If you use it right, Twitter can be a massive lead generation tool for your business. The problem is, many don’t take the time to learn how to use Twitter effectively.
They open an account, put out some tweets, and then wonder why there aren’t thousands of people flooding to their account to follow them and buy their product or service.
Luckily, I’m going to share with you a top strategy that I have used to help my clients turn their Twitter account into a highly effective lead generation tool.
1) Create a Profile That Generates Leads
Enhance your profile by filling out completely to make sure it best represents your brand and helps you generate leads. To make sure your profile is looking its best and ready to impress your prospects follow these steps:
- Your profile photograph should be crisp and clear.
- Your header photo should be on brand and not just a random photo you like.
- Utilize all 160 characters in your profile description. Really grab people’s attention here by mentioning your accomplishments, awards, and media appearances.
- Make sure there is link to your website or blog.
In the example below, you can see that my friend Matt Sweetwood has all four elements in his profile. I really like how he has his book branded in both his header photo and then again with his pinned tweet. His bio talks about the brands he works with, his roles of CEO, and a media byline with Entrepreneur Magazine.
2) Use The Follow First Method to Grow Your Account
The truth is that it takes time and effort to learn how to use Twitter for lead generation and sales. Getting followers is no easy task, and converting followers into customers is even more challenging.
It’s not enough to just get followers on Twitter. To get sales, you need to have followers who are interested in what your company is offering.
There may be no better tool to use to directly engage your competitors’ customers than Twitter. Just go to each of your competitors’ Twitter pages and click on their followers. Doing so will reveal every account that is following your competitors.
What a leads list!
While not every account that is following your competitors is doing business with them, they all have indicated an interest. That means they are likely to be interested in knowing what your company has to offer as well.
a) Follow your competitors’ followers
Once you’re on their page and looking through their list of followers, begin to follow the accounts that look like they would be interested in your company.
Also look to see who is engaging with your competitors’ tweets by liking and retweeting them. Consider following these accounts as well. Engaging with your competitors’ tweets shows that they are active accounts with a strong interest in the subject matter that you are likely to be tweeting about as well.
When you follow someone on Twitter, they receive a notification that you have followed them. The reaction of most people is to then go to your account to see if you are worth following back.
b) Unfollow those who don’t follow back
After following, give people 3-5 days to follow you back. If they don’t follow back, either their account is not active, or they’re not interested in you. Either way, go ahead and unfollow the people that don’t follow you back.
This will free up space in your network for you to be able to continue to follow your prospects on Twitter.
If you pursue this strategy, over time you will grow a highly targeted following full of potential customers.
Related Post: How to get rid of bots and fake followers
c) Pin a tweet to your profile with your top piece of content
My top piece of content is still the interview I did with Mark Cuban for Inc. Magazine.
Following your competitors’ followers will have a significant portion of them heading to your profile.
So make sure your profile is looking good and is ready to impress. Pin a tweet to your profile with your best offer and include a link to a landing page where people can make a purchase or sign up.
To pin a tweet, create a tweet with your offer, call to action, and link. Then, once the tweet is live, click on the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the tweet and choose “pin to your profile page.” Doing this will place the tweet at the top of your profile page, so it is the first tweet people see when visiting your page.
d) Engage with your followers
To raise your engagement on Twitter whether you’re an individual or major brand, try talking to your followers. You should start by saying thank you to the people that tweet your links, like your tweets, or retweet you. Then, see where the conversation leads.
You can take a step further by going to their profile and retweeting their pinned tweet. When someone pins a tweet to the top of their Twitter profile, it is usually their top piece of content at the moment. So above all their other tweets, that’s the one they most want you to retweet.
Also, make sure to always follow the people who engage on your tweets whom you’re not already following. Doing so will more than likely get them to follow back, and you will have gained a new follower who has already demonstrated an interest in your content.
Start conversations with your followers by engaging with them one on one. I recommend taking a peak at their profile first so that you can mention something about their business or something you have in common.
