One of the key considerations in choosing the marketing channels for your business is improving your brand’s awareness, improving traffic to your site and most importantly, driving successful quality lead conversions and increased sales. It can, therefore, be frustrating when your chosen marketing channels don’t deliver expected results to justify the invested effort, budget and resources put into them.

Trust the Bird for Your Lead Generation

With social media, especially, the challenge lies in being able to reach the right segment within the social channel’s wide user base to establish authentic relationships with prospective customers. Twitter, with its 600-million strong user base, is no exception.

Read: How Social Media Can Generate B2B Leads

Here are 7 strategies that businesses can use to generate leads with Twitter

1. Understand the Twitter Sales Process

What many marketers sometimes fail to understand is that traditional marketing tactics won’t work on Twitter: what they think is brand promotion would be perceived as spamming or pushiness by their target audience. This is because they’re more focused on getting the word on their brand out to their audience without a care for whether their audience actually needs it or not. The means they employ for such aggressive marketing tactics can include pushing tweet after tweet onto their users’ timelines or sometimes, horrors of horrors, sending them direct messages (DMs) without having previously engaged with them. This is a huge no-no and is bound to land them in a customer’s block-list. 

Read: 10 Reasons Why Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Work

One of the key lessons to from today’s marketing process is the shift from brand-centric marketing to customer-centric marketing. Understanding this shift is the key to demystifying the Twitter sales process. A successful marketing strategy aims at positioning yourself to your customer only when they need you; that is, only when they’re ready to come to you. So, if your Twitter marketing efforts are not aligned with your customer’s needs, you’re bound to come off looking as pushy or intrusive.

So, how do you identify a prospective lead on Twitter and assess their readiness to engage? LeadSift has a handy flow-chart on how to do just that. But, in summary, it’s about assessing their profile and activity carefully:

• Their follower count: A higher follower count can indicate high engagement rates on the platform.
• Their tweet content: Some key indicators to look for: Are they voicing frustrations about a specific problem? Are those problems something your service/brand can address? Did they specifically mention your official Twitter account in their tweet?

Also understand that Twitter (or any social platform, for that matter) is a two-way street. If your customer is looking for answers, it means they expect you to engage with them. So, that’s your cue to jump right on it.

Bottom-line: It takes time and careful monitoring to successfully leverage Twitter’s potential as a sales generator. Don’t push it.

2. Focus and Develop Buyer Personas on Twitter

As we’ve said previously, buyer personas are a composite, real-world picture of your customer. They can help you understand your customers better: who they are, what they do, how they think, how they seek out solutions for their problems, and where they look for said solutions. This, in turn, can help a business develop more intuitive and effective marketing tactics around intelligently segmented audiences. However, to create buyer personas, marketers need a reference point: cold, hard data that can give them the necessary insights into their customers’ behaviors.

Twitter’s Analytics for Business is a great starting point to begin building your buyer personas around their Twitter activity. There’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from Twitter’s Analytics platform. By navigating to the Audiences tab on your Twitter Analytics platform, you can gain a clear-cut picture of your key demographics including gender, interest breakdown of all your followers, age, language, country and regions.

A deep-dive into each of these demographics can help you develop multiple buyer personas around the specifics revealed by those demographics; for instance, the “interests” breakdown – found under the Lifestyle tab – can show you what your followers are primarily interested in. You can then use that information to build buyer personas around those interests. So, for instance, if the primary interest segment is “health and fitness”, and a secondary segment is, say, “music”, then boom! You can craft a message or tweet that appeals to the audience lies in the overlap between those two segments: those who love fitness and music!

3. Keywords and Hashtags

An effective way to establish a target audience in Twitter is by actively looking for and engaging with users who are talking topics that are pertinent to your business. And, Twitter gives you an easy way to sniff these users out: with its handy keyword search and hashtag system. To start off, though, make a list of keywords and phrases that are relevant to your business; then use Twitter’s Search Function to search for users talking about those things. The advanced search option, which uses filters and exclusions, can narrow your results down even further to be able to hone in on those prospective leads. Here’s an article on how you can use Twitter’s advanced search function to refine your audience search.

Once you’ve gleaned a number of prospective leads from your searches, you can start engaging with them, addressing any issues they have directly mentioned or inviting them to come to your profile or website for more information.Your search results can also help you identify top influencers in your audience, going by the number of followers they have, their tweet frequency, and the volume of shares and retweets they receive for your keywords. Influencers, by way of their clout, play a big role in drawing potential leads to your business.

