Twitter is indeed a great social network platform for connecting with new people. The open nature of Twitter makes it easier to expand your network, build relationships, and initiate conversations.
Remember, your prospects would be contemplating on your competitors and you. Hence, you need to be alert to what they say and orient your Twitter strategy to actively partake in their conversations.
This apart, you should also use Twitter to proactively promote your brand, create leads, promote company events, and engage with your prospects in real time. Generate leads by offering white papers, instructional videos, e-books, and product samples wherever appropriate.
The one simple success formula on Twitter is – interact and engage with your audience. Constantly interact with people, promptly respond to their tweets, raise questions, and start building relationships.
Before you could think of turning prospects into customers using Twitter marketing strategies, it is necessary to first find the prospects from among the millions of users on Twitter. One of the easy ways to accomplish this is to use the Twitter search function and type your keywords. Commence your search by using keywords and topics that you expect prospective customers to be tweeting.
After doing this, you can add each of your prospects into a Twitter list. It will then be less cumbersome to organize data and also to monitor your engagement with the list.
The next obvious step is to engage in conversation with your prospects.
During this stage your efforts should be to build rapport. You are using twitter for business and they are your prospects but do not expect each one of them to respond to your messages. That does not happen.
Take your time to build relationships and before that, do your homework. Browse their last 25-60 Tweets, read their profile, check out their followers. This will give you a wealth of valuable information.
The final stage is to convert a prospect into a customer. There are three practical ways to achieve this – communicating over the phone, shooting out e-mail messages or a personal meeting or virtual meeting using Skype. Use this opportunity to get more personal and understand the prospect needs and expectations.
Using twitter to increase your conversions and sales may be your ultimate aim, but as you are dealing with a social media channel it is imperative you focus on building relationships and establishing connections. If you attempt to be far too commercial-minded, it will be really hard to achieve long-term results.
If you find a prospect has a tweet that is relevant to the product or service you are marketing, re-tweet it to your followers. This is a great way to initiate a relationship on Twitter. Most people notice when they are re-tweeted and appreciate it. Try to initiate discussion focused around the prospect’s tweet. If done imaginatively, this can be a great way to convert prospects into customers.
If the prospect is already following you on Twitter, you can send him/her a direct message. This can be a good way to engage prospects and to convert them into buyers.