Sales Prospecting Techniques - Should You Be Using Twitter for Selling to Businesses?

A question I am often asked when delivering sales prospecting training is 'should I be using twitter for business to business sales prospecting?' Why Use Twitter: Twitter is a fantastic way to quickly and easily begin a dialogue with key targeted people and form relationships with them. You can search for people by the phrases they are tweeting, the words in their biography and even their location. Some of the things you can do are: Find your competitors and follow their followers. One of the greatest things about twitter is the transparency and the ability to come to the game late and catch up. If one of your competitors is already on twitter it is likely they have spent time building a following of targeted people. You can go to their profile, see who follows them and who they are following and then just follow them. You can literally 'steal' moths of their hard work. Find key industry commentators and start a communication with them. Have you ever wanted to get published in a trade publication? Why not follow the editor? Find key customers and prospective customers and begin a dialogue. Search for people mentioning your key phrases. It is easy to set up a search for phrases i.e 'used canon photocopiers'. Every time someone mentions these anywhere on twitter you will be alerted. So someone might say "Does anyone know a place to get information on buying a used canon photocopier?" To which you could reply "You might want to check out this blog post - How to buy a used canon photocopier (link)" How To Use Twitter: Set up your account Go to twitter search and search for your key terms i.e photocopier and start following people Start posting content - It is a great idea to post links to interesting articles, blogs and web sites. Have a look at digg.com and alltop.com/for content ideas. People who you follow will start to follow you back. Advanced Twittering: Semi Automatic content development: This is a time saving strategy for getting content that very few people know about so you can use it to become the expert in your field.

Head over to Google alerts at google.com/alerts(you will need a Google account)
Input your key phrase that you will be twittering about i.e photocopiers
Set it to feed which will create and RSS feed of all articles, websites and blogs mentioning photocopiers that it finds anywhere on the internet. An RSS feed is just a way of aggregating content together and sharing content from lots of different places.
Once the RSS feed is created go to Google reader (search google) and add the rss feed as a new subscription.

What you have now done is put all new items Google has found relative to photocopiers into one place where you can browse them easily.

Once you have started to receive articles you can pick out the ones you want to share in twitter. At the bottom of the profile there is a little button called 'share'. Click this for the ones you want to share.
Click on the shared items tab down the left side in Google reader and you will find a section that only contains the articles you have chosen to share.
Click the orange RSS feed button at the top right corner of the web address bar

This will take you to a new page. Copy the entire web address from the top bar and that is your RSS feed from your Google shared items feed. Go to twitterfeed.com/ and connect your google reader shared items RSS feed with your twitter account. What you have just done will save you hours every day and will help you easily become the expert in your filed who always seems to be able to find the best content to tweet about. Everything you click the share button in Google reader for will now be instantly posted to your twitter account.