A presentation on how you can leverage advanced twitter searches to generate real leads for your business

1. Harnessing Twitter Search for Business
Jan Minihane
@janminihane
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk

2. Agenda
• What is Twitter?
• Why use it for business?
• What is Twitter search?
• How to use active search
• Tips and tricks for better searching?
• How to deal with leads found
• Questions
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

3. What is Twitter?
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4. What is Twitter?
• A micro blogging site – 140 characters per post
• Users post [tweet] what they are doing, share news, articles, blogs,
opinions.
From the ‘bland’….
To the very ‘useful’….
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

5. What is Twitter?
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6. What is Twitter?
• Very fast-moving
• You don’t need a newspaper anymore….
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

7. What is Twitter?
A few numbers…
• 200m accounts
• 100m active users (50% log in daily)
• Averages 250m tweets per day
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

8. Why use Twitter for Business?
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9. Why use Twitter for Business?
• It’s a unique real-time way to connect with:
– Peers
– Competitors
– Media
– Past, current and future clients
• Enhanced customer service for current customers
• Shropshire has a very strong Twitter community
• Accelerates offline networking
And finally
• You can find your target market, for free….
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

10. What is Twitter Search?
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11. What is Twitter Search?
• A store of all recent tweets
• A way to:
• crowdsource ideas, see what’s hot
• monitor people talking about you/your business
• find people tweeting about your kind of product or service
• Can restrict by geography (amongst other things)
• Basically, an invaluable free marketing tool!
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

12. So how do you use Twitter search?
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13. How to use Twitter search
• Twitter.com/search
• Click on ‘advanced search’
• Complete relevant fields
• Bob’s your uncle….
Then:
• Modify the search to reduce the noise
• Save the ones that provide real value
• Examples
– Accountant – shrewsbury, shropshire, telford, ludlow, newport
– Graphic designer – shrewsbury, shropshire, telford,
– Graphic designer – recommend – nottingham within 500miles
– Changing bags - nottingham within 500miles
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

14. Tips & Tricks for using Twitter search?
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15. Tips & Tricks for effective Twitter searches
• Think about the language your customer uses:
• E.g. ‘poor website’ vs. ‘website sucks’
• E.g. ‘dairy products’ vs. ‘yoghurts’
• Click on ‘operators’ link for advanced search functions:
• filter:links
• near:shropshire
• use of “quote marks”
• Useful 3rd party apps for alternative searching functionality:
• http://hashtags.org/
• http://nearbytweets.com/
• http://www.twellow.com/
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

16. What do you do when you find a lead?
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17. Tips & Tricks for effective Twitter searches
“Can anyone recommend a decent bookkeeper in the Telford area?”
• Plan A – full out attack (with humour?)
• “Hi @JanMinihane, we are a full service bookkeeping company based in Telford, we’d
love to help you, DM your tel no?
• Plan B – follow & engage on something different
• “Morning @JanMinihane, just started following you, look forward to your
tweets”
• Plan C – get a fellow tweeter to recommend you…. (!)
• Plan D – follow them and see what happens
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

18. Conclusions
• Twitter is a great way to reach customers, PR contacts, peers,
competitors
• You can find followers on twitter passively
• OR you can harness the power of twitter search
• Twitter search can be the single most effective way of finding leads
• Only use twitter (or any other social media site for that matter) where
you commit adequate time and resources over a period of time
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk 25 January, 2012

19. Questions?
@janminihane
www.thenetadvantage.co.uk