How To Use Twitter Search To Find Real Customers For Your Business

Now that we are beyond the days of social media being perceived as just a fad, it’s time to look at how you can actually utilize social media for your business. This means using social media to find real customers for your company.

There are over 170 million active Twitter users (as of July, 2012) and over 6.9 million DAILY Twitter users just on mobile devices alone, it’s time that you tap into this source of leads for new business.

Monitoring Keywords On Twitter To Find New Business Leads

There are many Twitter tools available that will help you monitor what people are saying. You can use something as simple as the Twitter Search tool to expensive, complicated tools like Radian 6. To keep things simple, I’ll show you today one tool that can do the trick very well. It’s simple and free. It’s a Twitter search tool called Topsy. You don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it.

How To Use Twitter Search To Find Real Customers With Topsy

Topsy is a great search tool to find potential customers around the web, especially on Twitter.

All you need to do is go to their website, enter in your keywords and boom, you see anyone posting on Twitter about things you can help them with. This is where having a blog on your business’s website comes in handy. Instead of sending them a Tweet response that is spammy, won’t help them and won’t get them to want to engage with your company, you can share a link from your website that will solve their problem. Let’s put this into story form so it’s easier for you to imagine.

Imagine you are an HVAC company (heating, ventilation and air conditioning). That doesn’t seem like a very tech-world, social media savvy industry, right? Well, guess who is on social media? People with broken heaters that you can fix! A quick search for “broken heater” on Topsy returns 28 results in the last two days (at the time of writing). This means 28 people posted publicly to Twitter that their heaters are broken. How can you leverage this without coming on too strong with sales?

Reply to their complaint about the broken heater with a link to an article on your website about the top 4 reasons heaters stop working or 3 ways consumers can fix their heater quickly. Now you are providing them with a simple solution that may help them fix their heater or understand the problem. It will also now position you as the heating expert, give them your contact information (being your Twitter profile or your website) and become an actual lead for your business.

Since this person is obviously an active social media user, what do you think will happen when you are able to fix their heater and warm them up? They’re going to share your information within their social media circles, expanding your brand awareness and building your credibility. By doing a quick Twitter search on Topsy, you were now able to land a job and turn a complete stranger into someone who will now refer all of their friends to your company.

Too Lazy To Search Twitter To Find New Customers?

You can even set up customer email alerts with Topsy so that all you do is go and search once, then they will email you whenever you want with an update on anyone posting about your targeted search terms. There are no excuses for not using Topsy to find new customers on Twitter.

Create email alerts with Topsy to have Twitter search results sent right to your inbox.

Have You Used Topsy Or Another Twitter Search Tool?

What has your experience been using Twitter search to engage with potential customers? Good, bad ugly? Leave comments below and tell your story.

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Leave a Comment:

3 Steps For Using Content Marketing To Fuel Your Social Media Strategy | Tresnic Media says November 26, 2012

[…] a free Twitter search tool like Topsy, you can monitor keywords of what people are saying (it also can search throughout the social web beyond just Twitter). If you set up an alert system […]

Vernon Niven says December 30, 2012

Without location-based search, Topsy results are probably too noisy for most local businesses.

Location search is available in many paid monitoring tools and in Twitter advanced search.

If you are really serious about prospecting for customers on Twitter, check out NeedTagger (our new platform). NeedTagger is a purpose-built customer prospecting platform that goes beyond the limitations of keyword search tools like Topsy, but doesn’t cost a fortune. You can search for business opportunities by location, profile and conversation type (intent), in addition to keywords. We offer a special purpose engagement panel, unique prospecting analytics and a free app in Hootsuite. Free to try.

Todd Giannattasio says December 31, 2012

Very valid point, Vernon. I reference Topsy in this article because it’s extremely simple for a layperson to checkout and set up in a few minutes. You can certainly use something like Hootsuite as well to monitor your keywords and add in a location for more relevance.

NeedTagger looks interesting, I’ll have to check it out. Thanks for the comment!