Adam Melson Adam Melson

September 8, 2008

Find Potential Customers Tweeting to be Found

There have been several articles circling around about the usefulness of Twitter for businesses. Some writers are even sending requests to HARO with summary titles, “twitter, huh, what is it good for?” Here’s the answer.

Absolutely everything to your business if you do four things:

1. Access search.twitter.com
2. Listen to your potential customers
3. Check Google Reader (or any other type of RSS feed)
4. Respond to potential customers

What do I mean by listen? Instead of searching for company brand name or products in tweets, why not search for client needs? Here’s an example from the perspective of a travel agency:

“Need a vacation” brought back 45 results in the last 24 hours on search.twitter.com. This one keyword combination along with several others (find a vacation, want a vacation, deserve a vacation) can be gathered through the RSS button available at the top of the page.

Now, what can be done with dozens of people expressing what they need/want? How about advertising a contest or sending a discount from your related business? A bot can be created to send a reply (@) to the user saying, “We see that you need a vacation and want to help! A 10% discount on our popular vacation packages is offered at http://tinyurl.com/xyz.”

Developing a bot isn’t necessary, but certainly helps make the process lean. With 4-5 queries, that’s 2000+ potential customers per month expressing that they are interested in taking a vacation that a travel agency can most likely accommodate. Regardless of your conversion %, that’s a lot of cheap low hanging fruit.

Does this address a tweeted need? Absolutely. Is it spammy? That’s yet to be decided, but your input is always welcome in a quick survey below.

3 COMMENTS

  • Jim Kukral says:
    September 8, 2008 @ 5:37 pm

    I think when you add the bot to it, yes. Without the bot, no. Big difference in my opinion.

    I just emailed about 300 of my associates… one at a time with personal emails, but all with the same-ish message. If I would have automated it to people I didn’t know, yeah, it would have been spam. But since I did it “manually” and I knew the people already, it’s not spam.

    But your point is good. Business should be doing this in some capacity. I say forget the bots. Get an intern.

  • Kenton Newby says:
    September 8, 2008 @ 7:25 pm

    The level of “spammy-ness” also has to do with how close a match there is between what the person tweeted and what the offer is. So you say a contest? Okay, sure…why not. But a blatant “come buy my stuff” sales pitch? Ummm…big no-no. And that’s regardless of whether it’s done manually or with a bot.

    Case in point: The Internet marketing event I just went to this past weekend was something I didn’t even know about until I got a random email from the coordinators. They saw a post I added on another site and sent me an email about it. Unsolicited? Yes. Good match? Yes. So I went, it was cool and I plan to attend more.

    But if they had kept hounding me about it via email I would have been more than slightly annoyed. The same is true for tweets. If someone keeps talking about “vacation”, “need a vacation”, etc and keeps getting auto-tweets, that’s definitely spammy.

    Kenton

  • Adam says:
    September 9, 2008 @ 11:01 am

    I agree and I’m surprised I haven’t received any spam messages on twitter. Would definitely like to know if anyone has and see how they were generated.

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