How To Search For Leads on Twitter
A mistake many businesses make:
I just had a conversation recently with an insurance agent about the Twitter search tool. Many of you know that with Twitter you can search for keywords and phrases that can generate leads for your businesses.
But as I talked with him I realized that he was making a mistake many businesses make.
In the advanced search tool, he was searching for the word “insurance.” So what do you think he found? Well, he found a bunch of other insurance agents talking about insurance. This doesn’t help him to find any leads. The reality is that most people who need help with insurance aren’t tweeting the word “insurance.” What are they doing instead? They’re venting about the issues and problems that they are having. What you have to do is to think about what kinds of things people are likely to say when they’re venting like this.
What to do instead:
I’ll show you how this works for any industry in a moment. But for him, I told him to stop searching for “insurance,” and instead search for things like “car wreck” or “car accident,” “we just moved,” or even “my wife is pregnant.” Life events like this cause people to need to make adjustments to their insurance.
Now, I’m not saying that when someone says “I just got in a car wreck” you should swoop in and say “I want to be your insurance agent!” Don’t do that! But what you can do is to reply back to their tweet with something like “Oh, that stinks,” or “That sounds like a tough day,” or something like that. Or, you can simply follow that person. When they check out your bio to see who followed them they’ll see that you’re an insurance agent, and you’ll be in their mind if they need to change insurance.
Let’s see how this applies to other industries: For a pest control company, you don’t want to only search for “pest control company.” Very few people are actually tweeting “I want a pest control company.” Instead, they’re saying “Eeeeeek! I saw a spider!” Or, “Oh my goodness, we have termites!” If we were managing social media for a pest control company we would be searching for “termites” within a 10-25 mile radius of where the company operates. I guarantee we’d be getting them business!
So don’t think about searching on the name of your industry so much as the keywords that people are going to be typing when they’re venting about their problem.
I know I’ve talked about this before, but it’s such a crucial point. Time and time again I see people wasting time searching for the wrong types of keywords. Don’t search for “plumber,” search for “leak” or “toilet” or “faucet.” “My faucet broke.” And if you’re a plumber you can reply back, “We can fix that!”
So think about that. And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, that’s cool Mario, but how am I ever going to find time in my day to fight bugs and pests and do these Twitter searches all the time?” Well, that’s where we come in! We can do that for you so that you can spend your time doing what you do best. Interested?