This is Part 2 of Twitter Tools for Business Building.
To see Part 1, go here: Social Oomph.
To see Part 3, go here: Tweet Beep, Twollo, Twellow, Twitter Tab, Revisit
The best way to implement Twitter for lead generation is to first build a reputation as a trusted source of information or being seen as a thought leader for your industry-while simultaneously building relationships, remaining personal and approachable.
Pushing out one-way marketing messages about your business isn’t going to work, people won’t listen. You must ask questions, be personal, and engage others naturally within the community.
Once you are the source of value and have earned their trust, you can then offer information about your business services and products. Your followers now trust that whatever you recommend is going to be beneficial to them. However, this type of business self-promotion should be done sparingly.
Also, a good technique is to do a series of tweets leading up to your offer or product. Intrigue them, ask them questions and peak their interest for a few days before you tweet about your service or product. (See Social Oomph post about scheduling your tweets).
Always, always remember the philosophy WIIFM (What’s In It For Me-your customer’s favorite radio station). You need to address what’s-in-it for your customer-the benefits of your products or the great discounts you’re offering, or sharing value-based content and useful general knowledge to your audience. If not, they will quickly tune you out altogether.
OK, on to some more third party Twitter tools that you will find useful.
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard. It is now making strides and becoming more popular than TweetDeck.
It allows the user to monitor keywords, manage multiple Twitter profiles, schedule tweets, and measure their success.
The nice thing with Hootsuite is that you can manage not only multiple Twitter accounts, but also multiple social accounts. The different social accounts beyond Twitter are:
- facebook pages
- ping.fm
- wordpress
- myspace
- foursquare
It also has an easy to follow custom interface with social streams, tabs and columns.
You can track your success in real-time with click-through statistics and easy report exporting.
Hootsuite has a built -in reputation management pane called Mentions. This a great place to track mentions of your brand, your industry and your keyword searches.
Currently the iPhone and Android have apps for Hootsuite, so you can manage your accounts on the go.
TwitPic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to Twitter.
If you have a Twitter account, you already have a TwitPic account automatically.
Comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet.
Twitpic URLs are already short, making it unnecessary to use URL shortening.
You upload your picture via your phone, an iPhone app, or through a Web interface — and TwitPic posts a link to the picture to your Twitter account. So when you tweet it, it shows up as a shortened URL with your message. When users click the link they will be taken to your TwitPic profile to view it.
Bit.ly is a URL shortner that can post directly to Twitter.
If you share a lot of links on Twitter, bit.ly makes it a fast process by letting you shorten the URL and post to Twitter within the same screen.
You can post to multiple Twitter accounts using one bit.ly account.
Bit.ly lets you attach a brief code to the shortened URL, which then allows you to track how many people click on the link. You can also see more detailed information about those users, such as the country where they’re located and the time of day they clicked.
If you found this information useful, please share the love on your social media sites or kindly leave a comment below.
Respectfully,
Social Media Manager
owner, Bee Social, LLC
