Today I shift to the social media Twitter and how you can get more business leads using Twitter.  Brian Carroll, the sales expert has a wonderful blog entry that addresses this point with may links to additional resources.  Enjoy.

Can a social media like Twitter boost your lead generation results?

by Brian Carroll on 02/26/2009 00:53   342 views
Categories: Twitter, Lead Generation, Sales
Tags: microblogging http://www.thecustomercollective.com/TCC/30574

I came across a blog this weekend that reinforced my thoughts. This post, written by Christian Fea, CEO of Synertegic, Inc., started off with a this statistic that he found on compete.com: Twitter had around 3 million people visiting the site in 2008, and it grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

Ok, so how do we harness all of social media’s potential and use it to build a lead generation system?

Well, I’ve started to use my Twitter account a lot more, and I’ve found some productive uses for the application:

• Sent mini survey question and got answers quickly
• Promoted new blog posts and upcoming webinars
• Shared articles, resources, and blog posts that I found interesting
• Learned what topics my network finds interesting faster
• Discovered some useful blog posts and resources by using tweetscan

There are lots of great resources out there if you want to learn more about how to use Twitter to generate leads, and I’ve include links to several of them at the end of this posting.

But, first, let me give you a summary of Christian’s blog. He offers six effective ways to use Twitter as a lead generation tool:

1. Target your market to follow the right people. Christian says to ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Even if you’re in a broad spectrum market you’ve got to narrow down your focus to an industry, niche, or demographic.

2. Offer actionable advice. This is where being relevant sets you up us as an authoritative resource. Focus your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares or problems that your target audience may have. Anything that will help your audience do their jobs better, easier, or more efficiently will hit home with them.

3. Use your 140 character wisely. Just because you have 1,000 followers doesn’t mean they are all going to read your tweets. Your tweets – which you are forced to keep at 140 characters - are in effect your headline and become the reason someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet. Use defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet.

4. Your offer and call to action. Obviously, you can’t provide a solution in 140 characters. Christian suggests providing a link back to your blog before directing them from Twitter to another site.

5. Frequency of your tweets. If you’re serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, Christian suggests that you tweet a minimum of three times a day. His reasoning is that your target audience is online at different times of the day, so a tweet in the morning, midday and at night raises your chances of getting to more people.

6. Tracking your results. Christian says a good way to track tweet subjects is to name your blog post the same as what you use for your tweet post. He uses Google Analytics to track website traffic by copying and pasting Javascript code into the blog page header and then every page on his site is tracked.

Additional Resources:

Don’t have a Twitter account?
This site also offers help in getting started: “Using Twitter…‘The Smart Way’” by Mark Ramskill on TwitTip.

Looking for more Twitter followers?
Read this post by Guy Kawasaki: Guy offers some great tips for using Twitter including Twitter etiquette and how to write headlines. He also addresses the importance of links, and tells you the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible.

Need help organizing the world of microblogging?
TweetScan will give you daily or weekly email alerts on topics or people.

Have questions? Just give me a tweet! http://www.twitter.com/brianjcarroll

Your comments are always welcomed…

Here’s a brief blog post by Mari Smith–Queen of Face Book on ways to use Face Book more effectively for your business.  Enjoy.

Ten Ideas To Create Buzz With Your Page By Mari Smith—Queen of Face Book

1. 1. Get a new domain.

Create a shortened redirect URL or buy a domain (e.g. janedoefanclub.com) and forward it to your Facebook Page URL. Mine is marismith.com/fanpage (also /funpage & /fanclub).

1. 1. Use Twitter.

Tweet about your Page URL regularly. [Related posts: How To Increase Interaction With Your Facebook and Twitter Network | Twitter Buzz! Quick Tips for Business Peeps]

1. 1. Create exclusive content.

Add content to your Page for your Fans that they cannot get anywhere else, e.g. videos, tips, special gifts.

1. 1. Hold drawings.

Run a weekly prize drawing where you draw a Fan’s name at random for a prize.

1. 1. Play hide ‘n’ seek.

“Hide” something on your Page and get your Fans to find it. Have them tweet their answer to you! The first x get a prize.

1. 1. Run contests.

Create a photo and/or video contest. Have your Fans upload their photos/videos to your Fan Page.

1. 1. Provide a place for interaction.

