According to a recent report by Simply Measured, 98% of all big brands are now active on Twitter. Despite this, many companies still say they aren’t sure how to use Twitter to generate real business leads.

Twitter Search is Twitter’s best kept secret to solving this problem. Once you know how to use it correctly, Twitter Search is the only tool you really need to generate business leads from Twitter. There are already people on Twitter looking for your service or product, but to convert them into customers you need to be actively searching for them on a daily basis. This article explains the benefits of using Twitter Search to generate new leads for your business.

Twitter Search Lead Generation Guide

So what is Twitter Search?

Twitter Search, in its simplest form, is the search bar at the top of your Twitter homepage which allows you to look for specific people, hashtags or companies.

The key to using Twitter Search as a sales tool, is to refine your basic search with the use of Search Operators. Search Operators are specific words or symbols which help to filter your results.

An example is adding the question mark symbol “?” to the end of your search to find a question or adding the operator “lang:en” to find tweets that are only written in English.

Without search operators you could easily spend all day on Twitter, sifting through hundreds of results without ever finding a genuine lead.

Top Tip: You can learn more about what specific Search Operators do and how to use them in our previous post “How to leverage your Twitter Search with Operators

What are the benefits of using Twitter Search for Lead Gen?

Once you know how to use Twitter Search and Search Operators effectively, it becomes a simple way to conduct market research, find news in your industry and most importantly, locate new customers and business leads.

Many people turn to Twitter to ask for recommendations or to find answers to a problem. It’s also one of the first places customers turn to complain about a service or product. By using Twitter Search effectively, you can monitor the things your customers are asking for and respond with a product or service offer. This is a great way to win customers and takes little effort on your part once you have the initial alerts setup.

For example, if you are a localised small business such as a hair salon in Hertfordshire, you could be generating new leads by monitoring the below search on a regular basis:

Hairdresser recommend near:”Hertfordshire” within:15km

Enter this search now in Twitter and you will see that there are hundreds of results already that could provide a Hertfordshire hair salon with qualified leads.

Similarly, if you are a PR agency you can easily monitor Twitter coverage for your clients by setting up an alert that looks like the below:

“modelsown” OR “models own” -@modelsown

By setting up a search that focuses on the brand keywords but excludes the brands own handle, you can filter the results and be sure to never miss a mention, or the chance to reward a brand advocate.

How can I use Twitter as a Lead Generation Source?

Anyone can use Twitter Search manually but it can be time consuming and easy to forget! Twilert provides an easy to use dashboard which helps you to set up the search alerts that are going to generate leads for your business.

Once you have these setup, Twilert will send you the results in near-realtime, hourly, weekly or daily, prompting you to review the leads and qualify them. For our Pro and Agency accounts, we also provide a search history that you can refer back to if you need to find a previous tweet or monitor how many leads Twitter is generating for your business.

Start your free trial of Twilert today by clicking on the image below. Also keep an eye out for our next article on Twitter Search which will give you a template of Twitter Searches  you can use to begin generating leads instantly.

Twitter Monitoring with Twilert