A New Generation Marketer

Below is an excellent guest blog post by Affnet of Orange, CA, a company that provides performance-based services to online advertisers and publishers.

Twitter is certainly mainstream today. It’s almost impossible now to turn on a news show, sports broadcast, or other media based outlet without seeing some sort of Twitter message, follow request, or live updates coming from a Twitter stream. With so much attention and promotions going on for Twitter, many businesses and owners are trying to figure out how they can use Twitter to build their own business and generate more leads from it. The following information will share some ideas on how to use Twitter to help with lead generation.

To start, let’s take a look at why businesses get on Twitter to begin with. Typically, businesses will get on Twitter to create a brand experience, communicate with their audience or customers, build stronger brand reputation and better branding, engage in industry and market news and topics, and of course to promote their products or services. All of these things are done daily and can be the sole focal point, or a collaboration of all the elements to maximize the efforts put forth on Twitter.

Now, lets look at what the typical user is doing on Twitter so that we can understand how to effectively market to them to generate more leads. Users like to be informed about products and services that are relevant to them, share useful information with others in their circle, find things they think are either funny, helpful, or topical, as well as to stay current on trending topics.

In addition to why people are on Twitter, let’s take a look at who is on Twitter and what a business can hope to find in terms of new leads. According to PEW Research Center, nearly 55% of all Twitter users are between the ages of 18 – 49, which means that the majority of people on Twitter are adults. Over 40% of all Twitters have some sort of college education and over 60% of Twitter users make over 30k per year. The average age of a Twitter user is 31. This means that a large portion of people using Twitter are educated and have a stable job with a decent salary range, which makes Twitter a great network for generating new leads.

With these numbers in mind, Twitter is in a good position to generate leads and the following are some ways Twitter can help produce more leads for you businesses.

1. Branding and Reputation: Twitter can help establish a business with the right impression by having a branded experience on Twitter and link that to the company’s main site. This gives the impression that a business is supporting the efforts that they are making online and gives people a place to voice their opinions, share information, and to communicate directly with the company. In addition, it’s good to build a custom brand background and page look to give people the impression that they get when they visit the company’s main site. It also gives the impression that the company understands and values their brand.

2. Bio and Links: It’s important to give people a sense of what they will expect from the Tweets by adding some info to the bio as well as a link to the company’s website. This will give people a chance to learn more about the company by providing them with a snippet of what the business does as well as a way to get them to the website via a link on the profile page.

3. Contacts and Followers: The next important thing to consider is who the business is following and who should follow them. There are some tools that can help find relevant Tweeters in a certain market and it’s good to use them to help find those people and start following them. Another way to do this is to go to Twitter and start doing keyword search and see who is tweeting them. There may be some relevant followers that would be helpful to engage with and could be a good source for new leads. By finding the right followers, tweets and other info will go out faster and to more relevant people, which in turn would generate better leads.

4. Engage and Promote: Create useful tweets and post them regularly. It’s important to not only promote products and services from the business, but share other stories and ideas that are relevant to the industry. Making a tweet about an industry topic is a good way to engage people and get them talking. In addition, by creating tweets that are helpful in a certain market, it makes the business look like an authority within the space and gives them an advantage over people that are not as active. Getting familiar with certain Twitter options like retweets, followfriday, and other useful tools is another way to engage people and be able to generate leads. There are some helpful blogs and tools that can make this process a little easier, but it is certainly one of the most crucial parts to effectively generate leads from Twitter.

Twitter is certainly a new tool for businesses to use to generate leads and will be an effective part of business marketing for the next couple of years. The best part about this tool is that it’s free to use and only requires the time and effort needed to make it work efficiently.

Affnet is a leading, performance based marketing group that exclusively works with advertisers and publishers for effective lead generation.