Twitter for Lead Generation and Market Awareness
Continuing the theme of tools for processing market information, Twitter deserves special treatment. Twitter is an excellent platform for lead generation and bi-directional market awareness. At AccelerEyes, we enjoy engaging with our market (including leads and paying customers) through Twitter.
Image via CrunchBase
Lead generation on Twitter is fairly straightforward. We setup continual Twitter searches to monitor conversations related to our GPU and accelerator computing products. Throughout each day, we monitor what people are saying and, if appropriate, we send an @reply to engage.
In most cases, @replies will not show up in the Twitter feeds of followers. To send an @reply so all followers can see it, the convention is to put a “.” in front of the Tweet.
Some companies setup automated, no human-intervention @replies to everyone that uses certain search terms. Such practices are spammy and will generate more downside than upside for a business.
Market awareness is highly beneficial on Twitter as well, often producing information faster and more thoroughly than RSS feeds or Google Alerts. We use Twitter for market awareness by:
- Following relevant customers, bloggers, news sources, and competitors.
- Following certain news sources that are not appropriate for RSS feeds (due to information inundation) but are appropriate for sampling from time-to-time in a Twitter stream. For startups, @newsycombinator and @SAI follow into this category.
- Creating continuous Twitter searches based on terms that enable market monitoring.
Twitter is also the best way to connect with startup communities, both locally and nationally. It is an especially enriching experience to learn from others on Twitter, especially other entrepreneurs and investors.
How do you use Twitter to engage with your market? Do you generate leads with Twitter? Do you learn information through Twitter than you might not otherwise?