Guest post by David Anderson, CEO, MyWay Interactive:
Twitter is for business! Surprisingly Twitter conversations are much more business oriented than Facebook. Many business executives and their staffs use Twitter to converse with each other, listen to customer conversations on their brand and have dialogs with industry partners who are on the go.
Once your account is activated, you start building your friends. Your friends list, is composed of people you listen to (follow) and your prospective customers. As an example, if you are in the business of selling Bank teller software, you would listen to CIO’s at major banks or Directors of operations at Banks. You can easily find these people by doing a people search on Twitter .
Once you have found your core group, just “follow them”. Everyone will accept! That’s the nature of Twitter. You don’t need to invite anyone and everyone is happy to hear from you.
To expand your twitter friends, just click on one of your current new friends and expand the list of people they follow. You can then follow those people as well. It is very easy to create 1000 qualified people to follow by just seeing who follows whom.
Profile your friends
The next step is to profile your new Twitter friends. Read their Twitter bio’s and see if they list any hobbies or interests. Note their web site address. Read their Tweets to see what they are discussing. Do they like gardening, football or have a favorite sport team. Keep track of these social attributes. They are very important when building a relationship. Cross reference your twitter friend on Linkedin. Note their current employer and college attended. Read about their job function or company product line.
Building on common ground
To establish a relationship on line you need to find some common ground and interests between you and your contact.
Here is what you have so far:
Contact Name
Location
Company Name
Company web addr
College attended
Name of College sport teams
Interests and hobbies
Professional sport teams followed
Types of people they follow on twitter and are connected to on Linkedin (rock bands, political officials, editors of magazines)
Other information from twitter bio (loves travel, family person)
Other information from their tweets (events attended, places traveling to, political affiliation)
You now know enough to begin to build a relationship with your new Twitter friend.
Building an on-line relationship
The easiest way to start an online relationship is to forward an article of interest to your Twitter friend. Go online and look for articles of interest to send to your Twitter friend using google search. Do a search on their favorite sport, or hobby. Find an interesting article. Compress the URL for the article using http://bit.ly/ or http://tinyurl.com/. Create a short note saying “Great to be following you, thought you might find this of interest” and send to them on Twitter.
You can also search on their company and look for recent good news. This could be a customer win or an award. Follow the same process as above and forward the article with a note of congratulations. Everyone loves to be congratulated.
Different than email, people are much more approachable on Twitter. It is OK to reach out. People are on Twitter because they want to hear from you. They are interested in the news you are sending them.
People start following you
As you send your Twitter friends interesting articles they will begin following you.
Once they follow you back, you can increase the level of intimacy by using a DM (direct message). This is a private message you can now send to your friend. You are already confidants and you have not yet even met!
Sales benefit
Of course the benefits are tremendous! When you meet your Twitter friend live for the first time, it’s like your old friends. People buy from people they like and trust and you have already made the investment. The sales process is accelerated. How hard will it be for a competitor to win a sale with this customer now?
Automate acquiring new customers
This entire process described above can be automated. MyWay Interactive www.mywayinteractive.com provides the technology for you to build customer relationships on-line. Twitter friends are imported into your private contact manager where they are automatically profiled. Linkedin data,Twitter feeds and news results are displayed automatically. You receive all articles of interest for each contact, and you have a dedicated Twitter client to communicate these articles to them. Nothing could be simpler and like Twitter and Linkedin, MyWay is free.
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