Much has been said about using twitter to bring home the bacon. But probably none of it has been more apt than when Jason Day and Aaron Chronister decided to take up a fellow tweeter’s challenge: What could the barbecuers do with bacon?
Jason and Aaron have been running BBQ Addicts for a while now and their main challenge was to get an audience to their website. More audience means more advertisers, which means an income. They bought and cooked bacon and Italian sausage in a recipe called ‘The Bacon Explosion’, which they posted to 1200 twitter followers. The Bacon Explosion has since been viewed over 390,000 times, with people sending in pictures of their own ‘Explosions’.
Do they credit it only to twitter? Of course not. The Bacon Explosion made its way to StumbleUpon, and was helped along by Digg and Delicious. But it was twitter which set the ball rolling, and certainly twitter that helped attract a wider audience.
But if you think it’s only small business owners who are using twitter as a lead generation tool and to boost sales, think again. Zappos.com’s CEO Tony Hsieh is an avid tweeter and his current following is 1,879,862 and yes, they do shop at Zappos. DellOutlet is another excellent example where it’s amassed over 1 million followers, and uses its tweets to direct them back to special sales and store discounts. Their spectacular ‘Dell campaign’ will go down in history books as one of the twitter campaigns to generate over 3 million in revenue.
So what’s the answer to getting your business talked about and generating leads which result in sales? Getting as creative with your twitter posts as you possibly can. Namecheap is a domain registrar site and their ‘big’ twitter idea was to post Christmas trivia questions as a contest. Those who answered won a one-year domain registration at Namecheap. The result was a successful contest which not only drew in traffic to the account and bumped up the company’s page rank, but also helped them analyze figures and draw positive conclusions from them.
If you’re just starting out on twitter, here are a few tips on how to generate leads:
- Create several landing pages tailor made to your twitter account. This way no matter what campaign you plan, you can always channel audience into a pre-determined funnel.
- Always test your pages and campaigns, and then re-test them. It’s imperative to segment your audience to as narrow a list as possible, based on each campaign vertical.
- Save your character space by using tools like bitly which allow you to shorten links and analyze click-throughs.
- Optimize your twitter page, by adding customized backgrounds, blog links, your company logo, and URL links back to your website.
- Update your user profile and if you blog as part of a larger team, include all team member names and twitter handles.
- Change your automated message based on the campaign you run. A single unified message can be developed for cross channel promotions.
- Use TwitterSearch to find people and to find out the latest breaking news, relevant stories, monitor competitor activity and identify influencers, all which helps determine which direction you should be moving your marketing toward.
- Tweet consistently, not only when there’s a campaign or sale to be pushed.
- Cross promote your campaign, by integrating it with other social media channels like facebook, your blog, LinkedIn etc.
- Stay on the ball –always respond, send out messages, and forward interesting links. This way, you build not just a community, but ne that is interactive and ready to trust you.
