Twitter is an invaluable component of an effective digital marketing strategy. If you are a B2B company, Twitter provides tremendous opportunity to identify prospects in real-time and to engage with them.
Twitter by the Numbers
A little over one month ago in March, 2012, Twitter announced that there are more than 140 million active users and more than 340 million tweets per day. With such staggering real-time data there is, obviously, a lot of clutter and noise that needs to be cut through to effectively identify potential prospects. Few would argue that Twitter is ripe with people who tweet out questions, opinions, frustrations and real-time sentiments, some of which may – or may not – be relevant to your business. However, browsing thru 340 million tweets per day isn’t probably the best use of your time to identify leads and potential customers.
Advanced Search
Twitter Advanced Search, however, lets you quickly and effectively cut through the clutter and noise. With the advanced search function you can run a search for keywords by geographical location. For example, if a Heating
& Cooling Company services the metro Detroit, Michigan, area they could run (and save) an advanced search query that searches for the keyword phrase “broken air conditioner” and returns those Tweets that are within a 50 mile radius of their place of business, in Troy, MI.
By identifying a problem (broken air conditioner) that their service solves and appropriately responding in a timely fashion, it’s very likely that the individual who tweeted the fact that their air conditioner was broken would be ecstatic that someone responded to their immediate need. Such responsiveness may even result in the acquisition of a new customer – all from creating a single Twitter advanced search query!
How can Your Business Leverage Twitter’s Advanced Search?
Now think of how your business or organization could leverage Twitter’s advanced search. How would your prospect communicate (what keywords would they use in their tweet) the problem that your product or service solves? Once you identify relevant keywords, create an advanced Twitter search (include geographic modifiers for optimal results) and save the results so that you don’t have to create the search again. You may even want to utilize Twitter’s larger set of search operators to further drill down and get results that are most relevant to your business.
Twitter has a multitude of uses for businesses – but creating an advanced search query is one of the most effective for lead generation. Happy Tweeting!
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