3) Tweet Great Content
I encourage entrepreneurs to tweet original content as much as possible. If you are tweeting out content from other brands, while it might show you have a good reading list you are promoting someone’s else’s brand and sending traffic to their site.
a) Develop a content calendar for your tweets
Use Twitter to drive traffic to your website, webinars, book, landing page, blog posts, e-commerce page, gifs, and videos. Integrate your content calendar with your tweets. Research from Content Marketing Institute’s most recent research shows that brands who have a content calendar and strategy are almost 50% more successful with their content than those that don’t.
b) Tweet your top content more than once
Don’t be afraid to tweet the same piece of content more than once. Make sure to tweet other content in between so your page doesn’t look like you’re tweeting the same thing over and over. But the Twitter fast and someone who logs in at night may not see your tweet from the morning. So, try tweeting out your top content on different days and times to get the most traction from your content.
c) Use a scheduler to push out tweets on different days and times
You can use a scheduler to help save time. I really like Buffer’s Power Scheduler to schedule out a tweet to go out multiple times on different days.
For evergreen content that stays relevant, consider using Social Jukebox to schedule out tweets to run for an extended period. Social Jukebox allows you to easily add content to a “jukebox” and then continue to tweet it out as often and for as long as you tell it to.
d) Memes are very popular
My personal experience is that Twitter users still love a great quote. Memes that have emotional appeal perform very well on the platform. Check this one out from one of my friend, Amy Blashka. According to Twitter’s data, tweets with images are 150% more likely to get Retweets than text-only Tweets.
Here's your reminder to always find the highest and best use of your talents. 🎗️❤️🙌#inspirational #personaldevelopment #career #professionaldevelopment #goals
Find more passages from the book @BruceKasanoff and I co-authored, "I Am," here: https://t.co/PvqyyY0rBp pic.twitter.com/H2iktX523S
— Amy Blaschka (@amyblaschka) December 5, 2018
e) Video is the top content
According to Twitter’s latest data, video tweets are retweeted six times more often than tweets with photos, and three times more likely to be retweeted than tweets with GIFs.
Below is a video I created using Animoto that I tweeted to promote a recent blog post I did. Notice the call to action in the tweet to drive users to my website.
Getting PR is the best growth hack ever for entrepreneurs. In today's market it's not what you say about your brand, it's what other reputable people are saying about your brand. Check out the video and read the full post here: https://t.co/nC6Erso36o pic.twitter.com/saXD2Unzbb
— John White (@juanblanco76) December 5, 2018
4) Use Hashtag Intelligence
If you’re even a casual user of social media, you have noticed people using hashtags. Hashtags turn keywords within a post into a clickable link that displays content grouped together, making it easier for users to find more of what they are looking for.
Although hashtags originated on Twitter, their use has grown across social media. Hashtags are now a form of social media culture and a popular form of communication.
Understanding how to use them strategically can make a huge difference in your company’s penetration levels on social media.
Using hashtags effectively can accelerate your company’s growth, increase brand awareness, help connect you with influencers and prospects, and improve the overall effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
a) Relevant hashtags drive engagement
Using hashtags in your posts makes you more discoverable by appearing in searches. In fact, tweets that contain hashtags receive twice as much engagement with those without.
Think of hashtags as keywords. Before tweeting a post, do some research on the most popular and relevant hashtags for the particular topic you’re writing on. I use a free tool called The Hashtags Encyclopedia by Hashtagify. Just type in the subject of your blog and it will give you the leading hashtags. Using the right hashtags helps you get your post get in front of your target audience.
To really stand out, consider creating a hashtag that is specific to your business! Then when users click on it, they can easily find a curated list of tweets where they can learn more about your company and its solutions.
b) Use hashtags like a leads list
Clicking on industry relevant hashtags reveals a leads list for your business.
These lists will show influencers and prospects for your company who are relevant to your brand and the most active users within your industry. You want these people following you. Start by following them. Many of them will follow you back.
