This post will show how social media managers can find hundreds, if not thousands, of their prospects on Twitter automatically.
At my current job, part of my scope is to make sure we are engaging with current and future customers on social media channels.
Surprisingly, Twitter is quickly becoming a valuable channel for promoting content. In fact, when I analyze our data, week after week it indicates Twitter is better for promoting content than LinkedIn is!
A portion of our Twitter strategy includes finding and engaging with our prospects. (I will save revealing the whole strategy for a future post.) I am sure other social media marketers can agree that searching for prospects on Twitter can be hard. It’s hard to find the right people using advanced search, because many of them are actually just people promoting themselves and their business. For example, when searching for prospects to follow in the project management space, many that come up are people trying to sell training programs to PM organizations, or people selling subscriptions to their online community. Culling through the large list of people to weed out is a manual process: it’s complicated and time-consuming.
I decided to try to find a way to automate this process, to ensure the people we are following fall within our targets.
What I figured out is that there IS a way to automate this, and have Twitter comb through the data in about 8 seconds!
In order to do this, you will need the following items handy:
- Contact lists of prospects in a .CSV File (comma delimited) form.
If the files aren’t in this form, it’s very easy to convert them if they are in spreadsheets.
The lists can be purchased lists, or lists you have grown organically. To cut back on spam, I highly recommend sticking to using lists you’ve grown organically on your own. These would be people who have specifically “opted-in” to receiving communications from your company. If you don’t have a list handy, simply export it from your CRM system, or email marketing program. - New Gmail Account Created.
Make sure you are signed in. - Twitter Account that you use for social media marketing.
Make sure you are signed in.
Once you have these things, you are ready to rock!
Step 1: Take your contact list(s) and delete all columns in the .CVS file except for the email column
Step 2: Navigate to your new Gmail Account
Step 3: Click contacts>Import contacts
Step 4: Locate the file from your computer and click import
**Repeat as much as you want to import many contacts into Gmail
Once that is done,
Step 6: Log into twitter
Step 7: Click on Settings
Step 8: Click Find Friends from the left hand side menu
Step 9: Locate Gmail from the list and click the Search Contacts button
Step 10: Click Accept to give permission for Twitter to access your Gmail
Step 11: Twitter will load up a list of accounts found associated with those emails
Step 12: Click follow all
Every time you get more lists, you can continue this process and Twitter will again try to locate new accounts for you to follow.
This works great with work and non-work emails. It’s a great tactic to use, because many marketers think non-work emails are useless. When it comes to social media, non-work emails may be even better for locating prospects online!
My metrics show an approx 2.5% match rate… when you have a list of 500K that translates into 12,500 matches that you know for sure fall within your target market!
What short-cuts have you found by working with Twitter at your company?