he’s searching for, and most importantly, start creating awesome new content that’s even better than the stuff your lead has already tweeted out. Publish a new post, and then give your lead a shoutout like this:
Hey @OnlineLead, considering your industry, you might find this article helpful! [link]
Once you’re able to open up a dialogue online, you can then focus on taking the conversation offline.
If you’re already on Twitter, why not start using it to its fullest potential?
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