Looking to find your target customers online and get them to follow your brand? Try this Twitter Tip.
Utilizing Twitter’s Advanced Search Page, you can find your customers using keywords, conversational phrases, positive or negative sentiment, distance from a location, and more. Not to mention, creativity reigns. Creative keywords, phrases, and tactics will get you closer to your real customers, and can eliminate keywords that yield irrelevant results.
We recently utilized this functionality for one of our clients by typing in key phrases for the client’s product, and product category, and found a whole host of target customers posting to twitter about the product, category, and industry in real time. It was valuable, to say the least.
Using this tool, and others like Tweetdeck, CoTweet, etc., we now have a funnel of target customers to follow and interact with. Furthermore, by interacting with these customers while they are talking about said product category, we are making a relevant brand connection. We have found this strategy not only helps us understand how often conversations take place about our clients product, but also results in a higher incidence of consumers following their brand back.
If you are new to Twitter, begin by finding the right tools to listen in on conversations and identifying target consumers. Start with the free tools mentioned above to get used to listening and interacting. As you get more sophisticated, you can consider more robust listening tools like Radian6 and ScoutLabs. However, for your everyday identification and participation, the above tools and strategy work great.