Find New Prospects with Twitter Search
An interesting thing happened to me on Twitter the other day.
I was having a problem with the service provider for my web sites. Everything, and I mean everything was down. Email, web site, blog…it was all inaccessible. And I would have been okay with that if it had lasted one, maybe two hours.
9 hours.
During the busiest time of day for my site.
Major failure.
So, I did what any smart consumer does when they really want customer service these days.
I tweeted about it.
Hashing it out.
So, if I had just posted a Tweet about my dissatisfaction with my hosting provider, I probably would have gotten a few sympathetic replies from my followers, maybe even a recommendation or two for new hosting providers that some of my friends use. It’s great because I could easily tap into 300+ people instantly and get advice on what to do next.
In order to extend my reach, however, I decided to use a hash tag (#) in my tweet. A hash tag identifies a word immediately following it as a keyword in my tweet. It essentially tells people what I’m tweeting about in one word, and makes my tweet more easily searchable in Twitter. So, for example, if I were to tweet:
I love a couple pieces of bread smeared with a whole bunch of #nutella in the morning. Who’s with me?
Anybody could go to http://search.twitter.com and find my tweet, even if they’re not following me, by searching the #nutella keyword.
Go on, try it. I can wait.
So, back to my story, I tweeted about my woes and used the hash tag to identify my service provider, hoping I would get a response from someone, anyone, who knew what was going on. I was sure to tweet multiple times over the course of the outage, but unfortunately, my provider never ended up responding (though I did get sympathetic responses from people who were in the same boat). Eventually, my sites were restored and I was back in business.
Reaching Out
A funny thing happened the next day, though. I got an email from another hosting company, specifically mentioning my tweet about problems with my existing provider. The introduction read:
We saw a tweet saying that you are having problems with your web host:http://twitter.com/avelient/status/4554098156 We just wanted to reach out to you and offer some assistance.
So what happened here? Somebody in sales for this company clearly found out there was a problem with my hosting provider and started monitoring keywords in Twitter for people complaining about the service. They gathered all the names, researched them, got contact information for them if possible, and sent an email letting these disgruntled customers know that there was another option out there if they were ready to move.
How cool is that?
But Mariano, How Can I Use This?
The obvious question is how you can use this to prospect for your own business. Well, the beauty of Twitter search is that it has an RSS feed capability. What does that mean for you? Well, let’s say you’re a mortgage broker. You can create a search based on certain criteria, such as a certain hash tag, location of the person tweeting, etc., and using your RSS reader you can have a constant stream of tweets coming to you of people in your area who are tweeting about mortgages. You may find some people that you can help. Heck, you may find out how the competition his helping other people and you can adopt strategies or even retweet good information (which means you take information somebody provides and tweet it to the people following you). Any way you cut it, it’s providing you real information from real people that you can use to adjust the sales strategy of your business, both online and off.
So go ahead, try sending me a message on Twitter. If you have an account, use the #avelient tag to get my attention. If I see it, you’ll know it’s working…and that it can work for you too.
Loading ...If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Great article, Mariano!