There is simply no better method that I have found to grow a targeted following for your business.
c) Market your events
Hashtags can boost your marketing efforts for events. Using a hashtag for an event consolidates tweets in a stream where interested parties can click to learn more about the event from your marketing department as well as participants.
Keep event hashtags simple and easy to remember.
Go to hashtags used by competitors at their past events to reveal a list of people that may be interested in attending your event. Then reach out to them about your event.
As you can see, there’s far more to hashtags than just using trying to look cool. There’s real marketing strategy involved that when done right will help generate leads, grow a targeted following, and efficiently get the word out about your business.
5) Measuring your success with Twitter’s free analytics
One of the most common questions I get from people that are seeking to grow their brand using Twitter is how to measure their success. Many aren’t sure which metrics they should measure or even how to find the data in the first place.
They’re usually relieved when I show them just how easy it is to find rich data on Twitter that they can use to measure the effectiveness of their tweets and improve their marketing campaigns.
Twitter’s free analytics platform is one of my favorite features of the platform, and something that I believe sets them apart from other social media platforms.
To find Twitter’s analytics page, simply click on your small profile picture in the top-right corner of your Twitter profile. Then from the drop-down list choose the Analytics tab.
It’s that easy!
Once there, you will find all sorts of interesting data that you can use to see how your community is responding to your tweets. However, all that data can be a bit overwhelming at first. So, please allow me to attempt to simplify this for you.
Here are the five metrics that data-savvy marketers use to measure their effectiveness on Twitter and a quick tip for boosting your numbers in each of them!
a) Impressions
Impressions are the number of times people view your tweet. When this number is high, it seems that the other metrics follow the trend upward.
Using strategic hashtags that are relevant to your content will help distribute your tweet to a wider audience beyond your followers, which will boost your impressions.
Screenshot within Twitter’s analytics tool and a look at my daily number of impressions over the past 28 days.
b) Retweets
Measuring retweets shows whether or not your tweets are being shared by your audience. When someone retweets, it exposes your tweet to their followers. Retweeting is one of the primary ways content goes viral on Twitter.
To boost your own retweets, consider retweeting your followers more often. They will take notice and begin to reciprocate by retweeting you more often as well. Also, make sure to send over a quick thank you tweet to those that retweet you.
Doing so will delight your community and help them remember you.
c) Link clicks (this is the most important metric, BTW)
Driving traffic to your website, blog posts, or videos should be the focus of your marketing efforts on Twitter. The end goal for Twitter for a marketer is always to successfully convince someone to leave twitter and go to your website where they can make a purchase your product, buy your book, or hire you.
Measuring the number of link clicks your tweets are generating is essential in determining your effectiveness on Twitter.
To get more link clicks, consider using emojis in your tweets to cleverly call attention to your links.
d) Engagement rate
It’s helpful for marketers to monitor their engagement rate because it shows the number of engagements divided by impressions.
To drive up your engagement rate post attractive images with your tweets. If you post a link, Twitter will generate a smaller preview of the image associated with the link. Consider manually inserting an image, doing so makes the image full size, which stands out more in the feed and drives up engagement.
e) Profile visits
Twitter shows you how many people are visiting your profile. Generating profile visits means that people want to learn more about you.
So, make sure your profile is complete with compelling information when they get there. Twitter gives you one link to showcase in your profile, use it wisely!
To generate more profile visits, be interesting! Give away some free information that compels people to want to know more about you. If your tweets are boring, nobody will visit your profile.
f) Don’t forget about mobile
The great news is Twitter makes much of this data available via its mobile app. By clicking on the “View Tweet Activity” tab in the bottom left-hand corner of your tweet on your mobile, you can find real-time data on the performance of each tweet.
Ok, now that you know that you can get Twitter analytics in real time on your phone, you have no excuse not to use it.
Once you start exploring analytics on Twitter, you will be amazed at the depth of knowledge you can gain that you can use to more effectively reach your customers and get an ROI that even your CFO will be excited about.
Final Thought
We hope you’ve found this information useful!
If your company needs help generating leads on Twitter, we are here to help. Fill out the form below and we will be in touch below.