Start a thread on your Discussion Board that allows your fans to promote and/or network with one another. e.g. See my thread: What’s your Twitter username? Share here and we’ll all follow!

1. 1. Acknowledge fans.

When new Fans write on your Page Wall, respond by writing back on their wall.

1. 1. Invite via siggy files.

Call your Fan Page a Fan Club and include an invitation to join your Club on your email signature file.

1. 1. Buy Social Ads.

Promote your Page with Social Ads. Every time someone becomes your Fan their name and photo may appear alongside your ad.

http://whyfacebook.com/2008/09/25/how-to-create-and-promote-your-facebook-fan-page/

Using Face Book More Effectively

A business associate asked me to suggest ways she could use Face Book to help her home based photography business. Over the next two blog entries, let me share with you our conversation. It will give you ideas about your use of this social media.

I told Nicole that before we start with the details of Face Book and Fan pages, there were four questions that she needed to answer.

First, “What did she hope to accomplish by using Face Book for her business?”

Nicole had a number of different goals:

• To use Face Book to create a broader awareness for her business.
• To build up a list of loyal friends and followers—starting with her existing customers and friends.
• To generate more business referrals from this list.
• I also reminded Nicole that Face Book could be used as a means to build up her status as an expert photographer of babies and children.

Second, “What benefits did she offer people for being on her Friends list?”

This was a tougher question. After a lot of fluff, Nicole determined that she was in the business of creating memories for parents. Pictures of the children are important parts of family memories. Creating life-time memories was the core benefit of her business.

Third, “What did Nicole’s bring to the table that was different or better than her competition? What was unique or special about her business?”

These answers were easy for Nicole. “I provide a ‘mother’s eye’ to my baby photos.” As a mother she knows how to capture the right moments for her photos. Her goal is to foster long term, ongoing personal relationships with her clients. She sees this as being different from other photographers.

Finally, “How does she do business differently from other family photographers?”

She does her work in her home which is more relaxing for both mother and child than the typical studio settings. This makes everyone more comfortable and produced more natural and higher quality pictures. She has ten different shot backdrops, each one unique. She is very different from the “baby factory photo shoots” you find in today’s strip malls.

Now that we had these four questions answered, we had the materials and the outline of a strategy Nicole could use to start looking at Face Book applications for her business.

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Using Facebook for Business Networking
By Kevin Gault

By now you’ve heard about Facebook, the ultra-popular social networking site that boasts 150 million members.  But did you know it’s also a very powerful business networking site?

You can connect with legions of people in any industry organized by city, workplace, school and region. Facebook users create their own profiles that feature photos and personal background, they exchange public or private messages and they join groups that share their interests.  Using the site to spread the word about your business can pay off.

According to a recent study by Aberdeen Group, top companies are using social-networking sites like Facebook to achieve improved interaction with customers. The study revealed that companies that use social-networking websites are 17 times more likely to improve customer satisfaction than companies that don’t use the sites.

Facebook expert Mari Smith, known as “The Pied Piper of Facebook,” teaches courses on using the service for profit. “When you implement the strategies that I teach for Facebook, people in your industry, your peers, your clients and the media start beating a path to your door,” says Mari, a relationship-marketing specialist and social-media business coach based in San Diego. “It’s easy to create that presence and strong visibility on

Facebook and to get in front of the right people. It’s what I call ‘radical strategic visibility’—you’re seen in all the right places by all the right people at exactly the right time.”

Create a Strategy

Mari says there’s an essential rule of thumb when using Facebook: “The number-one reason that people flounder in social networking is that they don’t have a strategy. Some Facebook users add anyone and everyone as their friend on the site and they quickly get overwhelmed. To build a strong network, it’s essential that you carefully choose key influencers in your industry and choose your activities strategically.”

According to Mari, a powerful weapon in Facebook is Newsfeed. Using this tool, you can appear in the “feed” of information that reaches your friends in the network by posting photos, videos and comments, and importing your blog posts. This creates a fast-spreading “viral” networking effect and effectively builds your brand.

Buying ads on Facebook is another potent way to spread the word about your business. Facebook ads appear in the margins of other users’ profile pages. The ads work like Google Adwords and they can convey a precisely targeted message. “People click on these ads when they’re on their own profile page and the ads are tremendously effective for raising brand awareness,” says Mari.

