Don’t be surprised if I tell you that Twitter has surpassed LinkedIn when it comes to using social media for sales. According to a research done by Kitedesk, Twitter emerged as slightly more valuable network than LinkedIn specifically for sales prospecting. Because of the informal setting of Twitter, it’s perfectly alright to interact with unknown people based on their interest, complaints and problems. Moreover the real-time nature of Twitter helps salespersons to connect and engage with prospects instantly—a great way to make your existence known to the prospects.  For example, if you are selling copywriting  services, Twitter can tell you if someone is tweeting about the same in the real time. The whole idea revolves around finding relevant people who are posting content that would probably make them qualify as your buyer, partner or industry influencer.

Treat this is a platform that helps you make initial introduction. If they seem to qualify as your prospect, you can take it to LinkedIn to do more research and start with professional engagement. Let’s now check out the two social selling tips along with some of the use cases:

1. Advanced Search

Apart from the basic search tool, Twitter also has an advanced search tool in the web app. It helps you search by taking detailed parameters like words, people, place, date and sentiment. Here is the link to access the same:

https://twitter.com/search-advanced

Check out the official help doc for more information on the advanced search. Apart from this you can also use the search operators (similar to Google search operator) to make advanced queries from any Twitter search box. Here is the table containing all the special operators:

Sales Prospecting

Find Prospects

If you are a digital agency looking for new project related to app development specifically in New York, you could use “All these words” and “Near this place” for an advanced search. Here is how it would look:

Here is a sample result:

Also it is a good idea to search for specific keyword like “any advice“, “any recommendation“, “any suggestion“, etc. to search for people looking help in your domain. Seize the opportunity by instantly tweeting to the prospects and get into their awareness set.

Analyse Engagement

Check out how you have been engaging with a prospect by using “From these accounts” and “To these account”.

Monitoring Competitors

Often people take it to twitter to express their grievances and that makes it easy for anyone to find out unhappy customer of the competitor. Also because of the openness of the platform, one can see the accounts targeted by competitors.

Sentiment about Competitor

When you find out an unhappy customer of your competitor, simply tweet about your solution and communicate the benefit. Use “Mentioning these accounts” and “Negative sentiment :(” to find out those tweets.

Competitor’s Target

Say if you have found out the sales reps of your competitor (from the website or LinkedIn), you could check out the tweets your competitor has been sending to different accounts and the associated conversation. Closely look at the accounts mentioned in the tweets and that should give you a fair idea of the accounts targeted by the competitor. Use “From these accounts” to perform the search.

News

If you come across a news about your competitor which can give you a competitive advantage or something that gives them competitive advantage, you’d definitely want to change your strategy. After performing a search, click on news from the “More Options” drop-down to check out what the news sites are saying.

Gaining Domain Knowledge

Twitter is great for finding out articles that are getting shared in the real-time, just enter the topic in “All these words” and “http” in “This exact phrase”. Here is an example to search for articles related to “lead generation”.

You can also use the trick shared by labanol.org to find out popular tweets related to a particular topic. For example if I want to find tweets related to “digital marketing” with minimum 30 retweets, I’ll use the following search query:

digital marketing min_retweets:30

Similarly for the tweets with minimum 30 favorites, “digital marketing min_faves:30” can be used.

Creating Saved Search

You can save up to 25 search queries. It is great for storing frequently performed searches and using them later on to save time. Click on “Save” by opening up the “More Options” drop-down.

2. Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists help you to eliminate any irrelevant content/person and focus on significant people. Use can use Twitter lists to create list of your prospects, partners and industry influencers. These lists can be used to monitor what they are sharing, understand their pain points, engage with them and create foundation to move them to the next sales stage.

Competitor list can also be created to gain insights into their approach, messaging and the customers targeted by them. As these lists can be either private or public, competitor/prospect lists must be marked as private.

Example:

In B2B sales,  you can create a list of decision makers of your deal and regularly interact with them as per your expertise and interest. You could also set up lists according to their position in the sales funnel including qualified leads, dormant leads and the leads who would need nurturing.

Now that you’re familiar with these tips, it’s time to implement them in your sales strategy.