6 Effective Ways to Use Twitter as a Lead Generation Tool

As you may or may not now, Twiter is a hot social networking community right now. According to the Compete, in November, 2008 Twitter had approximately 3,478,239 people visiting the site. Twitter grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

So how can you harness all this growth into a relationship building system for lead generation or joint venture alliances? How do you provide value, direction, and an authoritative impression in the minds of your followers?

Here are 6 effective ways that I've found to contribute to the Twitter community that can be beneficial to your business or consulting practice.

1. Target your market to follow the right people

Ask yourself, "Who's my ideal client?" Once you define your target market, finding other people who share an affinity for your products and services is much easier. Twitter may have over 3.5 million users, but that's not your audience. More than likely your universe is much smaller than that. Even if you're in abroad spectrum market such as "online marketing" or "social networking specialist" you've got to narrow down your focus to a definable niche, industry or demographic.

Instead of being a "social networking consultant" to all companies, being more to less is a smart idea. For example, narrow your target audience or define a specific program for Graphic Designers who want to increase their sales by using social media. Once you've got your target market clearly defined, you go can use Twitter based tool sites such as TwitterGroups or the Twitter advanced search page, to find other Twitter pages that contain specific keywords to find specific people.

2. Offer actionable advice

Once you define your target audience and search them out, you should be focusing your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares, and problems that your target audience may have. Focus your Twitter posts (tweets) on providing useful and actionable solution to problems that your ideal clients are facing.

You don't want to use blatant sales pitches here. Remember, your objectives are to offer advise, direction, and act as an authoritative source of answers to your target market. Offer them advice (not just rehashed information), case studies, software, specialized articles, etc. Anything that may help them do their jobs better, easier, faster, more efficient or provide them a higher level of achievement, joy, and satisfaction.

3. Use your 140 characters wisely

Just because your have 500, 1,000, or 5,000 followers doesn't mean they're all going to read your tweets. It's human nature to only be interested in things, ideas, and tweets that are important, interesting, or provide value to what's going on in your follower's life at this moment. So consider what your followers want to hear about. This goes back to number one on our list. Targeting your market. If we're searching out a specific audience, your tweets are essentially your headline.

The reason why someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet to find the benefit that you've promised in your headline. Don't just write, "marketing ideas for Graphic Designers". Even though you're talking to a specific group of people, the phrase "marketing services" is vague, undefined, and abstract. Use a more defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet, such as "Traffic conversion best practices for Graphic Designers". See the difference, one is a general blanket statement, yet the other is focused to solve specific problem that your target marketing may be facing.

4. Your offer and call to action

Obviously you can't provide much of a solution within 140 characters. So providing a link back to your site, ideally your Blog first before directing them from Twitter to another site. Think about your end objective here. If you're trying to build your opt-in list, then posting your tweet with a link to another website defeats the purpose. What I like to do is write my tweet as a Blog post on my site first, then copy and paste my Blog post link into the tweet box. This way, I have the opportunity to get a new or returning visitor to my Blog where I can provide useful solutions to their problems or concerns, but I can also present them with the option of joining my opt-in list. You can see an example of this on my Blog if you click here.

5. Frequency of your tweets

If your serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, you're going to have to tweet a minimum of 3 times a day. I'd suggest once in the morning, once midday, and one at night. Reason being is that your target audience is online at different parts of the day. If your followers have a large following of themselves, your tweet will only be seen by a small fraction of your followers.

6. Tracking your results

One way that I've found to track your tweet subjects is by naming your Blog post the same as what your use for your tweet post. I suggest you use Google Analytics to track your website traffic. It's very in-depth, easy to use and it's free. All you have to do is copy and paste your Javascript code into your Blog page header and every page on your site will be tracked.

If you don't know how to do this your Webmaster can set this up for you in less then 10 minutes. By doing this you'll know exactly how many visitors you've gotten to visit your site and your can test different tweet topics to see which ones generate more clicks for you.