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TWITTER Search Strategy

By Karl in SEO, SEO, Social

Your TWITTER Search Strategy could be evolving every day finding out what works for you and what doesn’t. Many people still don’t know what to make of Twitter and Social Media but I think Social Media and Twitter offer great opportunities for the ones who use them correctly.

Yes, you can waste a lot of time if you don’t have a strategy and don’t know what to do, I totally agree. I call it ‘ROTI’: Return On Time Investment and for me it is an important measure since although I have time in abundance, I can never get any hours ‘back’. 

Here are some aspects of my personal TWITTER Search Strategy and how you can use it, too, to find highly targeted customers and to build links to your site. Plus a list of factors, initially inspired by David (Berkowitz) on whether it’s worth your time to tweet.

If you are think about using Twitter to market your business or profession, this is one of  the most important questions to answer:

1. Is YOUR Target Market Using Twitter?

To find out whether your potential customers are using Twitter, search on Twitter with search terms relevant to your business. For example you can search for your products and services names, or your competitor’s products and services. Also use any keywords that are related to what you are doing and offering. For example if you are dealing in ‘real estate’ or ‘property’ as it is called in the UK, simply put these terms into Twitter’s search engine to see who is discussing property and real estate related matters. If you are interested in people looking for property in London, UK, put ‘property London UK’ into Twitter’s search engine. For inspiration, take your search terms to Google’s FREE keyword tool, put your search terms into the tool and let Google tell you what other search terms you could use for Twitter’s search to see whether there are enough target customers for you on Twitter. 

If your target market is not yet on Twitter find out where your target market really is. How do you find your target customers elsewhere?

Use tools such as Google Alerts and Omgilii to find real-time conversations about you, your company, your products or services, your competitors, their products or services etc. This will tell you what is going on where and when. The latter is so important because this is when your potential customers appreciate help the most: right when they are searching for a solution, you turn up and offer your help. This will be appreciated, can create trust and allows for a longstanding customer or client relationship. All because you were there when they needed you.

(Omgili allows you to easily integrate it into your search bar to find any discussions in your field and you can use it to set up a custom search engine on Google, too.)

When you are trying to figure out whether Twitter could be a tool for you to connect with potential customers, ask yourself: is your target audience made up of tech ‘first-movers’ or are they lagging behind? You might discover that there are already lots of conversations going on that you didn’t know about. Customers praising you, customers with problems (even more important to know about them. Remember a happy customer tells about 3-5 friends, an unhappy customer tells about 10-12 friends, colleagues …). Go and solve their problems, clarify, resolve their questions, thank them for their praise and you could see many fruitful customer relationships being started from there. 

Here is a case study from Central Desktop demonstrating how it took them 27 tweets and 1 phone call to close the deal!  {thanks Ed for the tweet.}

This is what Central Desktop is using Twitter for:

• Customer Service
• Start “Customer Conversations”
• Share News & Events
• Sharing Links
• Share New Features
• Monitor Buzz
• Read News
• Make New Friends
• Discover Prospects

Think of other ways how you could use Twitter for your purposes …

2. Earning Trust by Using Twitter

Most of your prospective customers online are total strangers and probably will never meet you in person. This is a disadvantage to any offline business where you can assume meeting some of your customers at one point. However being visible to searchers online i.e. by tweeting about what you do will give future clients whom you found and who found you through Twitter the chance to get to know you more.

I use Twitter as a real time search engine to find questions and discussions where I can help. Right there and then, when someone is looking for a solution you can be there to help. You are there when it counts most, when the window of opportunity is open.

Providing real value when it’s needed most will create TRUST and trust in you is gold dust. Especially on the Internet where you usually don’t see the person at the other end. Trust is the basis to do business with a stranger and if you are willing to earn that trust, Twitter can be a great opportunity.

3. Reminding Them That You Are There

When your ‘Twitter Followers’ see you tweeting regularly, it doesn’t matter so much, whether you deliver great value in every tweet, it just will keep your name and offer fresh in your target audiences mind. Often this is enough to get you the click. When I get complaints about ‘Twitter not working, people not responding, etc.’ this is what I mostly reply:

a) Don’t expect a response. If you get one, great, if not move on.

b) If you are broadcasting a message to your followers, make sure you broadcast in batches of Tweets about the same subject. As you know, people respond to a stranger on average on the 7th contact. Why should this be different on Twitter? That means you broadcast a serious of Tweets about the same subject in a relatively short time span, increasing the likelihood that your followers notice that there is not only one message from you about that particular subject but three, four, five in the same stream. Obviously all of them need to provide real value, otherwise your followers might just get annoyed and un-follow you.

4. Speed of Getting Your News to Them

Twittering allows you to get your news to your potential customer’s PC or mobile quicker than the competition does. That gives you a competitive advantage since often it is just who makes the offer first, not who offers the greatest value for money. 

5. Your Competition Probably Doesn’t Sleep – Anymore

How cutthroat is your business sector? Do you need to use everything to stay ahead of your competition? Then Twitter could be a competitive advantage, or a necessary strategy to keep up with what your competition is doing. Use the Twitter tools available to limit your time involvement but stay within Twitter’s guidelines.