If you’ve got a big event coming up that will jumpstart your business, Facebook spreads the word about it lightning-fast. “When someone RSVPs for your event, that person’s friends can see that they responded and the friends become interested in your event too,” explains Mari. “I call that ‘viral visibility.’ There’s also ‘active RSVPing,’ which means when you send your RSVP message, you upload photos and videos, and post links as well. That information accompanying your RSVP creates a viral effect and tells many people who you are and what you do.”

Fan Pages
Want to keep your personal and business contacts separate on Facebook?  You can only have one account in your name, but you can have an unlimited amount of “pages” on Facebook for your business or group.

For example, Michael Stelzner keeps his Facebook contacts limited to close friends and has set up a fan page for everyone else.  See how he set his up here: http://tinyurl.com/98zyue

Mari details how to set up a fan page here: http://whyfacebook.com/2008/09/25/how-to-create-and-promote-your-facebook-fan-page/

No Hard Sell
Before you polish your sales pitch and log into Facebook, take a tip from Mari: “There’s a saying about social networks: ‘When the marketers move in, the members move out.’ The secret is to be a member, not a marketer. For example, putting up too many links to your company’s website can turn people off. That’s ‘push’ marketing. What you want to do is relationship marketing. Talk about what you do, but talk about it in a social, friendly way, not in language that sounds like a sales pitch.”

http://www.whitepapersource.com/marketing/facebook-for-business/

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 2:47 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Here are some free resources to get you started on the more popular social media types:

Free Resources to help you get started in social media networking.

1. http://blog.1429design.com/fort-worth-marketing-social-media-marketing-duct-tape-marketing-twitter-for-business/2008/12/ John Jantech’s free e-book on Social Media for your business.

2. http://www.betterbizblogging.com/ Blog Squad Get Your Free Copy of the Better Business Blogging Report.

3. http://internetducttape.com/2007/03/08/how-to-use-facebook-without-losing-your-job-over-it/ How to use Facebook without Losing Your Job over it

4. http://www.traffic-generation-explosion.com/twittercall.html Free downloads on Twitter:

Jump Start On Twitter: “This Step by Step Guide Is Perfect For The Twitter Beginner”
Accelerate On Twitter: “This Guide Reveals How To Generate An Instant Stream of Followers, Traffic, Leads And Sales For Your Online Business”

5. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn Guy Kawasaki.

Conclusions

Can social networking benefit your business? Absolutely. Today more than ever, it is important for small businesses to get exposure to large groups of people that are good fits for their business—groups not bound by space and time. These exposure goes beyond what you can achieve with a website.  Social networking can and will give you a different exposure.   With social networking, you are totally in control of what you say and who you connect with.

One example: you can get six times the response rate from a Tweet sent over an email sent? Why. With an email you must first get the email through the spam checkers; then the person must decide if they want to click on your email from their dozens in their email box; and then the person must decide to click on the link in your email to go to the information you are sending.

With a Tweet, it arrives immediate at your twitter site with no spam filters; it is already opened for you to read so no click is necessary; all you have to do is decide if you want to click on the link that is in the Tweet. One decision verses three decisions involved in emails. What would do you think is going to win?

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Al

What Not to Say or Do on Social Medias

Here are some things you don’t want to do on social media programs:

Privacy—while there are ways to keep your messages private, you should think of social media as a public forum where others will see what you write.

Don’t write anything you would not tell your grandmother.

People don’t really care about your love life, so don’t write about this.

Be careful about profiling any financial or personal data about you that others could use to steal your identity.

Don’t be saying negative things about your clients or customers or other people.

Don’t share any jokes that would make you blush.

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Al

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Additional Tips for Growing Your Friends and Followers

Here are some additional tips for growing your connections on Web.2.0 programs:

1. Create an agenda for your business about what connections you want and for what purposes.

2. Tap into people who have already bought from you and invite them to participate in your social networking programs.

3. Always have a bigger cause about you and your business. People love to be part of a bigger cause—something they can become passionate about. Find those people who share your cause and want to make changes.

4. Start messaging with experts in your program niches. There are no gate keepers to stop you like in the physical world of business! These experts have wide followings of people. Join up with them and begin tapping into their group of followers and friends. You can link back to those who first started following the experts to find even better people to follow.