4. Using Landing Pages to Drive Leads To Your Sales Funnel

When it comes to Twitter, one way to build an audience is by tweeting meaningful content: content that resonates with your followers. Twitter landing pages are the pages designed specifically to cater to the traffic coming from your Twitter profile; in short, it is the page your customer will land on when they click on the link in your tweet or profile. Twitter landing pages are an effective way to get your followers to the edge of your sales funnel. So, what makes a good Twitter landing page? Here are some pointers:

• To create an effective landing page strategy, ensure that the link in your tweet or profile links directly to the landing page. Don’t make your followers jump hoops to reach the page.
• Include just one call-to-action on the landing page.
• Brevity is the soul of Twitter, so keep your landing page short and concise, as well.
• With mobile traffic now far outpacing desktop traffic in most business niches, ensure that your landing page is mobile friendly, or you could lose out on a chunk of potential lead conversions.

And most importantly, track the number of contacts/conversions you get from the page, and start A/B testing various elements of your page till you get a page that affects the maximum number of conversions.

5. Integrate Calls to Action In Your Profile

You can effectively use your Twitter profile and your tweets to draw leads to your website by integrating calls to actions in them. You can integrate CTAs in each of the following aspects of your Twitter profile:

• Your Twitter Bio
• Your Twitter Header/Background Image
• Pinned Tweets (a tweet, akin to a sticky post, that you can pin to the top of your Twitter timeline)

When it comes to integrating CTAs in your Twitter profile, ensure that all the CTAs link to the same landing page or offer in your site. Don’t use multiple CTAs for different pages at one time.

As for your tweets, depending on where your users are in the buyer’s journey, there are a number of effective ways you can use CTAs to edge them further down the sales funnel:

• CTAs based on Retweets or Likes for those in the Awareness stage since it requires minimal effort on their part – a mere click to share your tweet.
• CTAs to Download e-books/whitepapers/case-studies for those in the Consideration stage
• CTAs to offer Free Trials of your product/service for those that are close to making a decision to purchase your product, i.e. the Decision stage.

6. Lead Generation Cards

Lead Generation Cards are a part of Twitter’s ad platform, which allows businesses to increase their potential leads from Twitter. With a Lead Generation Card, when a user expands a tweet, they can decide whether they want to send you their information. If they do, Twitter automatically sends you their name, Twitter handle and their e-mail address. Businesses can then use a CRM to populate those contacts in their database for further marketing efforts like e-mail newsletters and special offers.

Now, while this sounds easy enough, creating an effective Lead Generation Card does require a certain amount of consideration, especially when it comes to drafting the text for your offer, description, CTA and privacy policy. You’ll also need to ensure that the image used on the Card is compelling enough to induce your followers to take action.

7. Social Monitoring Using HubSpot

You can use HubSpot’s Social Monitoring Tool to track and monitor your leads’ behavior on your various social media channels. With this tool, you can find out what your leads are saying about your industry, engage and nurture leads based on what they’re saying on those channel, and be notified when your leads mention your company in their social media posts. When it comes to Twitter, this tool lets you create Twitter Streams which are specialized searches that Hubspot creates to monitor Twitter conversations pertinent to your business such as: 

• Specific Product/Service enquiries
• Product reviews or reactions
• Conversations about topics that interest or pertain to your industry/niche
• Complaints/issues about your product/service

You can create multiple streams, each aimed at monitoring leads at different stages of the funnel. When it comes to generating leads, your marketing team needs to be on the lookout for prospective users who might be interested in your brand or service. To that end, your marketing team can create individual streams that:

• Monitor activity by thought leaders and top influencers in your niche when they mention certain keywords or terms
• Monitor conversations among Twitter users around words/topics pertinent to your brand
• Monitor competitor activity and engagements to identify potential lead pools

Conclusion

Twitter, like most social platforms, can be a truly powerful means to grow your brand. However, before you can even to begin to expect dividends from your Twitter campaigns, you need to amass a considerable follower base, and the only way to do that is to actively engage with the Twitter community. Start conversations, join discussions, and provide information and value to those who engage with you.

Once you’ve grown your Twitter base and generated enough awareness for your brand in the Twitter-sphere, you can start cranking up the marketing efforts to generate leads through your “tweeps”!