Then you might be interested in the following 11-minute demonstration video, which shows how to use the NeedTagger app in HootSuite to monitor Twitter for three types of business opportunities:

1. Sales prospects – 1 stream per region
2. Customer complaints – 1 stream per product line
3. People who need your content – 1 stream per topic or blog post

NeedTagger is an intent marketing (filtering) platform that helps you find and connect directly with people who need your content, products and assistance right now.

Our apps help front-line sales and marketing professionals save time and stay focused on social selling, content marketing and customer support activities.

Our API-based data processing service (in private beta) helps marketers gain deeper insights into their market and extract actionable events from noisy social streams.

Already use NeedTagger?  then:

• Log into NeedTagger to see who needs your stuff right now.

• Learn how to build your business in 3 ways using NeedTagger

• Upgrade to a PAID PLAN to access 5X more opportunities.

  Check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

 

The post How To Mine Twitter for Prospects & Customer Issues using HootSuite [video demonstration] by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

Based on a unique commencement speech made by author David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, the video points out that tedious, mind-numbing, personally risky & difficult jobs – like social selling and prospecting can be – don’t have to wear you down.

In fact, the same tasks that drive you crazy right now can inspire you to succeed and thoroughly enjoy your job – if you think about them, and your role in the world, in the right way.

This video was produced after David Wallace’s untimely death in 2008.

(thanks to Matt Bertuzzi of the Bridge Group for sharing this video today)

The post Social Selling is Like Water [video] by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

Today, blogging, social sharing and marketing automation are filling the marketplace with content – and most of it is crap.

In response, your customers and prospects are starting to use apps like Flipboard to filter the crap out of their media streams – then sharing only the best with others.

What is your strategy for dealing with this shift in buyer behavior?

 For more articles like this, check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

 

Content Marketing Takes Off

During the past five years, content marketing has become a respected field in marketing. Spending on content marketing technologies is surging – dramatically:

• The Content Marketing Institute reports that 45% of marketers will increase their content marketing budgets in 2013; the CMI now has 38,000 subscribers
• eMarketer says that content marketing has become the top digital marketing priority for 2013
• AdAge reports that 81% of marketers have content marketing in their budgets for 2013

The adoption of content as a marketing tool is a big reason that marketing automation vendors like Hubspot, Demandforce, Marketo and Eloqua (now Oracle) are growing like weeds:

• Hubspot recently announced that sales of its all-in-one inbound marketing suite rose 82% in the past 12 months to $52 million. Total customers increased 42%, indicating strong pricing power.
• In Marketo’s IPO filing, just released, they reported 80% growth on $58 million.

All of a sudden, it seems that companies of all stripes are hungry to learn content publishing, targeting and distribution practices.  Their aim?  to create and market timely, quality content in a coordinated fashion across multiple digital channels including email, web, mobile and social. So customers find them, instead of the other way around.

Blame It On Google

Google started all of this when they launched PageRank and created the first content marketing industry: Search Engine Marketing.

For the first time ever in a public setting, Google offered a convenient way to both find the content we need and to market our content (website) to those who need it.

Today, Google understands and benefits greatly from the shift in behavior they enabled.

Google also knows that content marketing and social media are tightly linked during branding, shopping and research activities. This is why they continue to tweak their page rank algorithms to prioritize high-quality content that is frequently shared by others.  The Penguin release in April, 2012, focused on prioritizing quality content, and the more recent Panda release started incorporating social signals into search engine rankings.

Google’s adoption of social signals is huge. It forces businesses to start sharing ever-increasing amounts of high quality content in social media – or risk losing the attention of their market.

I think the recent Google algorithm changes is the biggest reason every business is now scrambling to get their content/inbound marketing act together. So blame them.

The End of Cold Calls?

It is clear that buyer behavior is changing in most industries. And the pace of change seems to be accelerating.

In our personal quest for economic independence (and better deals), we all seem to be choosing to rely more and more on web sites, search engines and social networks to guide our decision making.

Ask any B2B marketing or sales professional, and they will tell you that an increasing number of prospects are ignoring sales calls in favor of researching their options online.

Ask any consumer brand marketer, and they will tell you about the declining effectiveness of traditional media and direct mail.

Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for people who hate cold calls (on either side).

The Rise of Marketing Automation

To meet the demand for more efficient content marketing, over 20 marketing automation vendors including, Marketo, Hubspot, Eloqua and DemandForce now offer sophisticated platforms that help companies of all sizes manage email interactions, publish and track content and manage social media marketing in an integrated fashion.

Their common business purpose is to help marketers create and distribute high-quality content to the right audience at the right time, with lead capture features and metrics for every step in the conversion process.

But, as VentureBeat recently explained, there is a dark side to marketing automation: by making it easier for more companies to publish more content more frequently, every potential customer now now must sift through a LOT more content in social streams and in search engine results.

Social Sharing Ups the Ante

Due to the content-sharing behavior that buttresses most social networks, it’s only natural that social media marketing, content marketing and marketing automation are all joined at the hip.

Today, most marketers know that if you’ve published good quality content on your website or blog, then you ought to be sharing it in social media as much as possible.

But marketing content to search engines is quite different than marketing content in social media.

Search engines wait for someone to ask them a question; social media streams are endless rivers of content that flow fast. Keeping your message in front of a socially-active audience takes a lot of timing and publishing skill – and reams of fresh content.

In other words, social sharing has increased the content marketing challenge by at least one order of magnitude.

Now that social media marketing is becoming a standard budget line item, marketing automation vendors are beginning to add social prospecting and social publishing features.  For example,

• Marketo, Eloqua and Hubspot offer social media publishing and content sharing features.
• Most marketing automation tools offer social network/account integration features like follow-me buttons in emails, one-click publishing of content to social networks and traffic analytics for social media posts.
• Leading marketing automation vendor, Act-On, offers a keyword-based tool called Twitter Prospector that customers seem to love (see comments on blog post)
• Hubspot recently released their Social Inbox tool that lets you follow your marketing contacts in social media, and when they use certain keywords
• LooptFuse (a marketing automation platform) and NearStream (a social media lead monitoring tool) recently merged their companies
• Hubspot and HootSuite recently announced #ClosedLoopSocial, a product integration designed to improve content marketing and lead generation efforts around existing contacts

How Much Content Can We Take?

