How To Find Education Leads on Twitter

Capella University Twitter account example

Capella University Twitter account example

Are you a secondary education marketing professional, a lead generator or an affiliate seeking to connect with customers on Twitter?

Because it is such a noisy, high-volume medium, searching for leads on Twitter can eat up a lot of time. This leads many 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 organization in just a few minutes each day.

Here’s how.

Can’t I Just Search Using Keywords?

Many social media prospectors start by using Twitter Advanced Search or a third party version of the same.

We agree that Twitter’s search tools are great starting point for finding potential leads on Twitter. Especially if you are familiar with what people say on Twitter; good at complex keyword searches; and, don’t mind hunting and pecking your way through fast and noisy streams.

Unfortunately, as with any keyword-based search tool, most of the results you will get from Twitter search will not be useful leads.  Mainly because there’s no “intent screening” option.  For this reason, you will waste time scrolling through tons of media-sharing posts and spam to find what you’re looking for.  This is why many people give up on Twitter as a source of leads.

A Smarter Way

In our customer search engine, we go one step further and offer more than 70 Pre-Tested Prospecting Streams that are specifically engineered to help marketers find and connect with potential customers on Twitter, the worlds largest public social network.

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 analyze everything in real time and give you access to 30 days of history in every stream.

Students Seeking a College Education

For example, the screenshot below shows a Pre-Tested Stream we developed for the Post-Secondary Education industry. The image isn’t doctored in any way.

College: People discussing applying to college” is a pre-engineered, live Twitter stream of people discussing issues and needs related to applying for and obtaining a post-secondary degree in the US.

We detect a few thousand leads like this every day.

 

Easy to Customize For Your Business

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

  • Location (2 types): you can limit your search by the author’s residence (in their bio) or by their current location / where-posted (geo tag)
  • Keywords: add product names, brands, hashtags, block words, etc. For example, if you were seeking to drive people to a landing page for Online Courses, you might want to enter the names of degrees people commonly search for.
  • Profile/bio: enter keywords & block words to search profiles for job titles and interests; or, select from pre-tested profile filters.
  • and more
OnlineCoursesFor.Me landing page

OnlineCoursesFor.Me landing page

Benefits of Marketing to Intent 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 intent marketing on Twitter?

Learn about 5 Ways to Build Your Business Using NeedTagger.

Worried about what to say to a prospect?

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