Social Selling: How to Engage with Prospects on Twitter

Learning to sell through social listening is a core skill in the 2.0 world. Today we’re putting the spotlight on Twitter, which we know from experience can be a great tool for building a valuable network of contacts.

As we’ve said before, converting prospects to satisfied customers means cultivating a long-term relationship with them. Twitter allows you to do this organically, while Twitter Ads, the segmented advertising solution offered by the platform, is interesting, intuitive and practical.

Ready to delve deeper into the mind of a sales team community manager?

First, do your research:

Harness the power of your search engine

By entering keywords related to the service you offer, you’ll find a wide range of users you can start to interact with. For example, if you enter the words ‘automotive industry’ you can filter the search by people, news or hashtags. You can then start following people interested in your sector and share relevant content with them.

Identify the right professional positions for direct access to sales impacts

Defining your search well helps you contact your buyer personas according to their profile information. If you invest in the relationship, your lead will mature and thus be receptive to your proposal. If you don’t carry out this type of initial search on Twitter you can go from one profile to another in a company without actually knowing who makes the purchasing decisions. To continue with the previous example, consider ‘automotive industry enthusiasts’ and, above all, ‘Sales directors/managers in the automotive sector’.

Build a win-win relationship with bloggers

To continue gaining credibility with your target market, identify key bloggers who write on subjects related to your product or service. Share their quality content by retweeting; help them with ideas for their post (hashtags such as #recommend can help increase virality), and comment on their articles.

Exemplary salespeople are neither egocentric nor competitive. An open mind, generosity and the humility to learn from others will take you much further, and attract professionals with similar values. Many bloggers have their own businesses that could fit perfectly with your sales offering. It’s a win-win situation: you learn from their content. They can benefit from your product or service.

Engage with key journalists

If you want to raise awareness of your brand, your service or the great team that’s behind it, you also need to consider the media. Through Twitter you can find a huge number of specialised journalists who’ll be delighted if you share their articles and suggest ideas for future pieces. We’ve explained how a corporate blog can help drive your sales. The next step is to invite bloggers and journalists to share your content. Once they know you, they’ll start sharing your news, recommendations and articles they’ve written about your company with their large networks of followers.

Next, check out the tools designed to help you

All these tasks require time and dedication on a daily basis. Luckily there are various programmes that make the search easier, and provide an exhaustive analysis both of your activity and of opportunities to follow up:

• Mention.net is an essential tool for monitoring mentions of your brand, company or competition across social networks, blogs and websites.
• Twtrland measures the level of mentions of a Twitter profile and identifies influencers based on the criteria you provide. It’s a great way of getting in touch with your target market.
• FollowerWonk compares users (e.g. by identifying followers you have in common or interesting profiles), sorts followers by category, shows their updates and provides information such as the number of followers, location and social authority.

Look out for our next blog in the series on how to leverage Twitter to improve your conversion rate.