Twitter for business: 8 Ways to Generate High-Quality Leads

Social media lead generation is something which is a part of every business’s marketing strategy – and using Twitter for getting leads is no exception. Twitter is not just for sharing thoughts and opinions, liking, retweeting or replying on other tweets – it is also a successful platform for generating qualified leads for your business. If you are not planning to use it for business, you are wasting the potential that your follower count holds.

On truly utilizing the power of Twitter, you can get new sales prospects, foster them with direct and personal communication, and convert them into successful leads. These leads hold a huge chance of becoming paying customers in the future. 

But, many businesses fail to cut through the clutter and find the right customers for their products or services. The reason behind that is the gigantic 336 million active users per month. The key is to find “your people” in this mammoth-sized crowd and target them to promote your offerings.

Twitter is a place less personal as compared to Facebook and Instagram – it is a platform where mostly politicians, celebrities, journalists, musicians, and businesses connect with their audiences. Many pieces of research show that businesses that use Twitter get double the leads as compared to the businesses that don’t. 

Some statistics given by Twitter itself are:

• 66% of people on Twitter follow at least one business account.
• 94% of people are convinced to buy something when they follow a business page on Twitter.
• 69% have actually bought products by seeing a tweet.

In this article, you will find some great ways which you can follow to generate high-quality leads on Twitter for your business and build new opportunities for sales. 

1. Keep personal and business account separate:

Are you using the same account for personal and business purposes? Then that’s the first thing that you need to change. Make two Twitter accounts – one for sharing your personal opinions and one entirely for promoting your business. 

With a separate account dedicated to your business, you will be able to focus on your strategy and attract your target audience much faster. If you are doing that from your personal account, people will get confused as there will be distractions when they visit your Twitter profile. A separate account will help develop a brand identity and people will remember and recognize your company’s name easily.

You can see Twitter’s example itself. The account holders and owners have their separate accounts and there are official accounts for Twitter’s different purposes like Twitter, Twitter Verified, Twitter support, Twitter live, etc.

If you already have your business account, then the next thing to do will be to optimize your profile to attract people.

2. Enhance your Twitter profile:

Your Twitter profile is the first thing that people will come across. It can literally make or break your impression. A nicely built profile will decide whether people are going to follow you or not. And if you can make them follow – half of the work is done. They will definitely be interested in what you have to offer and will convert into leads.

As first impressions count a lot, here’s what you need to include in your bio:

• Keep your company’s logo as the profile picture. The cover picture can be changed according to the offers that you conduct. Keep the images in high quality.
• Incorporate keywords in your bio. It can help in making your profile appear when someone searches for that particular keyword or hashtag.
• Keep your username professional and as short as possible.
• Add your business location and also include your website link.
• Pin your most popular tweet or any recent offer that you announced.
• Write your company’s vision and missions in the bio. Do not write anything for promoting the products or services.
• You can include a call to action either in your cover picture, bio or pinned tweet.

3. Target the right people:

Search for the keywords that you want to target. The right audience will be definitely engaging with those keywords and hashtags.

When Nextiva, a remote phone system company, started targeting the right people they immediately saw 30% increase in their conversion.

Monitor the following actions taken by people to identify the ones that will be relevant to your business: 

• There will be tweets discussing a problem that people are facing related to your industry. If you have a solution to those problems, you can connect with such people to have further conversation.
• People will be engaging with influencers or with companies which are similar to you.
• If they are already using a similar product like yours, they might have left feedback in the form of tweets.
• Search for your competitors and see what kind of tweets have the most replies and retweets.

These are the people that can be your target audience as they are already interested in the kind of services you are providing.

4. Know the people with whom you are engaging:

It is very crucial to understand your target audience while using Twitter for business. You need to know your audience’s persona so that you can market your business more efficiently. You can find people’s behavior by using Twitter analytics. Go to your profile and select ‘Analytics’ from the drop down menu. Alternatively, you can also type ‘analytics.twitter.com’ directly in your browser’s search bar.

From the analytics data, you can learn the following things:

• You can find out individual tweet’s performance under the tweets section. Also, see the kind of tweets with which people engaged the most and try to create more similar content.
• You can learn about your audience in complete detail which includes the languages that they speak, age, gender, location, occupation, education, interests, mobile footprint and much more!
• Every month, your top tweet will be displayed on the dashboard of the analytics section. This will also help in formulating more tweets that your audience likes.

5. Conduct giveaways and contests:

This is something that every brand does in its growing stages. People love it when something that they like is given to them for free, especially when the product quality is great. Giving away free products is a sensible tactic which can be used to promote your product in its early stages. 

This will create a huge engagement on your post and will increase your followers. These followers are not going to be just random people – they will be the ones who are interested in your product and can convert into buying customers anytime in the future.

You can even run fun contests like asking people to answer a question, tweet an image with a particular hashtag, or asking them to suggest captions for any image or video – you can get all creative while running giveaways and contests like these.

6. Run Twitter Ads:

Creating promotions for business is very common on Twitter, just like on any other platform. Your followers, influencers and business partners can indulge in some amount of free marketing; but if you want to break the boundaries of leads, you need to run paid advertisements.

After creating an advertisement account, you can access Twitter ads from your profile or by visiting ads.twitter.com. 

When you are on the Ads page, select an objective for your ad campaign. ‘Website clicks or conversions’ should be selected, as your purpose is to generate leads. It will help you track the people who click on your ad and visit your website. 

Give a name to your campaign, select a funding source (bank details) and define a budget. Above all, promote a tweet which has gained the maximum engagement as it is most likely to bring quality leads. Twitter itself has provided a guide on how to run advertisements which is worth referring to.

7. Make use of Twitter’s lead generation cards:

Lead generation cards are a part of Twitter advertising options. This is very helpful as people can send you their information right from the tweets. Here’s how you can create a lead generation card:

• Go to section of “Twitter Ads”
• Click on “Creatives” and choose “Cards”
• Fill in the details as required – Objective, offer, image, call to action, description and privacy policy.

When someone expands your tweet, they can choose to fill in their information and send their name, email address and twitter handle. They do not even have to leave Twitter’s platform for doing so.

The only thing that you need to remember here is that you need a CRM provider that has Twitter integration. Otherwise, you will have to download the details from Twitter Ads section and manually add to your database. 

8. Offer appealing incentives:

People need a reason to share their information with you. Provide them a valid point and offer them something valuable so that they can share their details. There are different types of incentives that you can offer; depending upon the type of lead you are looking to collect.

Many businesses give a discount coupon to customers in exchange for a newsletter signup. These discount codes encourage users to visit your website and make a purchase. 

Some gated content, such as invite-only webinars or whitepapers also make for fascinating incentives. All these incentives can work only when you have a good reason to collect information from people. Whether it is for providing a quality newsletter, future discounts and offers, or to build loyalty – let people know what is in it for them.

According to a study done by US marketers, the following are the best techniques to generate leads:

• Email newsletters
• Webinars
• Sales emails
• Whitepapers
• Case studies, product reviews
• Thought leadership articles
• Access to private Facebook groups

That’s it! In short, there is no one step solution for generating leads on Twitter. Begin with creating an outstanding profile, socialize well with your audience before selling, become a part of the conversations, engage with your target audience’s content, and build a strong campaign. 

Never forget to take follow ups from the leads that you generate. Because, what is the point of generating leads when you cannot keep up with them? Time is of great importance in this case, so make hay while the sun still shines! 

The above tips will help you nail the lead generation process on Twitter. Use this microblogging platform to its best, interact with people, generate leads and grow your business to new levels.