Using marketing automation and content marketing technologies, now any business can be both a publisher and a distributor of content in multiple channels. In social networks, a single piece of content can get shared 100s of times a day.

But:  in a world where personal attention is limited – and the volume of content is exploding – how does one compete?

Velocity Partners recently published a humorous but spot-on analysis of where we are headed next in content marketing.  It paints a picture of a market FLOODED WITH CONTENT, where only the absolute best will attract attention.  The rest will be white noise.

If you want confirmation of this, take a look at what the most successful social media brands are doing today.

James Gross, co-founder of digital content-marketing startup Percolate, noted:

Red Bull is creating 100-200 tweets per day. It’s a leading indicator of where brands have to go. I’m fine with the newsroom metaphor [for brand marketing] if it leads us to brands creating more relevant content.

But here’s the rub for most marketers:  not everyone can create high quality content all the time.  Not everyone can be the life of the party.

Jane! stop this crazy thing!

Fast-forward this trend a few years, and it becomes clear that there will be waayyy more content flying past our eyes than we’ll ever have time to consume.

The implication of this crappy content conundrum is easy to see.

The long-term challenge for marketers is not to publish great content.  The real challenge is on the demand side:  how will we get our content through personal media filters?

In other words, you can push all the great content you want onto the web and out to customers via email, but if people aren’t searching the web or checking their emails for fresh content any more, it’s not doing you much good.

And this is exactly what’s happening.

Get Ready To Be Filtered

The competition for who gets to filter media for our consumption is fierce.

Over the past 100 years, responsibility for filtering & curating the media we consume has moved all the way from the supply side to the demand side of the media supply chain.

Control over media has moved from authors; to publishing conglomerates,  distributors & retailers (Amazon & Comcast); and, to digital media aggregators (Huffington Post and Netflix).  Most recently, control has begun shifting to social networks (Facebook).

On established social networks like Facebook and Twitter, we are already past the content saturation point for most users.  Consider:  

• If we actually saw all of the content shared with us by our friends and the Likes we have access to on Facebook, we would quickly be overwhelmed by our Newsfeed.  So, Facebook uses EdgeRank to throttle the messages we receive from our friends. 
• On Twitter, power users receive thousands of tweets an hour in their stream. So they rely on tools like HootSuite and NeedTagger to filter the fire hose for signal.
• To try and retain their position as media curators for their users, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook continue to re-design their interfaces to provide a more efficient media consumption experience.

Today, the consumer is assuming control.

The widespread availability of personal media curation apps like Pinterest, Tumblr and Flipboard are making it easy for your prospects and customers to filter and curate their own media streams.

Why go to ANY website for your content, when you can carry a media curation app around in your pocket?

Given the extraordinarily fast rise in users of these apps, it seems pretty clear that people like controlling what they read.

For example, take Flipboard.

(Full Disclosure: I am an investor in Flipboard).

Flipboard’s recent 2.0 release ups their game as a mobile-friendly way for people to filter (curate) any type of content, then share what they like best back to their personal networks (ie, stronger social signals). Using Flipboard 2.0, I can follow people I trust and subscribe to topical magazines published by professional curators to get all of the content I need – music, video, photos, short form and long form content, whatever. I can even shop there.

Personal curation platforms are booming as a category. Twitter (+200mm users in 7 yrs), Flipboard (+60mm users in 3 yrs), Pinterest (+40mm in 3 yrs) and Tumblr are redefining how people find and consume content in all its forms.

This shift in behavior is occurring really quickly, too. For example, Flipboard just announced they grew from 20 million to over 50 million users in the past 6 months.  Flipboard is a mobile-only app!

Perhaps most ominous is the fact that Google is clearly trying to eliminate the need for people to search for content (at all).  As evidence, check out Google’s announcements at I/O 2013.

google-io-keynote-2013 by Mashable

Google is clearly working hard to enable consumer experiences that are best described as serendipitous (one term for this type of technology is ambient intelligence).

Google expects us to all rely upon a select few web services who know what we want to deliver important content and information to us, when we need it. Without forcing us to search or ask for it.

Features like this are already embedded in many of Google’s strategy platforms such as G+, Google Glass, Google Now, etc.

How Should Marketers Respond?

In our opinion, there are three competencies that modern marketers must master to thrive in an era of customer-filtered content, as follows:

1. Content Curation: build strong in-house content curation (not just publishing) skills, so you can publish the Flipboard magazines and Pinterest Boards your target market wants to follow.

2. Customer Acquisition (Digital Direct Marketing): get very good at mining web apps, personal curation platforms and social networks for customers. This means getting really good at data mining (identifying prospects you want to target), maintaining an active presence on every network that matters to your business; and, buying native ads on the apps and networks your customers use most.

3. Real-Time Marketing Optimization: you must ensure that you rank high in the search-like web services that your target customers rely on for real time/personalized recommendations – services such as Google Now or anything built on top of Google Search, for example. Many of the principles of SEO will remain sound (great quality content, domain authority, etc.).  But traditional SEO will no longer be enough.  You are going to have to get to know each web service and social network on an intimate basis, and you’ll have to optimize each according to your unique requirements.

The age of content marketing and noisy streams has arrived. Your customers and buyers are finding new ways to filter-out your content. What is your strategy for dealing with this change in buyer behavior?

How We Can Help

NeedTagger is a customer acquisition platform that helps marketers sift through noisy social streams to identify meaningful customer engagement opportunities for their business.

Our approach is the exact opposite of “spray and pray”; instead, we help you find and connect with people who actually need your content, products, services and assistance right now.

