Using Twitter to reach out to new clients

Twitter can be a fantastic marketing tool to reach out to new clients.

It was reported last year that Twitter had 100 million monthly active users of which 50% logged in every day.  It’s estimated that there are around 250 million tweets a day, which is 150 million more compared to January, 2011. IOS 5 directly integrates info the operating system to allow apps to use Twitter functionally. This has significantly boosted Twitter signup since it launched. It’s clear to see that there is an ocean of opportunity for any company looking to reach out to new potential clients.

I'll be providing tips on how to best penetrate the twitter market.

Select your audience

You should try to limit your scope to the demographic that you are trying to reach. For instance, Wendy’s Cakes would focus their efforts on marketing towards people who enjoy eating cakes. So their goal would be to find people/companies that fit their target audience and to start following them.  The key is to find people that influence your audience. Consider the following:

• Who people are talking to?
• What people are retweeting about?
• And who they ask for advice.

Take a look at about 10 of your followers on Twitter, study their actions in detail and consider the 3 points above.  Once you have identified these factors, you should use similar keywords and terms to your competitors in order to find like-minded people. 

How do they speak

It’s essential to see what people are saying about your company if anything, whether it’s good or bad.  Any feedback is useful feedback; it may be that people are simply asking for advice about your company and the products/service that you sell. The same analysis process should be used for your competitors, look to see if they are jumping in to influence any of these conversations.

Assess how your audience is talking, whether they are formal, informal or it may be that they are blending their language to be both.  It’s good to match the tone of the audience so that they can feel an instant connection with your company.  Look at the links/content that your company is sharing along with the terms and ideas that are getting them excited. Checking out hashtags and other ways that your audience connects with companies is also worthwhile in order to see if they have real traction or if they are spam.

If you struggling to know what to tweet, visit my blog how to use social media to optimise your marketing performance.

Your value on Twitter

Your company should define their objectives for what they want to achieve on Twitter. Is your company on Twitter:

• To improve sales.
• To increase your brand awareness and create a buzz around your company.
• To provide customer service.  This is a common use on Twitter.

 

It would also be useful to work out the worth for each of your followers to see which ones would be more likely to turn into prominent leads.   

Goals to track

Once your Twitter page is in full motion, the next step would be to track your performance. Metrics to consider tracking are ones that capture overall influence such as retweets, blog posts and clicks. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are so many metrics that your company could consider including sales, email sign ups, @messages, direct messages and clicks.

Take a look at this fantastic twitter infographic from Touch agency (August 2011), to help provide you with a better understanding of the market that you are trying to tap into.

If you need help with your Facebook marketing strategy, take a look at my Using Facebook to reach out to new clients’ blog.

Using Facebook to reach out to new clients

Facebook can be a simple yet effective way of reaching out to potential new clients.

Facebook is by far the most popular online brand with 53.5 billion minutes per month spent on the social network in the US alone, according to the Nielson Company. In the UK it was reported last year that almost half the nation was now on Facebook with over 30 million users on the site. Assessing these figures you’d think it would be easy to reach out to new clients by using Facebook to drive your marketing performance…wrong! There are rich business opportunities out there for companies, but only for those that have an effective strategy in place.

It’s always difficult putting a winning strategy together in order to succeed in your business goals and that’s why we are going to offer you a few tips to help you in the right direction.

Getting users to like your page

It’s going to be difficult to attract new clients, if you have no one to like your page. A straightforward tactic to get people to like your page is by simply recommending your page to your personal friends list. If you are an admin on your company page, there is the option on the right side panel to recommend this place for your friends to like. Using this feature is an effective method to increase your brand awareness and the number of likes on your page. The option to recommend your page is available to every admin on the site.

By getting your friends, colleagues, existing fans or customers to like your page is great way to get started, however a lot more has to be done in order to attract further likes on your page. There has to be an incentive for users to click the like button at the top of your page. A tried and tested technique would be to run a competition in order to create a buzz around your brand. In our eyes, the strength of your brand signifies your company’s ethics and values so that people can make a real connection with your company and what you do. If you look around at some of the biggest companies in the world today, they all have CSR teams in place to manage the reputation of their brand. According to Edison Research and Arbitron, 80% of users prefer to connect with brands via Facebook, leaving Twitter behind in a distant second place with a mere 6%.

Let’s say that there was a company called Wendy Cakes and their primary social objective was to increase the number of likes on their Facebook page. A contest for those who liked their page would generate positive interest. Launching a competition to see who can come up with the best new flavour cake to sell-in store with the prize being a box of cakes or cash sum , could be a simple yet effective method of attracting and engaging with new followers.

