How To Find Auto Leads on Twitter

Are you a new or used car dealer seeking to connect with local customers on Twitter?  You’re not alone.

The leads are definitely there – people talk about car shopping all the time on Twitter (see example below).

But Twitter is a noisy high-volume medium, so searching for leads can eat up a lot of time. This causes many automotive marketers to throw up their hands in frustration and stop trying.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

With the right approach and tools, you can generate leads for your dealership in just a few minutes each day.

But I Already Search Using Keywords…

Many social media prospectors start by using Twitter Search or a similar keyword search tool in a third party software platform.

We agree that keyword search tools are great starting point for finding leads on Twitter.

Especially if you:

  • are already familiar with what people say on Twitter
  • are good at complex keyword searches
  • don’t mind hunting and pecking your way through fast and noisy streams.

Unfortunately, most of the results you’ll get from a keyword search will not be useful leads.

This is because there’s no real way to screen for purchase intent. When you search for “Mazda Miata”, you’ll get a lot of people sharing photos – not exactly what you’re looking for.

This is why even savvy dealers often give up on Twitter as a source of leads.

There Is A Smarter Way

That’s why we built our NeedTagger, the world’s first customer search engine for Twitter – to help businesses and other organizations find and connect with people they can help, without wasting time hunting and pecking through noisy streams.

We offer more than 70 Pre-Tested Prospecting Streams that are specifically engineered to help you find potential customers on social networks like Twitter.

We use sophisticated algorithms to analyze what people say, who they are, where they are and the context of their posts to filter your stream down to the people and posts that matter. We do all of this in real time, and we give you access to 30 days of history in every stream.

For example, the screenshot below shows a Pre-Tested Stream on NeedTagger that we developed for Automotive Dealerships. The image isn’t doctored in any way.

People who want or need an Economy or Compact car” is a pre-filtered, live Twitter stream of people discussing shopping for their next economy car.

Automotive Leads on Twitter - People who want or need an Economy or Compact car

Automotive Leads on Twitter – People who want or need an Economy or Compact car

We detect thousands of leads like the ones above every day. Most cities get hundreds or thousands every month.  People are using Twitter more and more to discuss the purchase of their next car or truck.  In fact, Twitter’s message volume doubled last year and continues to grow faster than its user base.

Easy to Customize For Your Business

Pre-tested streams like the one above can be customized for your target market by adjusting a few search parameters:

  • Location: you can limit your search to people who live in your local market and to people who just tweeted near a location.
  • Keywords: add product/service names, leading brands, hashtags, block words, etc.
  • Profile/bio: enter keywords & block words to search profiles for people with certain job titles and interests; or, select from pre-tested profile filters.
  • and more

For example, if you maintained a Lotus Elise Buyers Guide, you might want to set up a stream focusing on buyers of the Lotus Elise, Evora or Exige.

Benefits of Prospecting On Twitter

There are several benefits provided by this style of direct marketing on Twitter, including:

  1. Extend your potential sales reach by 10X: over 90% of your addressable market on Twitter probably doesn’t follow your account. They may never follow you, in fact. By seeking prospects out – rather than waiting for them to follow you – you can extend your effective sales reach to every potential lead.  Isn’t that why your company joined Twitter?
  2. High engagement rates:  click-through rates on outreach messages sent to individuals from NeedTagger currently range between 5% and 80%.  Almost all of these are directed @replies to people who do not follow their Twitter account.  The secret to high engagement is to be helpful – not spammy.
  3. Measure the ROI of your content:  NeedTagger tracks the number of opportunities on a daily basis for your custom prospecting stream.  We also track the clicks and shares generated by every outreach message individually. By adding a Google Analytics tag to your shared links, you can tie your outreach marketing directly to sales and leads generated.
  4. Manage compliance: many companies now have policies in place that govern what they can say and share online, especially with new contacts. We offer you the ability to save and reuse messages and URLs (landing pages, content, etc) in our web app, which is a great way to ensure compliance.

How NeedTagger Works

If you know a little about APIs, you can start mining your social data for leads like these today, in four easy steps:

  1. Get Your API Key. Our 30-day Free Trial classifies up to 1,000 messages per day.
  2. Create a NeedTagger App account. You’ll use our app to build and test your data filters. We provide 30 days of Twitter data to test against.
  3. Send your social data (tweets, Facebook posts, etc.) through our API. We’ll tag every post for intent – in real time.
  4. Use your intent-tagged data to drive actions and decisions in your customer-facing apps, business applications and social media analytics.

New to Prospecting on Twitter?

Learn about 5 Ways to Build Your Business Using NeedTagger.

Worried about what to say?

Here are 10 ways to introduce yourself to a prospect on Twitter.