The post The Flipboard Effect: What If They Never See Our Content? by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

Using Twitter to generate leads and meet sales prospects isn’t hard, but takes a bit of practice.  

Since launching NeedTagger in 2012, we’ve helped 2,500 businesses find and connect with new customers on Twitter.  Along the way, we’ve learned a few things about the right and wrong ways to use Twitter as a customer acquisition channel.

This post summarizes the top 10 best practices (in our opinion) and provides links to examples and other resources that should save you time and help you get better results.

Happy prospecting!

1. Respect the 3 Golden Rules of Social Prospecting, which are:

• be your authentic, awesome self at all times
• share helpful information as often as possible
• don’t sell too much.

Regarding selling too much: offering coupons and deals does work for some product and service categories – as long as the “buying signal” is obvious and strong.

When broadcasting information from your account, don’t send more than a small handful of Call To Action (CTA) messages per day.  CTA messages are posts to a person that directly incite purchasing action from him/her. If you post CTAs more frequently than a few times a day, then your regular followers may view you as spammy.

For all other new business opportunities you find on Twitter, your best strategy is to engage with your prospect as if you just met her at a dinner party or a public event.  That means you should: be friendly; don’t hard-sell; be helpful if you can; share your business card (follow them), and compliment them if you sincerely like what they said (retweet them).

2. Create special-purpose customer prospecting streams for your business

If you want to minimize the amount of time you spend hunting for leads, then you need to learn how to filter Twitter for the types of opportunities you are looking for.

There are many different types of prospecting streams you might setup to mine social media for potential customers.  Some examples include:

• People explicitly seeking your type of product or service
• People requesting help and information to solve problems that your company/products/services solve every day
• People complaining about your competitors’ brands, products and people by name
• People of a certain job title and/or work for a particular company discussing topics relevant to your business

Depending on how you organize your sales and marketing efforts, you may want to create multiple geo-targeted streams for each of the above, or create one stream for each product family you offer, etc.

So how does one create a “prospecting stream”?

Use the right tools.

Many leading social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite (free version), SproutSocial (free to try), ViralHeat (paid), and SalesForce MarketingCloud (paid) let you to set up persistent keyword-filtered streams that constantly search Twitter for posts containing the keywords that matter to your business.  Some offer location search, as well.

You can also use Twitter Advanced Search or SocialMention, although in our experience these tools don’t give you the best coverage and limit you with respect to location and profile search.

Unfortunately, keyword-filtered streams often suffer from “noise overload”. In other words, the vast majority of posts found are not relevant leads.  This wastes time and leads to missed opportunities.  It’s a big reason a lot of people give up on sales prospecting on Twitter.

The solution is to step up to more advanced “intent-mining” tools like NeedTagger.  Our tool was developed specifically for customer prospecting and uses profile-matching and natural language processing technologies to identify more opportunities and to filter-out spam and noise.  In addition to keyword search, we look for the right types of people in your market who are expressing needs related to your type of business.

This tutorial shows how NeedTagger works. 

The key benefits of intent-marketing tools are:

1. they save you time, because they filter-out a lot of noise and spam from your prospecting streams; and,
2. they uncover new business opportunities that keyword-based tools will miss (like implied needs)

We offer a free version of NeedTagger that you can play with, to see what it might do for you.

3. Follow first!

Start every day by scanning your streams and following as many likely customer prospects as you can.

If you use NeedTagger, you can quickly scan each stream and tag potential prospects, then use the “filter by tag” option to get your work queue setup.  Then, follow everyone on your list.  If you want to reach out to them, re-use saved messages and landing page links to speed your outreach.

You should follow prospects even if they are not an immediate sales lead. If they are obviously interested in and discussing your type of product/service, then follow them. Half of them may follow you back.

The reason you want to start your day following potential customers is simple:  if potential customers choose to follow your Twitter account, then you will be able to market to them for FREE on a long term basis.  In addition, you will be able to direct message these prospects with custom offers and use direct messages to answer to sensitive questions not appropriate for public display.

Here are a few things to be careful about when following people on Twitter:

• Don’t un-follow lots of people right after following them (for example, if they don’t immediately return the favor).  Twitter doesn’t like this behavior and may ban your account for spamming practices.
• Watch your follower-to-following ratio.  Some people and software tools view a person who follows many more people than follows them a spammer or a low-quality follower.  This is certainly not always true and it won’t get you banned.

4. Master your introductions. Then re-use the introductions that work.

After you use an intent-marketing tool like NeedTagger for a while, you will notice that a small handful of issues/questions/complaints keep repeating themselves over and over again in your streams, even though they are coming from different people. People are people, after all.

The repeating nature of social intent presents an opportunity to streamline your social prospecting by re-using the intros that work best for each situation, your content and your style.  In other words, there’s no need to custom-craft every outreach message.

To save time, you can save your best messages in NeedTagger (or tools like HootSuite) and reuse them.

Here are a few resources we put together for our customers that will help you make a great first impression:

• 10 ways to introduce yourself to a prospect on Twitter
• gallery of Twitter introductions (on Pinterest)
• Find customers on Twitter using the skills you already have

5. Types of messages you should respond to:

• People talking about you, your products and your people.  Make sure you include these as keywords in your stream definition.
• People using a hashtag you invented for your own business or marketing campaign
• People expressing clear intent or interest in the types of products and services you provide.
• People asking questions about problems you can help them solve.

6. Types of messages you should not respond to:

• People talking about unrelated topics
• People using widely popular hashtags
• People located where your service is unavailable

7. Use caution when:

• Two @names are in the message:  this usually means you are interrupting a conversation.
• People are expressing extreme unhappiness, distress, or anger.  Unless you are truly resolving the root cause of their emotion, you may be entering into an argument.

8. After you send a message, monitor for reactions & replies 

• Continue the conversation when you get responses, even negative ones. People want to know you’re there.
• Only use accounts that are actively managed by you or your social media team.
• Keep your opt-outs obvious and easy

9. Master your use of the @ symbol when formatting messages to send to prospects, as follows:

• Begin your outreach message with the target’s @name to send it to your target.  Everyone who follows your account will see it, too.
• Place your target’s @name in the middle of the post so their followers will see it, too.

