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How To Build Relationships On Twitter

4 Minute Read | Content Marketing

In this digital age, data is big money – the problem lies in mining the data into profitable information. Twitter has more than 135,000 new users signing up every day, and its 645 million active users tweet on average 58 million times a day. These startling stats show just how addicted we are to this well established social media platform.

Yet while Twitter provides businesses with access to a wide audience, using Twitter to sell your products and services requires a certain amount of tact and guile.

How Not To Use Twitter To Sell Products?

Spam isn’t just limited to websites and tinned meat:  It’s alive and kicking on twitter, too. First of all, if you spam on Twitter, you’ve already lost. Don’t spam – don’t even think of doing anything a tiny bit spammy. It’s a complete waste of time and money.

Jamming the 140 Character limit with keywords and then linking to a low quality content farm, achieves nothing. There’s no real value for anyone. You can’t trick Google, so why even bother trying?

We’re not saying don’t use keywords in your tweet and link to your products, there’s just a much better way to do it. Let Kwasi Studios show you!

How Do You Use Twitter To Sell Products?

Let’s take an example of an Australian Physiotherapy Supplies Company that has a large online shop.

Twitter has an amazing Search Function which allows you to search, in real time through the 58 million daily tweets. Load up the Twitter search and see if anyone is talking about the products you sell. Now, it’s important to constrain the search to Australia only, see below:

Awesome, some people are chatting about compression skins and garments!

Clearly the conversation between @wheresmylaurie and @jenwrites reveals that the tweeters are looking for clothing to help them exercise in the cold.

Why don’t we make a friendly reply back to @jenwrites with a link back to the product? Now, remember to be friendly, sincere and helpful!

How Do We Measure This Effort?

Notice how the link has been displayed using the link shortening and tracking service bit.ly? Well, now we can see statistics such as the number of times the link has been clicked.

Fantastic! Only one click, but it’s better than nothing.

Now, we can take this one step further if we have Google Ecommerce tracking enabled. If we create and isolate the correct date and referral source, we can see if those visitors made any purchases.

Unfortunately, in this circumstance, the social media effort did not result in a sale. But, for a few seconds work we were able to build a relationship with a potential customer.

Another example – 

Our client’s market is predominantly B2B – with the target customer being physio practitioners in Australia – so why don’t we try and find some Physios that own their own clinic, and build a relationship with them?

Let’s go back to the Twitter Search and find relevant users –

The initial engagement:
The response:
Closing the conversation:

It’s difficult to explain the feeling you get when an authoritative source (our Client is widely known within their field), communicates with you. It’s a great compliment. We’ve even offered to re-tweet information relating to physiodetective’s course – something that is guaranteed to ensure future communication.

Sure, there were no sales from this communication. But it may be the beginning of a strong and fruitful relationship with an Australian Physio –  the primary target market.

Establishing relationships on Twitter is the same as establishing them offline:  be engaging, friendly and helpful.  Talk to people, be social.  It is, after all – social media for a reason!

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