How to Prospect Using Twitter Hashtags

Hashtags made their worldwide debut on Twitter and are being used on just about every social media platform these days. Do you know how to use them to have meaningful engagements with prospects on Twitter? Do you want a better way to find quality prospects and increase your Twitter ROI?

Simply having a presence on Twitter isn’t enough. With Twitter’s massive size comes a great deal of noise that you’ll have to sift through. An efficient part of the prospecting process on Twitter is using hashtags the right way.

Why Should You Use Hashtags for Prospecting?

By using Twitter hashtags effectively you can harness one of the biggest social networking tools on the planet to listen in on conversations that customers are having about your business and topics related to your business.

Twitter is full of noise. Due to the fact that there are approximately 10,000 tweets sent every second, finding the right people on Twitter can always be something of a challenge. How do you connect and engage with the right people?

Hashtags have been an important part of Twitter since the beginning. Hashtags are a tool that is used to filter conversations based on:

Topics
Brands
Products

If you establish the right Twitter hashtag early on for your business, you can use them to monitor the feedback that your customers are trying to give you and to find quality leads.

Read on to learn 5 ways you can make the most of Twitter hashtags for your business.

1) Find Relevant Topics

Learn which hashtags you should be monitoring. One of the things that you can do is spend time talking to the members of your team who work directly with your customers. They know your customers better than anyone, and will be able to tell you about the types of challenges that your customers are facing or about the types of questions that they’re asking.

Once you’re armed with the right type of information, you can use that data to find hashtags related to those concerns. You don’t necessarily have to create your own hashtags. Instead, monitor ones that already exist.

Using the “Search” tool on Twitter, you can find keywords relating to the types of conversations that your customers are having or the types of questions that they’re trying to find answers to. Join in the conversation along with other industry leaders and start answering questions and providing links to quality content.

For example, here we searched ‘#hashtag’ to find conversations that are taking place around Twitter hashtags. Here are our results:

2) Monitor Relevant Hashtags

Get into the habit of monitoring relevant Twitter hashtags on a regular basis. If you spend time every day paying close attention to the conversations that your customers are having, you’ll have an easier time adding to the discussion and creating the type of organic relationship that most marketers strive for.

Social media is the first true listening platform, not speaking platform. Yes, you can speak on it. Many will, and many do so successfully, but on the flip side, riding the wave of hashtags instead of creating them is a defining part of my thesis on social media. You’ll get much more success if you pay attention to what is trending on Twitter, try to reverse engineer the nature of the hashtag, and then try to bring value to the conversation. – Gary Vaynerchuk

Paying attention to what real people are saying on a site like Twitter allows you to react in the right way, at the right time. Potential customers will notice you when you continually provide value and respond to your customers questions and comments right away.

3) Add Value to the Conversation

One lesson that many people don’t learn until it’s far too late is that you have to add value to a conversation if you’re going to get anything in return. If you try to jump into a conversation that your customers are already having and dictate its direction based your desire to sell to them, you’re only setting yourself up for disaster. Provide information based on the types of discussions that your customers are passionate about.

A prime example of providing value is to participate in scheduled Twitter chats. A Twitter chat is a structured session that is created to provide informative or educational content. You can utilize a hashtag discovery tool to find a hashtag that is branded to your business or chat topic and not already in use.

Right now hundreds or organized twitter chats are taking place every week thanks to hashtags. Tweet chats bring together many people who are tweeting simultaneously using a common hashtag. You can use tools like Twubs.com to manage and moderate your tweet chats.

Here’s an example of a tweet chat that is hosted monthly by Gary Loper.

4) Use the Same Hashtag For All Your Posts

Select a handful of hashtags that pertain to your business and then establish guidelines for when to use each particular one. Here are some examples:

Links to blog posts.
Links to podcasts.
Event promotion.
Q&A

using twitter hashtags in the twitter feed

Groove Digital Marketing uses #contentmarketing to organize all our blog posts.

5) Start a Twitter Contest

Want a fun way to generate more leads? Hold a contest on Twitter with a hashtag.

Use a free contest app to select random winners. Make sure the prize is relevant to your industry to make sure you are attractive qualified leads!

Your contests can include:

A creative answer contest.
Retweet to win.
Photo contest.
Question & Answer.

How to Prospect Using Twitter Hashtags #contentmarketing

Click To Tweet

Do You Plan to Start Using Twitter Hashtags?

We’re convinced that using Twitter hashtags is an excellent way to find out what real people are saying and what they expect from you as a company. As a prospecting tool hashtags will improve the overall quality of your user engagements and allow you to increase the return on investment of your social media efforts across the board. You can take the valuable lessons that you’re learning from Twitter and apply them to other social media channels with great results.

What’s your opinion? Will Twitter hashtags help you prospect and generate more leads?

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About
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Trent Dyrsmid

Founder at Groove Digital Marketing

Right after being a husband and father, and riding dirt bikes, Trent's next love is digital marketing. He is the author of the Digital Marketing Handbook and spends most of his time helping his clients succeed.