Twitter 101 for SalesRep
Twitter may seem like a frivolous social media platform to most. However, to many with a keen sense for opportunity, this has been turned into a major money-making tool. The same idea can be applied to Financial Advisors - though this may initially sound like an odd coupling. By following/interacting with the right people on Twitter, you can grow your network exponentially.
Bearing this in mind, let’’s review the Twitter timeline basics:
“Your home timeline displays a stream of Tweets from accounts you have chosen to follow”
This has several implications if you want to use Twitter to grow your network and to sell:
The only people that will see your tweets are the people who follow you.
If you are not followed by prospective clients or people who can relay your messages to the right people, your tweets won’t be impactful.
You can tweet corporate messages all day long but until your follower's list grows quantitatively AND qualitatively, this will be useless.
Some would even argue that it could be damaging for your brand and your business.
For e.g: Let’s say I am a prospect in your niche market and I look up your profile on Twitter. If you have zero followers or a few other Financial Advisors and none that I can relate to, you’re probably not going to hear from me.
So what should you do?
Analyze your list of followers
Figure out how many people in this list could become a client or introduce you to someone that can be a client
Start engaging and following with prospects in your niche. (we can help with this )
Measure your progress
Your timeline displays “a” [selected] stream of Tweets
This also is a problem when you want to use Twitter for business.
Even if you follow 1000’s of people in your target market. You will only see a sample of what they tweet. This sample will be picked up by the Twitter algorithm and favor the most popular tweets (more on the algorithm here: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-algorithm/ ).
In our experience, the tweets that offer the best chance for engagement/icebreakers are not the most popular tweets. It could be a prospect asking a question, sharing about his/her personal life or events they are attending...
Furthermore, Twitter works by pushing its users to follow random people out of the blue so that you can start listening to them. However, this may not be the best first move in sales. For e.g: Let’s say you are targeting plastic surgeons in NY - you could start by following a lot of plastic surgeons in LA. This is not necessarily a bad idea but the probability that they follow you back is slim, especially if you’re starting with an account with only a handful of followers (and none of them being other plastic surgeons).
The best way forward? Build a list of prospects and listen to these prospects prior to following them.
With this, you’re able to subtly use “follow” as a soft signal/icebreaker after you have liked or engaged with a tweet that you found interesting. Overall, this approach is much more organic and therefore effective.
Where do you start?
Build Twitter lists with people “in-market” (https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-lists)
Make it a daily routine to listen to these people on your lists
Engage on the tweets that make sense
The task may seem daunting at first, but it’s the only way to really maximize the power of Twitter as a business development tool.
Another option would be to contact us and we can do the hard yards for you :) or signup for our Connect app
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-timeline - read this article for more color on the above info.