The most valuable, untapped, feature on Twitter is the opportunity to build lists.
Segmentation and advanced Recency-Frequency-Monetary analysis, RFM , is possible when you build lists.
Considering that Twitter is quickly becoming a sales and marketing channel the equal of traditional channels like postal-email-phone, it is time for businesses to create lists of their prospective and current consumers that choose Twitter as a channel for communication. Building Twitter lists begin with two steps:
Identifying Your Customers & Prospects on Twitter
- Email Addresses: extract and build a list of the email addresses of your customers from your database
- Data Append: utilizing your list of customer email addresses, contract a data append service to find the social network (Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn) url addresses of customers who have adopted Twitter and other networks
- Data Search: use Google or Twitter Search to input keywords or names of your customers. Example- Google search Dean Guadagni on Twitter or Dean Guadagni: Twitter.com to find Dean Guadagni's Twitter url aka handle
- Prospect Search: input keywords that will identify real time conversations on Twitter relevant to your business. Record the Twitter url of each prospective customer and build a list of these prospects
Building Twitter Lists
- Customer List: build a master list of the customers you currently service who communicate on Twitter. Note- Lock this list for your eyes only so that no competitor can view the list
- Segment: from the master Customer List segment your customers into different lists such as location, clients, prospects, most active purchasers, etc.
- Engage: send a tweet to your customer or prospect bundled around an offer to entice them to follow your Twitter account if they are not following
Benefits
- New Touch Points: identifying customers and prospects who use Twitter provides businesses a new place to communicate and deliver offers
- Database Enrichment: adding social media information to your database increases the value of your database
- Measurement & Analysis: building Twitter lists is the first step in creating a measurement strategy that will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of Twitter as a sales and marketing channel for your business
About the Author: Dean Guadagni
Dean Guadagni is the Business Director for Inner Architect a direct marketing firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dean's focus is the integration of social media with direct marketing. He is a Twitter, Facebook, and blog consultant in the wine industry.
