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Finding customers for free on Twitter – too good to be true?

One of the most underutilised tools on Twitter is it’s search function, so I thought I’d share some tips on how you can go find your target market for free on Twitter – after a bit of work up front it’s easy!

Every tweet is logged and searchable on Twitter, so why not use this function to go and find your ideal customers (remember, as consumers, we’re lazy, we expect you as a business to come to us).

I’ll use an example of a restaurant in shropshire wanting to raise it’s profile and find customers.

1) Do a keyword analysis – what kind of words would someone put in a tweet that would make them your target market?

e.g. shropshire restaurant, shropshire dinner, shropshire lunch, shrewsbury dinner – you get the picture…

2) Set up some twitter searches using these keywords and save them (either in twitter.com or the likes of tweetdeck)

e.g. “shropshire restaurant” OR “shropshire lunch” (brings back tweets that contain both Shrpshire and restaurant OR Shropshire and lunch) or restaurant near:shropshire (brings back tweets that contain the word ‘restaurant’ from anyone tweeting near shropshire)

To set up searches:

Within twitter.com – type your search into the search box, if you like the tweets that come back click ‘save this search’ then you can access it agin within the ‘searches’ tab on the homepage.

Within search.twitter.com (twitter’s own search engine) – type in your search parameters and it will show you the results within twitter.com

Within twitter clients – each client has it’s own process – within e.g. Tweetdeck, click on ‘+’, enter your search term, click search and review what comes back.

This is the part that takes time, time to work out what searches bring back useful tweets. Don’t forget when you are searching by an exact phrase that you need to use speech marks: e.g “shropshire restaurant” will bring back tweets that contain that exact phrase, whereas just searching for shropshire restaurant will bring back any tweet with those 2 words in it somewhere.

3) Review your searches and see which bring back good results (there will be plenty of noise to work through so this is the bit that takes work) and scale down your searches to a manageable number.

4) If there’s a lead, follow that person and then THINK about how/if you want to approach them. The original tweet will dictate whether it’s appropriate to just follow them or whether to tweet something to? If you do tweet something to them, ideally keep it very light and not too “we’re brilliant, use/visit us”. An example:

Tweet: Can anyone recommend a nice restaurant for a birthday celebration near Shrewsbury?

Action: follow them, possibly tweet them, say you saw their tweet, you know you’re biased but you think you’d be perfect? (And consider a discount/incentive e.g. free bottle of wine if they mention the tweet).

Often just following them, engaging with them on a human level will work just as well – remember you’ll sell on Twitter by not selling.

5) Review your searches as often as you can and the leads will be there for the taking…..

By the way, as with all Social Media, if you’re going to do this and want to see the return, do it properly and spend time setting up the right searches for your business – there are no real shortcuts to success but with some work up front you will see a return!

Hope that’s useful to you!
TTFN

Jan

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