10. When sending an unsolicited message to someone on Twitter:

• Be transparent about why you’re responding to them and who you are
• Provide some value to the recipient in your tweet
• Use a single Twitter account in your response.
• Don’t ever use hashtags, marketing slogans or hard sales pitches
• In the UK, Twitter usage requires having “(ad)” in your copy

We hope this list helps your sales prospecting efforts.  Best of luck!

The post 10 Best Practices for Generating Leads and Sales From Twitter by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

In this post we offer examples, facts and figures that will help you frame the size of the Twitter lead generation opportunity for your business.

Regardless of your type of business or market size, it is likely that every day there are at least a handful of new customer engagement opportunities waiting for you on the world’s largest public social network.

Whether you can turn these moments of opportunity into high-quality leads is up to you. But it might help you to know that many of our 2,500 customers have been successful landing new customers from Twitter.  Check out our Pinterest Gallery of Satisfied  customers for a few examples.

 For more articles like this, check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

Twitter’s Role in B2B Selling and Lead Gen

Most B2B marketers agree that Twitter adds SOME value in sales and lead generation, but opinions differ widely regarding what that value is.

Some say Twitter’s value is limited to sharing content and news to attract an audience. Others say it’s great for monitoring your competition. A few even claim you can generate a sale with a single tweet (that’s not been our experience, for what it’s worth).

It is clear that for some B2B organizations, Twitter has proven itself a valuable source of leads.

For example, Marketo uses Twitter Promoted Tweets to generate leads at a fraction of the cost of other social channels.

We believe Twitter’s highest-value role in B2B marketing is in the front-end of the selling process, i.e., social prospecting and lead nurturing.

In our experience, Twitter has proven itself an ideal channel for handling the following activities:

• identifying in-market prospects (by monitoring for people sharing specific needs & issues you can address)
• warming new leads
• establishing yourself as a respected thought leader and problem-solver in your field 
• driving highly qualified traffic to your website
• compressing the sales cycle by tackling the most common questions and issues that stand between you and the deal
• measuring the impact of your content marketing, lead generation and outreach activities.

The scale of Twitter’s B2B lead generation opportunity is also misunderstood: it’s probably a lot larger than you think.

A question we often get from B2B sales & marketing professionals is,

how many NEW customer engagement opportunities exist on Twitter – for a company like mine?

The quickest way to answer this question is to search for people expressing needs related to your business, right now.

But if we take a step back and look at Twitter as a whole, the scale of the B2B lead generation opportunity on Twitter is very large – and poised to grow many times over.

200 Million Unmet Needs (Last Month)

Since early 2012, we’ve been monitoring Twitter for 14 types of tweets that contain commercially-relevant intent (see chart below).

We call these special intent-laden tweets, “needs”.

Our best estimate is that about 3-5% of tweets represent commercially relevant needs.

By “commercially relevant”, we mean that an average sales, customer support or marketing professional would classify the tweet and the person as worthy of further monitoring or worthy of taking some sort of action such as: following, retweeting, sending an outreach message, etc.

In March, 2013, we identified more than 200 million opportunities to engage with people around moments of need. The chart below shows how they break down by type of need.

Note that we aren’t yet mining every possible type of need. Further, we only identify English language opportunities.

14 Types of Commercial Intent on Twitter by NeedTagger (estimated)

In addition to the Types of Needs above, we also mine Twitter for people discussing important Life Events, Trigger Events and more than 60 common household and business purchases.

Specific B2B Examples

So let’s now dive into the industry view of these needs.

Listed in the chart below are a few of the pre-tested sales prospecting filters we offer for B2B customers today.

The stream volumes below identify explicit buying signals – they do not find tweets containing other forms of intent, such as people asking questions, complaining, offering opinions, etc.

B2B opportunities available on Twitter (sample)

As you can see, the volume of B2B needs expressed on Twitter is large enough to interest most B2B social selling professionals.

Keep in mind that only about 16% of the US population uses Twitter today, and the number of active users and number of tweets posted each day is increasing rapidly.

The list above represents a small slice of the opportunities we’ve identified for our B2B customers, because the majority of our users don’t use pre-tested streams – they build custom-filtered streams for their business using our self-service apps.

Here are a few examples of B2B prospecting streams created by our users:

B2B Leads – NeedTagger customer streams (examples)

It is important to note that the vast majority of commercial needs expressed on Twitter each day are overlooked by most businesses.

This is partially because Twitter is young, but it’s also because even socially-savvy business professionals believe Twitter is too noisy to get any business value from it – other than following the news. 

LinkedIn Is the King of B2B Social Selling

LinkedIn is widely considered the king of social prospecting for most B2B industries today and for good reason: professional networking is the best means of getting introduced to a potential client or customer for most B2B companies.

In addition, the conversion rate of traffic sourced from LinkedIn seems to be higher than other networks.  A recent Hubspot study revealed that LinkedIn traffic converts 277% better than Twitter.

Hubspot conversion rate survey 2012

But… You Can’t Connect With Everyone

That said, the reality is that most of your socially-active sales prospects are not directly connected to you on any private social network like LinkedIn. Most never will be (is our guess).

This may sound hard to believe, but do the math for your LinkedIn account right now:

• how many companies and sales prospects (people) likely exist on LinkedIn for your business/market?  
• how many of them are directly connected to your account right now?

If you are connected directly to more than 10% of your potential buyers on LinkedIn, then you are way ahead of most.

The other shortcoming of LinkedIn is its limited use: the vast majority of people do not visit LinkedIn every day.  Many don’t check it weekly.

Why Twitter Is the ‘Queen’ of Social Selling

If LinkedIn is your social selling rolodex, then Twitter is your 24-7 business conference.

