Social media, especially Twitter, requires a lot of effort in order to extract business value. But with over 200 million active users, the probability that your prospects, leads, and customers are using the Twitter is high. This means conversations that could drive business value are happening; they're just surrounded by irrelevant clutter.
So how can marketers navigate this social network and prioritize their time so they're only reviewing the tweets that are most important to them? The key is dissecting the Twitterverse into specific segments that are most relevant to your business and using your marketing data to create those groups. And we're going to tell you how.
Let's take a simple case: Wouldn't it be great if your social media manager spent more time tweeting at your leads instead of combing through tons of off-topic posts? Yes, I mean exclusively interacting with people who have already showed interest in your company, perhaps to help guide them further down your marketing funnel. If you knew who on Twitter fit into that specific segment, you could get so much more value out of your social media efforts by focusing more time on that important group of people.
The following list is full of social media tips to help you focus your social media efforts on the right conversations and interactions. We'll describe how a marketer can implement each tip, as well as how a current HubSpot customer could do it using our new social media monitoring tool, Social Inbox. By focusing on targeted Twitter activities like these, you're sure to get more business value out of your time in social media.
As you can imagine, how you communicate with someone who is currently considering your product or service should be different than how you talk to a random person in your network. You should focus on building rapport and strengthening your relationship with your opportunities, and you can do that by paying attention and being gracious.
In the event one of your opportunities comments on, shares, or replies to a piece of your content on Twitter, you should respond. Thank the person, ask them what they learned, or share their tweet with your own followers. In order to find and follow these people in the first place, export a list of your current opportunities and add them to a Twitter List on Twitter.com. Then check in on them every day.
HubSpot customers can easily do this in their Social Inbox by creating a list of their opportunities in HubSpot (perhaps by segmenting by lifecycle stage), and then setting Social Inbox to monitor the tweets of those people in that list. You can also specify that you only want to see messages containing certain keywords, like your company name or your blog. Now you'll see whenever an opportunity mentions you, so you can follow up.
The marketing process doesn't end once a new customer signs up for your product and service. It's also important to nurture and support your customers in order to retain their business long term. Kick off that relationship by thanking them for choosing your company and greeting each new customer with a friendly tweet.You can do this by having a sales or account management rep send a tweet as soon as a new customer signs up for or purchases your product/service. Make sure to keep track of your customers' Twitter usernames in order to make this easier. For HubSpot customers, our software collects contacts' and customers' Twitter account information to make this type of engagement even easier. 
Take initiative to collect social media contact information from your visitors and leads so you have accurate Twitter information for each of your contacts. You can do this by adding a new field to the forms on your website. This information will help you implement many of the tips on this list, as well as make sure your information is 100% accurate.If you don't want to add a Twitter username field to every form, perhaps use that particular field on lighter, more top-of-the-funnel offers that an individual might download earlier on in the marketing process. For HubSpot customers, our software will keep this information handy in a prospect's contact record for when you want to target and nurture those people in social media.This is a great tip for local businesses or sales reps who are targeting sales in a specific territory. Twitter tracks its users' geographic information (for those users who have enabled it), which helps you understand where the people you're interacting with are located. While monitoring, prioritize interactions based on where they're tweeting from.On my way to #SMSSummit New York for day two! Speaking on social + lead gen at 3pm.
— Rebecca Corliss (@repcor) June 12, 2013
Social Inbox helps HubSpot customers target geographic areas through its option to create streams of people exclusive to specific locations. For example, if you were a building contractor who wanted to interact with users in Massachusetts about home improvement projects, you could set up that query in Social Inbox and use it to focus your efforts.Customer support is oh so incredibly important. And if a customer or client is having a problem with your product or service, that's a critical opportunity to either win their life-long support, or lose it forever. That's why it's extremely important to have a solid pulse on how users are responding and using your product. To do this, create a Twitter List of your customers, and use it to monitor their tweets on a regular basis. In Social Inbox, HubSpot customers can add a specific keyword filter to call out instances when customers tweet "help," "support," or specific names of your products or services to make it easier than manually sifting through all of the noise. Here's a thought: The keywords that drive the most traffic to your website from an SEO perspective could also be really helpful for your social media strategy. Set up keyword streams in a tool like HootSuite, TweetDeck, or Social Inbox to monitor those keywords. (For current HubSpot customers, use your Keywords tool and sort by "Visits" to see which keywords might be best to monitor in social media.)Once those streams are set up, they will help you discover people who are interested in those particular topics. Jump into the conversation and perhaps even follow those individuals. If you have content that addresses those topics, share them in the discussion. This type of activity will help you tap a new network of people who may not have discovered your website and content yet.
Wouldn't it be great to use social media to target people who have taken certain actions on your website? Perhaps you have a collection of leads that keeps viewing your pricing page, but haven't yet taken the plunge to purchase your product.
Nurture those people in social media to give them a little nudge or offer to answer their questions. This might be tricky to do without a robust tool or the ability to track leads taking these actions in your current CRM. Professional and Enterprise HubSpot users, for example, can create a list of users who have viewed any of the important pages on their website and set Social Inbox to monitor it.
What other people say about your products/services can have much more credibility than what you say about yourself. Make sure you're monitoring instances of people mentioning your company and products in a positive light. Favorite the most flattering tweets, and use them on a dedicated product testimonial page, landing page, or product page. For HubSpot Social Inbox users, if you prefer to reference quotes from a specific group of people, like customers, set up that monitoring stream based on customer lifecycle stage and filter for mentions of your company.Last but not least, use social media to fuel your competitive intelligence and help you get a leg up on deals you could otherwise lose. If you know which of your leads are interacting with your competitors online, you can use that to modify your strategy and perhaps follow up with a lead sooner than originally planned. Don't lose the deal! Use this information to help you. Sales reps can set up a Twitter stream using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite to monitor mentions of competitors' names, have a set plan to monitor their leads on Twitter via their own account, or, if they're HubSpot customers, could create a list and monitor their assigned leads in Social Inbox. Simply add a search filter to focus on references of key competitor names and topics that could elude to a competitive conversation. These steps should help you focus your social media efforts to be more relevant and business-focused. Whether you're a HubSpot Social Inbox user or not, be smart about your social media monitoring so you get the most value out of your time.How do you target your social media efforts?In which I give the biggest unsolicited plug ever for @HubSpot's Social Inbox -ow.ly/mkYwE
— Zack Bridges (@z_bridges) June 26, 2013
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