5. Ask people on your social network to help you increase your followers or friends. I know of one person who had 150 followers and wanted 200 by a certain date. He asked his existing followers for their help. And they got others to follow him.

6. Get endorsements, recommendations or testimonials from others. Share these with your friends and followers. This will help increase the number of people in your connections.

7. Declare yourself an authority on a given issue and demonstrate your expertise.

8. Add as many followers as possible. Followers and friend are much like numbers. Statistics show that for every three people you ask, one will join your group or conversation. If you asked 300, you would get 100 new followers or friends.

Remember people are always watching what you say and with whom you are connecting. You are constantly being judged. Use this to your business advantage.

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Al

Who Do I Connect With on Social Networking Programs?

One of biggest weaknesses of small business owners is to market their business to everyone. If you sell cars, you may say your market is “everyone who drives a car”. With social marketing, the weakness of marketing to “anyone or everyone” becomes an even more glaring.

Social marketing has three distinct advantages over traditional network practices when marketing your business.

First, social networking is more precise and more targeted than traditional business networking. With traditional business groups you have no control over who joins the group or what value they may have to your business. Business networking groups have an agenda of getting as many businesses to participate as possible. Their existence depends on constantly bringing in a wide variety of new business owners.

You can join traditional business groups that are more likely candidates for your business. For example, if you are a decorator, it would be better to join woman’s groups rather than diverse business groups. But even here, there is hit or miss.

Participating in social networking programs allows you to pick and choose who you want to associate with on the network. Others may wish to follow you or be a friend but you do not have to follow them or befriend them. By having in place a “branding policy’ you can determine who you want to associate with on a social networking program. And if you want to make a change, you can easily do this.

Second, internet social networking is no longer limits connections to people in your own physical area or meeting with people on the phone. You can learn about other people and they can learn about you from bio’s, profiles and from the types of messages you send back and forth. Space and time are no longer limitations.

Third, over the past five years businesses have made a shift from product selling to customer selling. This has never been more evident than with social networking. People buy from people they know and like and trust. Social networking activities allow you to disclose things about yourself as well as learn things about the customer that are not found in normal business to customer relationships. This exchange allows you to predispose customers to your business.

Not only are you allowed, you are expected to share details about yourself and what you are doing. “What are you doing now?” is a common input area on most social networking programs. Indicating your current activity is how people come to know you and trust you. They want to see you are another human being just like themselves.  It is no longer a sales person to customer relationship.  This level of detail is very much a part of social networking.

Who you connect with in social networking is directly related to the goals or agenda you have created for your business. If you are looking for joint ventures or affiliates from the program, you will want to select certain types of people to be followers and to be following. If you are looking for more exposure for you and your business, you need to determine what type of people are the best fit for the exposure you want.

Use your agenda to determine what programs are best suited for your business.   Use your agenda to determine what type of people within those programs are best suited to your purposes. Do not overlook this focusing step otherwise you will get lost in social networking activities and end up doing activities without any purpose.  You can waste hours of time.

To be continued, your comments are welcome…

Al

Social Networking Bio/Profile Branding Tip

Here’s a tip for making a stronger bio or profile on your social networking programs. Did you know that 67% of the people follow another person or join their networking group because of the bio or profile listed?

Your personal brand is important on social networking programs. Why, because unlike other commercial exchanges, your personality, your human to human contact, what people like and dislike about you is what sells on social networking. You are far more important than your product.

Take the time to write up a personal brand profile of yourself. This written exercise may take 1-2 hours and will touch points of your personality you forgot existed. By creating this longer version of “you”, new ideas and concepts will be uncovered that can be included in your shorter bio or profile forms on social networking programs. You turn boring into exciting. Here are the questions you want to answer in your personal brand review:

• Write a description of your perfect day
• Where would you live?
• What is one thing that stands out in your life?
• What emotion captures you best?
• What is your naughty nick name–take yourself to the edge?
• What sacred cows do you like to tip over?
• What color or logos express you?
• What is your biggest cause?
• What’s your rags to riches story?
• What special language do you use?
• What special techniques are you?
• How do you live the life your prospects dream about?

If you take the time to answers these questions about your life, you uncover a richer and more exciting description of “you” that can now be incorporated into your shorter social networking bio or profile. When people read this more exciting you, they will want to follow you or be your fan.

To be continued, your comments are welcomed…

Al