Some folks have asked us to provide more detail about what we actually do – especially the types of “needs” we detect on Twitter. We thought the best way to answer that question would be to share some of the filtered “need feeds” we are tracking right now.

Our first example is in the Post-Secondary Education industry.   

“Prospective Students Seeking Help and Advice” is a pre-filtered Twitter feed that contains a live 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 relevant Education needs every day on Twitter. The snapshot below was taken last night:

If you are an education marketer, how might you engage with these people to help them? 

NeedTagger makes it easy for your organization to detect needs like these and meet them with your content – with detailed analytics to measure the ROI of your outreach marketing effort.  We call our approach, “outreach marketing”, because most of the people in the feed above probably don’t follow you online (yet) – you are literally “reaching out” to help them.

Outreach marketing delivers high engagement levels when it’s done right. This means applying social engagement best practices rigorously, such as staying on-topic, offering meaningful assistance and avoiding hard sells/spam at all costs.

Why Filter for Intent? Aren’t Keywords Enough?

Intent-filtered streams help you quickly find and connect with people who need your products, services and assistance right now.  Compared with keyword-based search tools, NeedTagger streams contain fewer, more relevant and actionable posts.

NeedTagger streams look like the example above and share these characteristics:

1. The posts are from potential customers - not influencers, advocates or marketers.  Our approach isolates people who are discussing products, services, seeking advice & complaining out loud about the products and services you offer.
2. Most of these people don’t follow your account (yet).  They are prospects, not fans.
3. Noticeable lack of news, media sharing and promotional links. NeedTagger filters-out the media-sharing part of Twitter and isolates the conversations, public statements, questions, complaints and implied needs that you can act on.
4. Very little spam. Due to the high-quality filtering approach we use, NeedTagger streams are much more on-topic and almost completely spam-free. This saves you time.
5. Popular hash tags and keywords don’t dominate.  Popular tags and terms quickly get overrun with spam, so we use a more sophisticated approach.

Our approach compliments popular social media monitoring tools like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Radian6.  In fact, we offer a version of our app inside of HootSuite.

Many of our customers start their day on NeedTagger looking for fresh lead capture opportunities.

Pre-Configured Streams That Are Easy To Customize

The pre-configured stream above is one of several Education industry filters that NeedTagger provides out of the box.

Each NeedTagger stream can be quickly customized by providing a link to the “degrees offered” section of an educator’s website.  NeedTagger will scan the link, and our natural language processing platform will identify the names of the degrees and programs currently offered by the university to tailor the campaign filter to include the specific programs/diplomas offered. A campaign specialist will review your campaign filter and adjust it (if necessary) to ensure it’s doing the job without too much noise.

During the past few weeks, we’ve developed dozens of pre-configured streams for industries that have a decent volume of relevant needs expressed on Twitter (not all do, sadly). If no pre-configured stream exists for your industry or requirement, then we can usually build one for you very quickly.

Benefits of Intent Marketing On Twitter

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

1. Extend your reach by 10X: over 90% of your addressable market on Twitter probably doesn’t follow your account – and may never. By seeking them out proactively, you don’t have to wait for a connection that may never happen.
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 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.
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.

Not For Spamming

In case you are wondering: NeedTagger is NOT designed to spam people. If you spam for a living, then look for another tool. Besides being a really dumb thing to do on social media, if you spam using our platform we will ban you faster than you can say, “limited time offer!”.  If you are an educator, then you must also respect federal advertising regulations which clearly prohibit most types of spam.  Our stored message templates can help keep you compliant.

We hope this post helps to answer the question, “What Do You Guys Do?”, a little better.

NeedTagger connects you with people who need your products, services and content – right now.