It seems that everybody is preaching the power of social media nowadays. Regardless if you’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the owner of a small auto body repair shop, you likely recognize the importance of social media and how it can grow businesses and better connect them with consumers.
The social media network Twitter has a hidden power that few businesses are currently using. Twitter has serious potential as a way to generate leads for your business. Curious as to how you can use Twitter to generate leads? Read on, my friends.
Get Involved in Chats
Twitter has spawned massive micro-blogging communities for just about every niche out there. Professionals in these industries often host chats in real time that can be followed using a hashtag. The potential for generating leads in these online chats is tremendous.
Simply get involved in these types of chats as a participant, and offer valuable insight. Do this with your business’s Twitter handle, so you can become an authority in these chats and get your name out. You’ll see that the click through rate to your website increases during these chats. Make sure you have a lead capture landing page on your site, which I’ll get to next.
Link to Lead Capture Landing Pages
Obviously the more you tweet from your company’s Twitter handle, the more likelihood you have of generating traffic to your site. When you include a link to a landing page on your website in a tweet, you should make sure that page has some type of creative lead capture software.
Linking to a lead capture site will ensure that your followers who click on the link will be prompted to provide information, which can then lead to them becoming a qualified lead. In order to get people to give you their information, you’ll want to make sure that you’re offering something. Offer a free ebook as a way to entice people on your lead capture pages, or perhaps a free consultation.
Start Conversation and Engage
One proven method to generating leads using Twitter is to simply tweet engaging thoughts that start conversation. Thought provoking material or insider perspectives for your industry will no doubt draw attention to your Twitter, which will then in turn drive traffic to your site.
In addition to starting meaningful conversation that will draw attention to your profile, engage with potential leads by tweeting out at them. Follow specific hashtags relating to your business, and send tweets to those people using those hashtags in order to start conversation with them. In most cases, finding people and tweeting at them this way will at least result in a visit to your website, which could most definitely result in a potential lead.
Be Retweetable
Arguably one of the best ways that you can use Twitter to generate new leads is by making sure your tweets are retweetable. You want your content to be good enough that people will share it, but you also need to take it a step further than that.
Twitter has a character limit of 140. If you use the majority of those characters, your followers won’t be allowed to add their own personal message to the tweet if they retweet it. That’s why (in some cases) you should keep your tweets as short as possible. You’ll want to leave enough space so people can add their message to your tweet, which will mean more people are seeing your tweets. Of course, you need interesting and engaging content and perspective in order to get retweeted in the first place.
The more retweets you get, the more followers you’ll get, and the more traffic you’ll get to your site. All in all, it means more leads.
Ted Levin is a freelance copywriter who also does professional SEO consulting. He enjoys writing about new social networks, storytelling in marketing, and blogging tips.
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