Twitter users are more active than LinkedIn users. Active Twitter users check their streams several times a day, and heavy users post every hour. This means that if your prospect uses Twitter, then you have more opportunities to engage with him or her.

Twitter is also much more open, and thus easier to mine for opportunities.  Did you know that over 70% of the world’s publicly-searchable user generated content is posted on Twitter?  The other 30% includes Facebook, LinkedIn, blog posts, discussion forums – you name it.

Taken together, Facebook and LinkedIn contain more user-generated content, but the vast majority of it is not available to you (unless you pay for ads – maybe).  Only a small number of conversations & posts on FB and LI are publicly available for prospecting – and reaching out to people you don’t know is not standard protocol.

This means that Twitter is an ideal place for connecting with people who don’t know you yet – and with people who won’t connect with you anywhere else.  And, as we pointed out earlier, unconnected prospects probably make up 90% of your potential market.

The obvious advantage of using Twitter to generate B2B leads is VOLUME: more opportunities exist to connect with a given prospect each day.

The primary challenge to using Twitter for B2B leads is TIME:  no one can afford to spend all day monitoring busy Twitter streams for opportunities.

The best way to maximize your limited time on Twitter is to quickly identify the tweets and people that matter the most to your business – by filtering-out all of the spam, news and noise that does nothing to drive your business forward.

This is where an intent-marketing tool like NeedTagger can really help.

How We Can Help

NeedTagger helps marketers sift through the noise of Twitter to identify meaningful customer engagement opportunities for their business. We help you find and connect with people who actually need your content, products, services and assistance right now.

The post How Many B2B Leads Can You Get From Twitter? by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

One of your basic objectives as a social sales person should be to establish yourself as a trusted resource and a subject matter expert to your market.  You need to be viewed as a helpful professional whom your prospects and customers can rely on throughout their buying journey.

The following infographic outlines the human communication behaviors that instill trust in other people.

These are useful behaviors to learn, whether communicating online or off.

The list was developed for entrepreneurs but applies equally well to sales and marketing professionals.

 For more articles like this, check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

 

The post How To Build Trust in Others: Critical Social Selling Behaviors by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

The challenges we see professionals struggle with when prospecting customers on Twitter include:

1. not being clear about who you want to connect with (and why)

2. not knowing what to say to a new prospect, and,

3. how to identify new prospects quickly and efficiently.

In this post, we address these three challenges and offer ways to overcome these hurdles. Our expertise is in monitoring conversations on public social networks for leads, so in this post we’ll focus mostly on Twitter as a source of prospects.

We also provide an example from our own social prospecting efforts (last night), to give you a feel for how natural this type of prospecting can be.

 For more articles like this, check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

 

Challenge #1:  who am I trying to meet?

Before attempting to search for potential prospects on Twitter, we strongly recommend that you write-down your prospecting objective in a statement that describes the people you want to connect to.  Use a format similar to this:

People X who need/want/complain about topic Y.

For example, here is one of our social prospecting objectives:

Social selling professionals with Twitter experience who need tools to help them find new prospects.

A lot of new social prospectors struggle to come up with a statement like that. Partially because it immediately begs the following question:

Challenge #2:  what will I say when I find them?

Ah, yes – the introduction. The bane of all prospecting. What do you say?

This second question is where the greatest number of new NeedTagger users get hung up. There are a number of practical reasons for their reluctance, including:

1. fear of being seen as a spammer: this fear, while very common, is greatly overblown for professionals who sincerely seek to help people solve problems (as opposed to sending coupons, useless landing pages and irrelevant links). If you answer the right questions from the right people, you will not be viewed as a spammer.  That said, if you have any doubt at all about how someone might respond to your message, then engage less directly, i.e., follow them, retweet them or list them.

2. lack of content: you don’t have the right links/content to share, so traffic generation seems impossible. Solution: place your landing page URL or your company’s URL in your profile, as a default way of generating traffic.

3. lack of solution-selling knowledge or expertise: you simply aren’t the right person to talk with customers about issues. We see this a lot. For example, marketing specialists aren’t always skilled at selling or answering questions.  Solution: give your sales force the tools they need to prospect directly.

4. inexperience with Twitter:  you don’t know what to say on Twitter (in general).  That’s OK, Twitter is still a new experience for most. The only solution is time – it takes a few weeks to a few months to become skilled at using Twitter naturally. Give yourself this break-in time before pushing for prospects.

5. lack of incentive: you are not tasked to generate new contacts, sales or leads. We see this a lot, too. Again, marketing professionals are often not motivated or told to generate leads or to identify prospects. Very often, their job is to share content (broadcast it) and to generate followers and likes.  NOT the same thing, of course. Solution: give your sales force the tools they need.  Or, train a person or two on your social marketing team to answer questions and to forward posts on to the right sales people.

Being prepared with content, putting the right person on the account, and having the right incentives are issues that any company can address. The rest are personal learning curves.

To help our new users learn what to say, we’ve put together a few online resources:

• 10 Ways to Introduce Yourself to a Prospect On Twitter
• Meet New Customers on Twitter – Using the Skills You Already Have
• A Pinterest Gallery of New Prospect Introductions

Of course, Twitter offers several advantages over “real world” conferences: 

Which leads us to the third challenge: getting your Twitter prospecting streams set up correctly, so you don’t waste hours monitoring noisy streams.

Challenge #3:  how do I find new prospects (without spending all day on Twitter)?

Given Twitter’s relatively low penetration into our society (so far), a social selling professional probably shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes to an hour each day on Twitter.

This means you need some way to avoid monitoring noisy, high-volume streams all day. The ideal solution is to monitor a low-volume stream of high-quality prospects.  

This is where an intent-mining tool like NeedTagger can really help, because keyword-filtered streams are often too noisy (too many irrelevant posts) or too lossy (miss too many opportunities).

The video below explains how to set up three different kinds of prospecting streams on NeedTagger.

You can find more detailed instructions here: http://www.needtagger.com/2nd-home/how-to-use-needtagger/

As you can see, NeedTagger works a little differently than your typical keyword search tool.  We added the concept of “intent” (conversation type) to your search. But filtering by intent makes all the difference.

