A great tip for using twitter for your small business

A great tip for using Twitter for your small business is to use Twitter as a search engine and see who is right now in need of your product or service.  It’s real time market research and great for building prospects, building connections and extending your network but also for testing products and market needs before you’ve even built or launched your product.

Hot on from the release of this tool yesterday, here are a few quick tips on how to best use twitter pie.

You are an accountant

Let’s assume you’re an accountant.  This is scenario #1. Apart from wanting to be a lion tamer, you want clients and books to check.

So, you go to twitter pie and you type in a variety of searches such as below:

• need accountant
• I want an accountant
• accountant asap
• can’t do my taxes
• need taxes help
• looking for accountant
• taxes need doing
• taxes deadline coming
• too many taxes
• business books messy
• messy accounts
• accountant referral
• accountant questions
• want accountant in [insert your town]

And so on!  Mix and match the above, create new ones.  Get in the zone and crunch out 25 or so phrases to search. Time to get creative ; )

A bunch of twitter results appear on the page.  If you leave the page for an hour or so it just keeps on going (refreshes every 2 seconds if your search is that popular and trending).

Try searching through users tweets (@ search) or the # keys (# search: users use these to categorise their tweets for search) or Custom Search keywords.  See which yields the best results for you.

Then, you reply to the tweet with a piece of free advice, a link, a copy of a spreadsheet that might help them solve their taxes problems or anything else that you can do to help them.

Ask for work

Then after they’ve said “thanks” or asked for more information or advice from you, you can just ask “hey, hopefully those resources helped. If you need me to work with you to save further headache in the future, here’s my details”. (afterall, if you don’t ask you don’t get shit).

You’ll be surprised what happens next.

You’ve found someone at the right moment in need for your help (product or service). Rather than spending time and money on magazine adverts that fail over and over again, this is a perfect example of using a tool to find someone in need of a solution right at this moment.  Your conversion rate will certainly be a lot higher than other ways of advertising. You politely and sincerely come along and give them some help and advice without being spammy or ramming your deals down their throat.

It’s like networking online.

They feel warm, fuzzy and appreciative and can see the expertise and value you can provide them to solve their current hell of a problem (it’s so hellish because they are telling the world about it right now). So, you offer them a way to banish this problem forever with your widget-o-matic and they bite your hand off.  Simple.

It’s one of the ways to approach these things backwards. Like reverse marketing.  You’re giving your solution to people in need for it right now rather than advertising your solution and hoping it finds people who need it.  You’re actively going out and finding them rather than waiting for them to come to you.

What can I do right now to action this?

I only want to provide value here and don’t want you stressing over finer details or reading something that isn’t going to take your small business forward.  So, we need to make this actionable today.

Go to twitter pie now, sit there for 10 mins crunching out searches and see what results start coming up.

When you see a bunch of useful tweets you can respond too, start responding.

Make a note of these searches, add the page to your bookmarks and then make the twitter pie technique part of your weekly marketing routine and do this for 2 – 3 weeks (3 sittings of 20 minutes over 3 days – just an hour a week so easy to fit into anyone’s schedule) and see what clients you can pick up, people you can connect with and help you can offer.

Any comments on how to maximise this strategy or improve on it, feel free to comment below!

Happy Tweeting and best of luck!