6. You Can Tweet More Often Than You Can E-mail!

With Twitter you can contact your potential customers several times a day – whereas if you try that with your e-mails you might get a different response – or none whatsoever. This can be a significant advantage over your competition that isn’t using Twitter. As they say ‘out of sight is out of mind’. In today’s competitive environment you need to use every opportunity to stay in contact with your market, dlevering value, creating a trusting relationship.

7. Your Location

If your business is based in or focused on a certain city or region, use Twitter to see what people are saying about it. Then use the Advanced Search feature to find posts from people based within a certain area. There may be ways you can be a resource about your geographical area. Additionally you can run location-specific searches for your brands and relevant topics.

8. Increasing Your Margins Instantly and With Low-Cost by Selling to Your Existing Customers

Besides e-mail, Twitter is a way for your existing customers to keep up with what you are doing. When potential Twitter clients follow your ’soap opera’ they get even more loyal to you and are much more likely to re-order from you, with no advertising cost to you, other than your time to do your Twitter updates.

9. Quality vs. Quantity of Twitter Followers

Whether you should go for quantity - the number of followers – or quality of followers,  depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Begin with the end in mind. I personally am looking for quality, which means I rather have a smaller number of people I follow so I can really see what they are up to and communicate with them (as much as my time allows).

Do I auto-follow people who follow me? Yes, I do out of courtesy and because I believe everyone deserves an answer. However that doesn’t mean that I constantly weed out. I do: I weed out certain industries, such as pills, gambling, violence. Plus if someone uses Twitter as a broadcasting platform only, what’s the point, there will never be any real communication with them. And I un-follow people who do pay too little attention to detail, meaning they don’t even put a picture or at least an avatar in their profile.

To keep your profile and the people you follow tidy, you can use free applications such as Tweepi and MyTweeple.

My intention is to use Twitter as much as possible as communication platform and I have started to promote my Twitter ID to my various lists of business contacts. Twitter is a relatively new form of communication and it gets some time to get used to it and to see its advantages but ‘doing it’ is the best way of discovering how Twitter can help you.

When you search for people, search for so called ‘power users’ since they will a) have a large number of followers and more importantly b) their vote weighs a lot with their list. So when you follow them, read what they’re up to and re-tweet (RT) some of their content. They might return the favor, which will give you exposure to their list, recommended by this power user. Likewise when you are re-tweeting their content to your list of followers, make sure the content is really worth the RT.

10. The Edge Of Social Media

The share of traffic to websites from Social Media sites is rapidly increasing and Hitwise recently stated that it is already as much as the traffic coming from the search engines! That is great and definitely a good reason to get your Twitter Search Strategy and your Social Media Strategy right. But there is one caviat: keep in mind that the edge on Social Media might be sharper than in search | SEO or PPC. When you communicate well, you build trusting relationships, deliver value, then your Social Media relationships can become highly profitable but when you screw up these relationships they can very quickly become colder as cold and give you a bad reputation on the net!

11. Being Social on Social Media | Twitter

When you start Tweeting on Twitter remember that Twitter belongs to the so called Social Media. This means that using these social media should be in a social way: It’s ok to show some of your personality on these social media and on Twitter and it is boring and not really social to go out and tweet only about your product features. Remember that you will be talking to strangers and they want to get to know you a little first, before even considering doing business with you …

For example, Rich Schefren recently admitted that he sometimes gets a quick fix of love by walking out through one door of his house and instantly returning through another door, just to see how much his dog was enjoying him coming back, wagging his tail, … Hilarious, funny and courageous writing. Very social and did have nothing to do with Rich’s offers.

Or Michael Campbell sharing the story when he almost lost his wife and had to temporarily close his membership site for that reason. This gives you an insight into who the person is on the other side of the wire.

If you decide to use social media and Twitter, keep in mind that it is a time commitment, too. Just with any friendships, if you want to build them, you can’t just make contact and then not be in contact for a couple of months. Consistency is very important and you will need to find a routine that allows you to stay in touch. For a start you want to remind people of your mere existence and only if you keep providing value, will they continue to follow and trust you.

As Twitter is evolving, so are the tools using it. But beware some of these tools can get your account banned. If you are using any of these to0ls you need to use them wisely and always keep in mind how you would feel, if you were sent the Tweets you are sending. Do the Tweets deliver great value or would you un-follow that person as quickly as possible?

As with all human interaction there is no single and definite rule on what you can do and what not. Relationships are a wonderful way to learn in life and you will have to apply your common sense and the feedback from your followers to understand how you can deliver value to them.

To come in this post:

- be more yourself in the big corporate world, you are still a person and now Social Media gives you a good reason to show that

- take more responsibility for your actions, business and personal mix in social media and you can’t do wrong in either.

…

Does your TWITTER Search Strategy work for you or do you ‘agree’ that Twitter is a waste of time? Leave your comments below.

If you want more tips about Getting Customers Online, SEO, Social Media etc. before your competition gets hold of them, see me on Twitter http://twitter.com/KarlOrtenburg.

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Tags: real time conversation, Twitter, Twitter Search, Twitter Search Strategy