Still, NeedTagger is easy to master – for those who are ready.

Prospecting on Twitter – An Example

Sales and marketing professionals who’ve mastered social prospecting know first-hand that people on Twitter are actually very receptive to “stranger-experts” stepping-in to help them. This makes sense, as one of the biggest reasons people join Twitter is to find information and connect with new people they can learn from.

Compared with broadcasting content from your account, targeted social prospecting is an order of magnitude more effective in terms of generating useful leads. Our active customers generate 5%-80% click through rates (CTR) on messages sent from NeedTagger.  A typical result is 20-30% CTR.

For example, here is a new connection we made with a prospect – last night:

I found Ron’s post in our NeedTagger stream Sunday night – it was a day old (hey, it was Sunday):

I first checked Ron’s profile out on Twitter – he seemed like a good fit for us: an active/experienced Twitter user, in the right line of work.

Note the LinkedIn URL in his profile. That was helpful.

So I reached out and suggested Ron try our tool (see my message below).

I sent the following outreach from our corporate account.

It’s usually better to initiate a relationships from a personal account, but for this type of opportunity our company account works fine.

Regarding the outreach message itself: notice the lack of a link in my message to Ron.

This prompted Ron to check out our profile.

This is a softer, more respectful way to introduce your business to someone – versus sending them a link.

As you can see, this is a natural way to start a relationship with potential customers on Twitter.

In our case, 100% of our new business has come from organic search, personal networking, partner referrals and social selling.

NeedTagger surfaces the most valuable and actionable engagement opportunities for your business on Twitter. It’s FREE to try - just click the blue button above to start connecting with prospects on Twitter.

The post The 3 biggest challenges to social prospecting and how to overcome them by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

There is growing evidence that adding social prospecting, lead nurturing and relationship building skills to your arsenal will improve your sales performance. Consider what the most recent Social Media and Sales Quota Report found,

In 2012, 72.6% of sales people using social media as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often.

Even if you don’t buy the “quota” argument, your customers are clearly using social media for business – so you’d better learn to interact with them there.

But getting started can be tough.  Software vendors and social media marketing gurus are publishing dozens of articles a day on the subject. Thinly-written & redundant blog posts are piling up so fast it can be tough for someone new to this practice to know where to start.

As Koka Sexton, LinkedIn’s Sr. Manager of Social Marketing, put it in a recent article about the rise of Social Selling:

There are some great people and organizations out there that know a lot about social selling, best practices and ways to implement it, but there are also many people that call themselves experts that are really good at optimizing your LinkedIn profile and that’s the extent of their expertise.

What is “social selling”?

There really is no single definition – it really depends on who you are, what you sell, and how your buyers buy.

You sort of have to dive in and learn by doing.  That’s what the resources below will help you with.

During the past few weeks, I’ve been catching up with some of the leading thinkers, practitioners and best practices in social selling. I’ve learned that there are some excellent, experience-based best practices and how-to guides available online.

The good news is that lot of “social selling” is really just a lot of common sense sales techniques mapped into a new environment with a few new rules and gestures to learn. Plus a bunch of new tools like ours.

But you don’t need tools to become a social sales pro.

This graphic from Julio Viskovich gives you a glimpse of what social selling really is, as suggested by some of the most experienced practitioners today:

SocialSellingGuide 7 pros share their tips – borrowed from www.julioviskovich.com/

Alright, on with the resources.

Listed below are some of the best online sites and resources for the social selling newbie, which probably best characterizes 90% of sales professionals today. So don’t feel alone!

NOTE: This list is intended to be a quick starting point for new practitioners, not an exhaustive library. If you are an expert, then I’m sure I missed a bunch of your favorites. Feel free to suggest more in the Comments section, below.

First Reads

1. “The Future of Selling” is a great long-form read by Brian Fetherstonhaugh (CEO of Ogilvy One) that explains the context of social selling: why is selling changing? how are marketing and sales blending together in completely new ways? with plenty of data that makes it clear that social selling is a skill we’d better all get comfortable with.
2. “What Is Social Selling?” is a brief and easy to digest introduction by Koka Sexton, Sr. Social Marketing Manager at LinkedIn. Maybe a bit too much emphasis on LinkedIn (Koka now works there), but then again LinkedIn is definitely the first network to focus on for most social selling efforts.  Koka has been focused on this subject since 2009, so listen carefully.
3. “The Grande Guide to Social Selling” by Eloqua. Nice broad overview of the terms, technologies and practices involved, with an emphasis on how inbound marketing and sales can work seamlessly together.
4. “Social Selling – a Mini-Guide” by Salesforce.com.  Shorter version & slightly different viewpoint than Eloqua.  

Detailed How-To Guides

1. “Social Selling in B2B” An excellent multi-part blog series by HootSuite.
2. “The Ultimate Guide How to Use Twitter for Social Selling” by InsideView.com.  It’s 47 pages long, and worth paying for with your contact info.
3. “Social Selling, the New Practitioner’s Guide” by Julio Viskovich, Social Selling Sensei at HootSuite.  Of all the social selling experts out there, I really appreciate Julio’s no-BS, hands-on demos and how-to guides. You can tell Julio learned by doing. I’ve learned quite a bit from him.

Personal & Career Training

1. “The Rise of the Social Selling Expert” by Jeff Molander (on eConsultancy.com).  Career context.
2. “Seven Critical Skills of The Social Seller” by Dan Bernoske on salesbenchmarkindex.com. Learn how you need to behave.
3. Social Selling University  - the online home of social selling best practices. Sponsored by InsideView, a leading prospecting/lead gen/business intelligence solution provider.  Best single collection of resources on the internet, in my opinion.

Why is Social Selling Getting So Hot?

Simple: every business needs to generate sales to survive.

You can’t meet payroll with ‘likes’, after all.

wheres the beef – copyright Wendys

In addition, the whole social media marketing craze is getting long in the tooth.

