Customer Acquisition on Twitter Revealed
Twitter is just a micro-blogging service where you can express your thoughts to your friends, right? Wrong. It’s easy to fall into that trap, especially because this is precisely the message Twitter is sending via their copywriting:
Your Customers Are On Twitter
Because Twitter has become such a wonderful place to consume content, everyone and their mother has a Twitter account today. To be precise Statisita recently reported that Twitter has 284 million monthly active users worldwide.
So what does this mean from a business perspective? Your customers are on Twitter too!
Twitter Data is Gold
What makes Twitter so unique from the other social networks is that from it’s inception people felt comfortable sharing information. Essentially, Twitter made sharing cool.
All across Twitter people are sharing wonderfully succinct descriptions of:
- Who they are
- What they’re interested in
- Where they spend their time.
And as it turns out, you don’t have to have a PhD in Data Science in order to take advantage of this data for your business. But more on this later.
Let’s jump into a practical example and take a look at my personal account:
So lets see, who is Tom Kornblit?
He’s a co-founder from New York interested in startups & traction. That’s basically as good of a summary as I could provide if you pestered me with a Who, What, Where questionnaire. However, you don’t have to ask. I’m releasing all this information publicly, for free, on Twitter.
It’s incredible how open people are to share their personal information on the open internet today. It’s become part of the cyber-culture that this generation has cultivated.
Cool but what does that mean for my business?
As a business owner or marketer, you know your audience. You know what kind of people would be interested in your product or service. And now, you even know that you can find them on Twitter. So what can we do with all of this valuable information?
You Should Follow, Not Lead Your Customers
As Jay Baer pointed out:
“Companies should follow, not lead, their customers across the social Web.”
There’s a good reason for this. Due to the advancement in technology and social media, business has fundamentally changed, and so have customer expectations.
Particularly customers expect a different experience for how we as companies:
- Reach, interact and raise their awareness
- Market our brand
Taking a Novel Approach to Customer Acquisition
With today’s competitive global market and the wide variety of solutions available, you need to differentiate yourself.
Studies have shown that customers want:
- To feel important.
- To be listened to.
- To be given a personalized experienced.
So what better way to start winning over their hearts than by following them on Twitter.
To the naked eye, you might not realize the effectiveness of this. So I’d like to highlight the key points from both a customer and business perspective.
From a Customer’s Perspective
You’re paying them a compliment.
They love the fact that you followed them. You genuinely found them to be an interesting prospect for your business and thought connecting would be mutually beneficial.
From a Business Standpoint
You own a highly curated feed of customer insights about your industry.
Complaints, recommendations, ideas, and thoughts of people in your target audience are now available, in real-time. Learning from customers is the cornerstone of Customer Development in Lean Startup methodologies and should be not be overlooked.
Increases awareness
The analogy I like to use when describing this phenomenon is: you’re tapping potential customers on the shoulder, making them aware of your company.
Awareness is the first step of the customer acquisition funnel:
Interested prospects follow-back
Also part of the Twitter cyber-culture, people follow-back if they find you to be compelling. And they follow-back even more often than you probably think. If they follow-back, this is usually a good indicator that they are interested in your product or service. You have a bite.
Targeting and Vetting
Okay, enough theory lets put this into practice.
This is a three step process:
- Using Twitters Advanced Search functionality, target the segments that you think would benefit from being a customer of your business.
- Hand pick the individual accounts of the best prospects and connect with them.
- Direct Message the leads that follow you back with a friendly opener.
Good openers can be something along the lines of:
- “Thanks for following back! Glad we connected. Did anything in particular interest you?”
- “Thanks for following back! Happy to connect. Let me know if you have any questions about @ComapanyX”
Key Takeaways
- Twitter is the largest customer data repository existing to-date, with over 120 million people at your disposal.
- Cold calling & TV advertising will still exist as viable customer acquisition channels, however they become less effective overtime due to saturation. This phenomenon is called Channel Decay.
- You must be adding value. The technique described above is definitely not a silver-bullet to customer acquisition and will not work if you’re not knowledgeable and constantly adding value via your Twitter timeline.
Concluding thoughts
Will you take advantage of this open data repository? Will you be the most badass, bleeding-edge marketer at your company or in your industry? Or will you let your competitors run away with these trade secrets?
Would love to hear success stories, or extrapolated thoughts! Tweet at us at @tkornblit, @msavin, or @FlutterHQ.
Happy Hustling.
