Twitip

by LisaMarieDias – follow her @LisaMarieDias

For all the hoopla that surrounds Twitter and the myriad of apps (applications) that have sprung up to help people manage and make sense of it, I haven’t seen a single article singing the praises of Twitter’s basic search tool. And sing they should! The basic search tool that resides in the sidebar of everyone’s Twitter page is one of the quickest and easiest ways to find people, answers, trends and, if used wisely, customers and clients the world over. Here is a brief explanation of how it works and some suggestions for how it can work for you! To begin, it is a search box, just like any other. You type in a term and it searches the Twitterverse, returning, in moments with a list of posts including that word. Now, at first glance, this may not seem impressive – Google has spoiled us so badly that short of bring us a cup of coffee with the list of results, we just aren’t going to be impressed. But the power here is that through this box, we are able to essentially listen in on a zillion mini conversations throughout the world and target those that are about things that are of importance to us. Then we can introduce ourselves and join those conversations! Used wisely, this tool really can, pretty much, introduce you to a world of potential customers and clients.

Suppose you have a high end snowboard and ski shop. You sell equipment both in a brick and mortar location (a store) and over the internet. Type the word “skiing” in the search box and voila, you have literally pages and pages of people talking about skiing. Ditto on the term ‘snowboard’. I tried this as an experiment today and, since it is September, there were a lot of people still tweeting about water skiing but, being that the Twitterverse is truly worldwide, there were also posts by a lucky few that were enjoying some beautiful Spring skiing. And there were plenty of people already talking about snow skiing, about their ski plans and even about ski and snowboard equipment. As you can imagine, you could also plug in a key destination like ‘Vail’, a company who’s equipment you carry or a term like ‘Alpine’ and each search would give you literally dozens of people that are skiers and snowboarders, many, if not all of them, potential customers!

Now, you just need to decide which of these people you would like to introduce yourself to. Read through the posts and see which seem like a good match. Are there people you can help, people that could use your advice? If some guy is talking about buying a board that is known to be unstable in some way – you can reach out and mention that. Or your shop offers it at a great price – share that too! Someone may be tweeting about having a hard time finding equipment because she is really tall – you can send her an article you wrote about that or hook her up with a product line that specializes in big and tall items. You can do this by hitting ‘reply’ to the post, or, if you are both following each other, via direct message. Keep in mind that these posts can only be 140 characters long or less so if you want to share more info, you will need to follow each other and share your email address via direct message.

Someone that posted “I hate skiing” or “I dread the snow” may appear in your search results but is probably not someone that you need to reach out to. But if they are talking about how they can’t wait to start skiing or if they are out shopping for a new snowboard, you may want to contact them. The great thing about this tool is that you decide which conversations to join!

You can start to ‘follow’ some of these potential customers to get to know them better and to start a relationship. To ‘follow’ someone, you click on their @name (this is their username, it may not be their real name) which take you to their Twitter ‘page’ where you can click on the button below their icon that says ‘follow’.

Then you need to make sure that you keep up your end of the conversation as well. Post links to interesting snow sport related articles, new product, Mass Unfollow People You Follow, info and tips on finding the right equipment. Post snow reports and anything else that might be of interest. The idea is to build a relationship but even more importantly, to share your expertise and to let them get to know you. And to make sure that someone out there using the search box to look for snow sport equipment, can find you!

Depending on how much time and energy you want to devote to this effort, you could potentially gather hundreds of people to ‘follow’ at which time you would probably want to utilize an application like TweetDeck or one of the other ‘follower management’ tools to keep track of who you are following and which are potential customers.

The next step is to convert these followers to customers. To facilitate this transition, I would suggest creating a page on your website with a special “Twitter follower” coupon geared to encourage people to walk into your store and another for discounts on online purchases. You can then offer these to your potential customers by simply ‘replying’ to one of their posts or, if they are following you back, via direct message. To do this you can just write a note and post the url of the page that has the offer. If these people have grown to know and trust you, they will follow the link, driving traffic to your site and hopefully to your stores – both online and off!

And all of this because of the humble little search box. Let us all take a moment to give thanks!