In many industries, social marketing teams and their agencies are getting increasingly pressured by the CEO and CFO to demonstrate results – aka, ROI, leads and sales. In some large early adopter organizations, social marketing budgets this year are actually flat (gasp!).

The pressure is clearly mounting for social marketing programs to contribute more to the bottom line – or be relegated to the role that other over-hyped “marketing techniques” have in the company. As in, none.

That’s OK with us. The shift in priority away from producing “content” and “engagement” to delivering “leads”, “customers” and “revenues” is refreshing and predictable.

We’ve always believed that social networks are an ideal medium for the social-by-nature, solution-oriented sales professional to thrive in. That’s who we designed NeedTagger for.

Our Social Selling Advice to You

It’s been on the back of our business cards since the day we opened shop:

We believe that “finding needs and meeting them” is the proper mindset of every great social selling professional.

Wanna get started today with social selling today? Then go find someone on Twitter or LinkedIn (or any network where your customers congregate) who needs something you have to offer – information, content, answers, services, whatever – and offer them help.

You don’t need tools like NeedTagger to start loading your funnel with prospects.  But we’ll be here if you need us.

 For more articles like this, check out our new Flipboard magazine, “Social Selling”

 

Let us know what you think about social selling by leaving your comments below.

The post 10 Great Resources for the Social Selling Newbie by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

Let’s end this debate once and for all:  yes, you can meet new prospects, capture new leads, acquire customers and sell products and services using Twitter.

Thousands of companies, business owners and sales professionals are doing it right now. Over 2,500 business owners, sales pros and marketing specialists use our service to do it.

But let’s not confuse “selling” with what most companies are doing on Twitter right now – which is ”marketing”.

For example, you aren’t selling on Twitter if you spend most of your time and resources on the following activities:

• broadcasting content from your Twitter account, and expecting new prospects to follow you; in general, less than 10% of your socially-active target market will do that; and even when they do, only 1-2% of them will see a given post.  
• recruiting influencers to share your messages and content with their fans. This is at best an indirect way of reaching prospective customers, and it takes a LOT of time and resources to do it right. 
• advertising. By advertising, we mean sending one-to-many messages or Calls To Action that may excite someone to click, but offer little immediate value to your sales prospect. Promoted Tweets can be used for so much more.
• reading news, watching videos or laughing at a Vine clip shared by someone you follow.  

The trick to selling on Twitter is to focus your time on finding and connecting with people who genuinely need something that you have to offer (products, services, advice, critical information, whatever); then, take the time to reach out and help them – with the utmost of respect for their situation.

When prospecting on Twitter, your goal is to search Twitter for the right kinds of people in the right regions who are talking about important Life Events, Trigger Events and expressions of need related to your business.  To do this efficiently, you will need the right tools.

Once you find a hot prospect, patience and time are required to build a relationship with her. You cannot be aggressive or spammy, or your reputation will get clobbered. You should expect to engage in a conversation that may span days – or even months.

In other words, you’ll need to prospect and sell a lot like you already do, in the real world.

The Proof

Targeted, solution-oriented selling on Twitter works, in both B2C and B2B industries.

For example, Marketo shares helpful content to generate leads at a fraction of the cost of traditional lead gen methods.  To quote Jason Miller,

Our Twitter strategy has allowed us to see immediate results from our efforts. Our average lead-conversion rate from emails and online campaigns is between 2-3%. Some of our Twitter campaigns have yielded conversion rates as high as 14%. And the cost-per-prospect is six times lower than that associated with some of our other marketing programs.

In Marketo’s case, they use Promoted Tweets to share their helpful content with a targeted audience.

NeedTagger goes one step farther and connects you with individual people in need.

Listed below are a few recent NeedTagger customers who’ve had success selling this way on Twitter. All posts below are unsolicited, uncompensated and copied directly from Twitter.

From what we see, this solution-minded approach to social selling appears to work in almost every industry and region – we support 13 industries in B2B and B2C.

New to Social Selling (or Twitter)?

You’re not alone. Only 16% of internet users are active on Twitter, after all.

If you are a new Twitter user, then social selling is not something we recommend you jump straight into. Before you try it, take a few weeks to learn how to engage with people naturally on Twitter.

But don’t worry – when you are ready, it’s not hard to learn.

You may be pleased to learn that most of your real-world selling gestures can be mapped to Twitter gestures fairly easily, as this chart illustrates:

Real-world selling gestures and their equivalents on Twitter

If you are an experienced Twitter user but new to social selling, it might help you to look at Twitter as a giant dinner party or business conference – with the added advantage that you can hear what everyone in the room is saying, in real time.

You may not have a relationship with most of the people in the room, but you are probably connected to many of them through shared interests or personal relationships.

How would you approach a potential customer in a situation like this?

Exactly…

Great for Lead Nurturing, Too

Twitter is also a great way to handle middle-of-the-funnel lead nurturing.

Once you’ve identified a list of prospects to follow, responding to their requests for help or opinions is a natural opportunity to guide them in their decision making process.  You can use a social media monitoring tool like HootSuite to do that efficiently.

Copied below is an example of lead nurturing taken from a customer of ours who sells social media management services – note how he’s helping someone solve a technical problem, building goodwill in the process:

Using social media in this way, you can reach more people at more engagement points than you can in any other media.

You can also learn a lot about why people like or dislike your offerings, and how people talk about your brand.  Try getting that from a Search Engine!

Social Selling Is A Greenfield Opportunity

Perhaps the most important reason to learn how to sell on Twitter (or any social network for that matter) is the fact that most of your competitors want to, but they haven’t learned how to do it, yet.  Most are still stuck in the mode of analyzing, but not acting upon, purchase intent.

A recent survey by Gleanster revealed that the vast majority of Top Performing marketing organizations are focused on identifying purchase intention in social media.

Yet Gleanster’s report also noted that only 6% of top performing marketers are actually measuring purchase intent in social media.

