If you use Twitter but not Twitter Search, you’re missing out on many of the opportunities the channel offers to connect your brand with your customers. While Twitter will tell you who’s mentioned your brand handle, Twitter Search will tell you who’s mentioned your brand but not tagged a handle, who’s talking about your competitors and who needs a service or product that you can provide.
How do we know this? Because we see businesses generate leads from Twitter Search every single day. Businesses who employ Twitter Search as a way to provide stellar customer service, keep their audience engaged and find new leads.
When employed in the right way, Twitter Search is one of the most powerful tools to help you gain followers and make more of the time you spend on Twitter. And the best thing of all? Once you’re set up, it runs itself, endlessly searching to present you with the best leads and the most important conversations.
If you’re having a hard time working out how this would specifically apply for you, check out these examples of businesses who are already using it to great effect:
If you’ve built an app, chances are it’s either solely for entertainment purposes (a game or funny video creator) or it’s to fulfil a gap in the market. With the later category, the app is functional – it aims to help a user do something better, faster or easier than they could have otherwise done without it or it gives them access to something usually on their desktop while they’re ‘on the go’. This means that so as long as you’ve got your product/market fit right, there are guaranteed people out there looking for your app.
But how to find them?
This is where Twitter Search comes in handy. For example, Flow for Instagram is an Instagram app for iPad created to fit a gap in the market that Instagram itself was yet to fulfil – an app for viewing Instagram on iPad. The app also offers many other benefits that are coveted by users, such as account switching. Knowing that it filled a definite gap in the market, Flow then setup a search to generate leads from Twitter search which looked for users who had tweeted
instagram no ipad ?
These were just some of the results they received:
With a simple favourite or reply, Flow App was then able to reach out to all of the users who were looking for an app exactly like the one they offered! This led to an increase in downloads, more brand awareness and hundreds of new customers who may not have found the app otherwise.
2. Event venue
Twitter Advanced Search allows you to search for tweets that have been sent within so many miles of a City or Town, which can be really useful for location based search. Twilert takes this one step further with a geolocation tool that allows you to pinpoint tweets that have been sent from within 100 metres of any given area around the world. This is a powerful monitoring tool that an Event Venue such as The NEC or London ExCel can use to generate leads from Twitter Search:
This allows the venue or organiser to gauge feedback and conversations that are going on within the venue, even when the user has forgotten to tag a Twitter handle, for example:
This gives them realtime access to the conversation going on within their venue, which they otherwise may have missed and could generate lead opportunities for future events or venue advocates.
3. Educational brand
It’s not just businesses who are adopting Twitter as part of their marketing strategy, many schools, universities and teachers are also using it to build another line of communication with their students and to promote the organisation to the wider public.
In some cases, students or other schools may not mention the University or School directly, so it’s up to the organisation’s marketing or social media team to find ways to surface the tweets that are relevant.
For example, Brighton University has the Twitter handle @uniofbrighton but many people will also tweet just mentioning ‘Brighton Uni’ or ‘Brighton University’ without actually tagging the official Twitter handle. For the University to gain a full 360degree view of what’s being said about them on Twitter, they could employ the below namecheck search:
@uniofbrighton OR ‘Brighton University’ OR ‘Brighton Uni’
This search uses the OR operator, to create one feed which tracks all mentions of the University, regardless of whether the official Twitter handle has been tagged or not. This will pull out some interesting tweets such as those below:
By getting in touch with these Twitter users, Brighton University will provide a personal touch that could help the students in their decision making. This will help to show how the University is innovative and up-to-date with relevant channels of communication while potentially gaining new students who may have otherwise gone elsewhere.
4. Beauty Brand
Whether a beauty brand manages their communications in-house, or through an agency, there is always a need to know what people say about their brand on Twitter. Unfortunately, most brands only monitor what is being said directly to them, rather than what users are saying about that type of product or brand generally. This means they are missing out on an opportunity to generate leads from Twitter Search and gain many new customers.
As we mentioned earlier, users turn to Twitter to ask questions. This includes questions such as ‘What is the best facial cleanser for dry skin?’ or ‘What’s a good organic shampoo brand’?
All the beauty brand has to do to capture these leads, is to search for them on Twitter and then reply with the useful information. The user is already searching for the product that the beauty brand can provide, so it is not seen as a direct sales pitch.
For example, an organic skincare brand could search for the following:
recommend organic skincare ?
This would pull up a lead of relevant lists like the below, that the skincare brand could contact to promote their own products:
5. Etail website
Any website that sells physical products online should be employing the power of social media to grab the attention of their customers. They can guarantee that their customers are online by the nature of where they are buying their products so it’s a good bet that many of them will also be engaged with social media. An online store that sells Vintage clothing could play with keywords such as:
recommend vintage online ?
This would provide them with a list of qualified leads, like those shown below, which they could contact or follow up with to suggest their services or even provide a quick discount code for.
Similarly, an online store that sells wine could use the search online wine recommend ? to capture the leads below and turn them into customers:
Key Takeaways:
- Brands in your industry are already online and using Twitter to find leads
- Twitter search can pull out conversations that people are having around your brand – even when they don’t tag your Twitter handle
- With Twitter Search, you don’t have to constantly search through Twitter – you can save the searches or employ Twilert’s email alerts and let them do the hard work for you
