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I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago about how consumers take buying decisions on Twitter and mentioned how I was accidentally involved in an online chat about British telecommunication providers.
Whether BT or O2 follow up with people online who are looking for their products is something I cannot quantify, (but hopefully engagement index will tell us soon enough!) However I decided this week to dig a bit deeper and actually present a very simple way that you social media fans out there can adopt in order to find some potential leads on Twitter by using the “advance search feature” or even the simple search bar.

Before you do anything and proceed with this you need to make sure that:

1) You will be online and respond fast and accurately to the potential lead that you are trying to approach/open a discussion with.

2) You have landing pages ready with the products/services you wish to promote/sell.

Now as some of you may know, I run social media workshops along with LimeTree or on my own on a one-2-one basis. I checked my diary and saw some empty spots for next week so decided to have a look on Twitter and see if people are looking for social media training. While social media training as a keyword is very generic and as I am aware that there are a lot of agent/robot accounts out there spamming people who tweet specific keywords, the first thing I did was to filter my search. The second concern I had was that due to a personal engagement next Thursday I could not be away from London. I therefore needed to make sure that any potential client I wanted to approach would be around London (or within 50 miles.)

To sum up my search:
Words: Social Media Training
Negative words: Free
Near: London and within 50miles
Being a question, I included ‘?’

So I went to https://twitter.com/#!/search-advanced and used it in the simplest way possible (Seescreenshot below):

Or alternatively you can go onto the Twitter search bar and add this:
social media training -free near:”London” within: 50miles?
which is the keyword you are looking for, -<word> you do not wish to be included (in our case “free”)
near: <area> you are looking for (great for location targeted marketing),
within:millage of the selected area
and “?” as you are looking for questions asked.

Tada!! Amongst various tweets I found this one which looked promising – I will hide the username for obvious reasons:

So I sent a tweet to introduce myself and find out a bit more about what sort of training he is looking for his staff. He asked me to send him the following:

1) A landing page where he could see my work
2) A testimonial page from those who have attended my courses
3) Any other relevant links or web pages he could see

I have sent all that, he thanked me for my time and we will set up a telephone discussion should the web pages please him. The whole process took me less than five minutes and is only one of the ways you can use social media channels in order to generate leads and potential customers. You do not have to spend a lot of hours everyday looking for leads! In the social media world, working smart and effectively can do miracles.
If you have a sales team and are looking for ways to generate leads from Twitter or any other social media channel please do not hesitate to contact us directly through email or Twitter!