How to Target your Prospects on Twitter

If you’re selling to the general public, Twitter can be a great way to connect with your target audience. First of all, you need to know who your target market is and also give some thought as to how they phrase their tweets

So, if you’re a catering company and you want to increase the number weddings you cater for, then searching out newly engaged couples would probably be a good idea. A common tweet for this kind of life event would be “Congratulations to Sandra and Bob on their engagement”. For a search to work effectively you need to use just 2 or 3 words – fewer than this and your results will be too general, many more than this and you won’t get much of a result.

So from my example tweet, take out the words that are unnecessary or could be changed. For instance, I often type congrats and not congratulations, so I would leave that word out. Also take out the small insignificant words and the names (unless you only want to work with people called Sandra & Bob!) What you’re left with is “their engagement”.

You can translate this into whatever your target market is. If you’re a plumber, you could look for people complaining about a dripping tap, if you’re a hypnotherapist wanting to work with people who would like to lose weight, maybe you could search for people tweeting about having a fat day?

When you’ve followed people that are in your target market, how you proceed will depend on how they’ve phrased their tweet. Do they have an immediate need? You could jump right in there, or maybe you could ask a friend to recommend you? Recommendations by someone else are so much more powerful than us selling ourselves, don’t you think?

Going back to the engagement scenario, I would create a Twitter list of people to keep in touch with, by clicking on the head and shoulders icon next to the blue following button, and then clicking on add or remove from lists and following the instructions. I’d then engage with them, comment on their tweets, answer their questions, and, when the time is right, when their need becomes more pressing, you can offer your services, or, as I suggested before, get a friend to recommend you.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on…

If all of this sounds like too much effort, I often do just the background work for clients. So I do the searches and create the lists and my clients do the engaging, or, I also take on the engaging and take it right up to the point where there is a potential sale. At this point, I would hand over to my client for the negotiations to take place. Maybe we could help you?