I don't often endorse social media apps because they tend to come and go, but in the case of Tweet Spinner, I feel compelled to speak up. In the last 6 months alone, our company-wide Twitter reach has grown by more than 50%, but more importantly, during that period social media has grown to become the source of 10% of all sales leads, with about half of those coming from Twitter. Talk about your social media ROI! Much of the credit should go to our use of Tweet Spinner, a social media web app that allows you to find and manage targeted followers more effectively. Here's the rundown.
This is the biggest advantage of using Tweet Spinner (TS). What you can do is set up searches by keywords phrases or by mimicking the friends (reciprocal relationship) or followers of Twitter profiles you follow and respect. You can set up a daily schedule for TS to go out and farm these resources for likely candidates. You can set up filters that will limit results to certain friend/follower ratios, making it far more likely that they will follow you back. TS will present you with a list of candidates for each search, and you can elect to batch follow all of them or select individuals to follow or not. Try the Show/Edit Filters button for a comprehensive set of rules you can use to manage your Twitter account.
The beauty of this approach is that you can quickly and automatically find people who are influencers in your industry, who are discussing relevant topics in Twitter every day and who are likely to follow you back, and so become potential leads. This helps to reduce the "noise" from irrelevant followers and focus on your core subject area and the people who are active every day. If you include a regular stream of valuable content (both yours and others'), you have an excellent chance of gaining highly qualified sales leads from Twitter. The "mimic" function is the killer app here. You can let social media influencers in your business do the work for you as they put together their targeted friend lists and you follow them. Sneaky? Perhaps. Effective? Definitely.
No doubt your Twitter account is brimming with lifeless zombies who either tricked you into following them and then immediately zapped you or are just plain worthless (nothing to say, asleep at the wheel). Ah, but how to get rid of these wastrels without spending hours in Twitter or deleting them all at once, which can make your account look overly automated and unattractive to new, relevant followers. Tweet Spinner is particularly adept at cleaning. The Follower Manager allows you to automatically find the zombie followers and purge them on a regular schedule. You can review recommend purges and make sure you're not deleting people you intended to follow despite their lack of reciprocity. You can also find, review and follow people who have followed you and might deserve a follow-back. And don't forget about those millions of Auto DM's (Direct Messages) that keep accumulating. You can set up rules for detecting and automatically deleting spam, and you can archive DM's for later searches and follow-ups.
There's plenty more you can do to make your Twitter network more efficient and targeted. I wouldn't mess with the DM Outbox. In principal, you can set up automatic direct messages, but these are widely considered spam, so someone might well purge you if you use them! You can also automate tweets via the Smart Tweets tab. I like SocialOomph or HootSuite better for this function because they allow you more flexibility and ease of use. In particular, I like SocialOomph because of it's drip feed "reservoirs". More about that in a coming post.
That's it for now. By way of disclaimer, I am not (nor is Kuno Creative) in any way affiliated with Tweet Spinner. We just like the product and how well it has helped to produce more sales leads from Twitter. Everyone in the company uses it now, and we are deploying it for clients as well. If that isn't a ringing recommendation, I don't know what is.
Presented by Kyle Lacy, author of Twitter Marketing for Dummies and the Kuno Creative inbound marketing team.
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