Interlinking between sites

Facebook may be seen to be the top dog in the social network; however other social platforms are just as important in increasing your social profile. It’s essential to interlink between these sites to communicate with your target audience and to steer an effective multichannel marketing strategy. Steps to be taken, would be to simply post links or create tabs between your main site and other social networks, whether it’s from your homepage or LinkedIn account.

Focusing on Facebook, posting videos from your YouTube account is a fun and informative way to engage with users. Drive users back to your website by posting continuous blog posts to your page. Connecting your Facebook and Twitter accounts, allows for all your tweets to be shown as Facebook status updates to make your Facebook page more current and topical, providing that you update your Twitter page on a regular basis. To do this you can visit the following link, www.facebook.com/twitter.

For tips and advice on how to improve your performance on other social networks visit my blog, Using social media to optimise your online performance.

Spread the message

It’s not all about concentrating your efforts on Facebook; it’s about spreading the message about your company as a whole. Ideas of how this could be done, include:

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• A newsletter promotion/email marketing campaign with a link to your website and social media pages.
• Having an email signature, so that every time you send an email there is a link to your website and social media pages.
• Having a link to your website/social media pages on your business cards.
• A link from everyone’s personal page who works for the company to your main site and social media pages.
• Word of mouth. Nothing beats spreading the message about your company than you personally communicating to others how great your company is!

Landing page

Facebook itself has useful features that can help to draw in traffic. The best of them is the option to have a custom landing page on your site. A landing page allows your company to focus on the message that you want to communicate for your audience, whether it’s a new product, a special offer or to simply get people to click on your like button. If you look at Lakeland’s Facebook landing page, click here, there is a clear call to action to get people to like their page, using easy on the eye text and imagery.
 

 

It’s important to make sure that your ‘like box’ is featured prominently. Plenty of traffic should follow if you have a well-designed landing page with clear indicators to a prominently placed ‘like box’. Another useful feature would be to install the WP FB like plugin to your blog posts.

Relevance

It goes without saying that the content on your Facebook page should be relevant to your company and what they do. It’s important to get the right blend of status updates which informs your followers about your latest company activity and latest industry news. You can engage with your competitors by posting useful insights, questions, contests, photos and videos that will make users want to come back for more. For instance on Wendy’s Cakes Facebook page, there could be:

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• Questions to engage with their audience…E.g. what’s everyone’s favourite cake??
• Cake pictures.
• Video cake recipes.
• Latest confectionary news.

This is a small sample of content that can be used. It’s important to put your stamp on your content and to make sure that it reflects your company and what you are about. It’s not essential to stick to your industry when using Facebook. It’s good to mix it up with bit of fun and not to be so serious, whether it’s having an update about somebody falling off their office chair or commenting on Lady Gaga’s new haircut, however this should be done in moderation.

Another useful tip to get the conversation going by mentioning your Facebook page in your blog posts and everyday conversation.

Facebook Advertising

The number of companies spending on Facebook ads is increasing at an astounding rate. According to IgnitionOne, Facebook ad spend of all clients grew 281% from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011. Impressively, ad impressions for all clients grew 200%.

Running a target ad campaign using Facebook advertising can help your company to reach out to potential new clients. An example of the success that can be founded via Facebook affiliate marketing can be seen on the site itself by visiting the following page. Advertising on Facebook allows companies to target their exact demographic. For example if Wendy’s Cakes could target their campaign for females aged between 25 and 35 with ‘cakes‘ as one of the activities that they ‘like’.

Monitoring your traffic

Monitoring your traffic and your users’ most popular activities on your page is a good way to keep on top of your Facebook business page. It’s a real chance to carry on optimising the areas where you are performing well and to improve upon sections that aren’t performing so well.

To do this you can track growth using Facebook insights and then use this knowledge to analyse what activities are driving the most growth and duplicate this activity. It’s also useful to take a look at your demographics to see who your most popular is and perhaps target more of your content at this group.

So what have we learnt?

Essentially, we have learnt that Facebook can be an immensely powerful tool if used in the right way to attain new followers and potential business. Essential tips to accomplish include:

• Getting users to like your page.
• Interlinking between your sites.
• Spreading the word about your Facebook page.
• Having a landing page.
• Staying relevant to your company and industry (most of the time!).
• Perhaps dabbling into Facebook advertising to see if it benefits your company (not essential).
• And to monitor your Facebook traffic.