This is what’s known as a “greenfield opportunity”.

Game On!

It is clear that during the past few years, businesses have become increasingly interested in generating leads and sales using social media.  In the Google Trends chart below, note how “Twitter leads” and “Twitter sales” queries are increasing in popularity faster than “lead generation”:

That’s why we developed NeedTagger.

NeedTagger surfaces the most valuable and actionable engagement opportunities for your business on Twitter – and makes it easy for you to capture leads, land new accounts and sell.

The post How To Capture Leads, Acquire New Customers and Sell On Twitter by Vernon Niven first appeared on .

Recruiting Fans Isn’t Enough

Is your social media marketing objective to grow your business? If so, then you know you will have to reach NEW customers, not just your fans.  And influencers and advocates are really indirect methods of doing that.

Have you studied who is actually following your social accounts so far?  Are they customers and potential customers – or lurkers, bots and coupon-clippers?  Do you even know?

If you’re like most leading brands (see graphic below), then less than 10% of your addressable market in social media actually follow you there today (see chart below).

This means that for every qualified customer or prospect that follows you on Twitter today, there are probably another 10 who don’t (or won’t).

So how can you reach the “other 90%” of your market who won’t follow you online – but may need your stuff?

Content marketing has been recently bandied-about as the best way to attract new customers in social.  There’s a lot of logic behind this trend – organic search engine marketing is the biggie – but there’s so much crappy content out there today, many potential customers may never even notice you!

And spamming Twitter won’t get you there – especially if you try to automate your introductions, like this amateur spammer attempted to do:

Twitter spam FAIL

So what sort of “content” should you share?

Funny videos, contests, personal stories and games may make you more interesting, but these forms of content are one-hit wonders that don’t address the reasons your customers buy stuff from you in the real world: you solve a problem for them.

To get customers really interested, you should probably strive to share helpful content, not to be “interesting“.

But forget theory – what do your customers say they want?

Better deals, for one. Study after study have clearly shown that better deals are the number one reason most people follow a brand in social media.  Here’s one study I grabbed from HootSuite recently:

why people follow brands in social media – hootsuite study

 

pinterest gallery of marketers connecting with sales prospects on Twitter

If you really want new customers to follow and engage with you in social media, then your content will need to dig deeper and address the needs that your organization and your products satisfy for your customers in the real world. And, you need to deliver this helpful content to people who need it, as close to their moment of need as possible.

But first, you’ll need a way to identify the people who need your stuff.

Does Purchase Intent Exist in Social Media?

For most digital marketers, purchase intent doesn’t pop into their head when talking about social media. Not a lot of people are buying stuff on Facebook, after all.

So, can you really detect if a social media user is in the market for something you sell?

The short answer is, YES. Purchase intent exists in social media, and it can be tapped to capture leads, to attract high quality traffic and to grow your business.

Don’t believe it’s there?  Try our free Customer Search Engine for Social Media  to view a live stream of people complaining about their allergies, shopping for a car, discussing their mortgage needs, hungry for pizza and discussing their college applications.

The truth is that purchase intent is discussed by people in social media millions of times a day in the English speaking world. We know, because we measure it.

But in social media, people express many forms of intent that go beyond the specific, personal intent that you see in search engine queries.  The breadth of intent expressed in social media is vast.

Social intent ranges from the aspirational

to the downright actionable:

In fact, some forms of purchase intent are only expressed in a social environment. For example, when people “fall out of love” with their phone company, they don’t first signal it by searching for a competitor.

Instead, they complain out loud:

Some view this wide range of intent as a weakness of social media, but I think it represents a unique opportunity for savvy marketers.  Because the range of intent is so diverse, content marketing can be used to guide people in their decision making process at many more engagement points than you can touch in other media.

To act upon these streams of intent, you just need a way to differentiate the various types of demand so the right team members can address each of them (cough). That’s one of the reasons we built NeedTagger.

But most marketers are only beginning to learn how to tap into social intent to build relationships with their market.

Publishing At The Moment Of Need

Social feeds move really fast, so timing your content delivery is important. If you can target people close to their moment of need and help them, then you have a much better shot at getting their business.  This is especially true of people discussing their most important life events in social media.

In fact, I would argue that getting the right content in front of potential customers when they need it most is becoming the single-most important success factor in online marketing. There’s simply too much noise out there, and the amount of online content that people have access to is more than doubling every year.

Today, good timing can mean the difference between getting 0.01% and 50% response rates on the same piece of content. As signal-to-noise continues to fall in your market’s news streams, the importance of timing your delivery will only grow.

Targeting Intent With Helpful Content Delivers Results

You can achieve amazing results by targeting social intent with the right content at the right time.

By helping people in their moment of need, you can not only capture new leads – you can create incredibly high levels of brand loyalty at a very low cost per prospect. At the very least, you will drive highly qualified traffic to your web properties.

For example, here is an example of someone posting an intent-targeted message inside NeedTagger, our Customer Search Engine for Social Media:

And here is a Pinterest gallery we put together showing how business marketers use NeedTagger to connect with prospects on Twitter.

pinterest gallery of marketers connecting with sales prospects on Twitter

Using this simple listen-and-respond process a few minutes each day, our customers achieve 5% to 80% click through rates on messages sent from our service to people who do not yet follow them.  In other words, unsolicited posts.

Other social intent-targeting platforms such as Solariat, LocalResponse and GoChime are reporting similar levels of engagement with intent-targeted messages.

In contrast, when you post a message from your Twitter account to your followers, about 1-2% of your fans will engage.

Once you learn how to talk to prospective customers in social media, the help you deliver can feel like serendipity to the people you reach.

Even better, when you behave this way in a viral, public forum like Twitter, you gain the added benefit of appearing to the world that you are a business who cares.  Because you do!

In summary, targeting people in need with your content is a powerful and natural way to capture leads, drive traffic and build your brand in social media. 

The post Intent Marketing: A New Way To Reach Customers in Social Media by Vernon Niven first appeared on .