Twitter: Social Media Prospecting Tool

Although it takes time and a systematic effort, Twitter is a good social site for finding new prospects. Tools like Twitter Search make it easy to search on user names, topics, hashtagged words and locations of users.  This is a nice way to find people who have interests that match what you are selling, live in the geographic area you serve (if you are a local business) and even find your existing customer base.

However, measuring the effectiveness of the contacts that you make is also important. Once someone starts following more than 10 – 20 people, not every tweet is going to be read. It is easy to get lost in the mix so you need to know who is actually engaged with you and how effective your tweets are. Finding out how influential some of your followers are (those that have the most followers and retweet you are gold) and who is actually following the links you post can help you measure your effectiveness .

There are two good tools that I have seen recently that help you get a pretty robust picture of what is going on in your “Twitterverse” and one that specifically reports on who is following any links you put in your tweets. Twitteranalyzer displays about 50 measurements with very appealing and easy-to-read maps and graphs. TwitterFriends provides a similar number of reports but claims as a benefit that you can “find out the hidden network of Twitter contacts that are really relevant for you”. Both of these sites provide a wealth of data, sliced and diced in multiple dimensions.  However, though interesting in the abstract, I am not sure that all of the data is relevant.

What the data can do – especially if you dig deep and research your followers that rank the highest in the various reports – is illuminate who you might want to “direct message” and build a relationship with. You can also look at how your competitors appear on several social rankings (not all data is accessible without a Twitter user name and password) and see how you compare to them. You can also see where you stand now in the various rankings and measure your improvement over time. The caveat is that it will be a personal decision as to what “improvements” are really relevant to success. There is no established conventional wisdom about what – exactly – constitutes doing well beyond having a large number of followers. Good data mining with tools like Twitteranalyzer and TwitterFriends and commonsense judgment on what is relevant to you is the best there is at this point.

If you just want a quick measurement on if your tweet was read and acted on – in cases where you have included an URL – then there is a very simple way to accomplish this. BackTweets lets you search on an URL and see exactly who clicked on that link. With social media – as with all other forms of communications – response rates are a tried-and-true indicator of interest.

Similar Posts:

• Social Media Tools Week: Twitter | Social Media Prospecting Tool
• Can You Segment Your Twitter Followers, and What Value Does That Bring?
• What is the Best Way to Measure Your Social Capital?
• The Social CRM Debate: What is it? And are the Two Terms Really Compatible?
• Social Media: How Do You Measure Success?