Want Free Sales Leads? These Twitter Tools Make It Easy
by Dori SaltzmanThis is the fourth article in a series of practical technology articles featuring advice and insights from social media expert Sophie Bujold.
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Obtaining sales leads is typically an expensive proposition for travel agents, but social media is changing that. By putting people’s everyday conversations online and making them available for anyone to read and track, social media has made free lead mining a reality.
Twitter, the most public social media venue, is an especially useful resource for sales leads.
But Twitter users send about 200 million tweets daily, and it takes time to sift through all the tweets flooding the Twittersphere. “Twitter is a big melting pot of updates and replies,” said Sophie Bujold, a social media consultant for the travel industry.
Monitoring tools
Social media management tools like HootSuite and TweetDeck make navigating this hodgepodge of tweets much easier.
Let’s say you want to find sales leads for safari trips. HootSuite and TweetDeck will monitor conversations on Twitter for you, so you don’t have to check your Twitter page constantly or use the Twitter search function to follow conversations.
You just have to set up the keywords you want to track, and the software sets up monitoring dashboards that track both your followers’ conversations and all the other millions of conversations on Twitter.
Find your keywords
To get the best possible leads, you’ll need to determine the most useful keywords to follow. Some will be obvious. If you want to find leads for safari vacations, keywords and phrases like “safari,” “big five” and “Kruger National Park” are safe bets.
If you’re not sure what keywords to monitor, use Twitter’s search engine, Google or socialmention.com to research the words that come up most often when people discuss travel, Bujold advised.
Create a monitoring stream
Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords, log into TweetDeck or HootSuite and add a monitoring stream. Each stream can monitor from one to several words, depending on the software. You can also set up separate streams for different words or different subject matter.
The number of keywords you monitor is up to you, but make it manageable, Bujold advised. She recommends that agents start by monitoring two or three streams of keywords to see how it goes. From there, they can decide if they want to add or subtract any.
Fine tune your keywords
Pay attention to the relevancy of the tweets being found. “There might be a keyword that you think is great, but once you start monitoring it you realize there’s really nothing you can bring to the discussion that would be useful, or the people using the keyword aren’t in the demographic you want to target,” Bujold said.
In those cases, delete the keywords from the monitoring stream and try something else.
Broad vs. narrow
Another thing to keep in mind when choosing your keywords is the different results you’ll get using broad versus narrow keywords. Broad keywords will pull in lots of tweets and keep you very busy, but the vast majority likely will not be relevant. Too narrow and you may get virtually nothing to work with.
Bujold recommended applying the same principles to keyword monitoring that you do with Google searches. “Most people don’t search for ‘travel’ nowadays. Instead they search for ‘travel to South Africa’ or ‘travel to south France.’ If you’re seeing too much, you need to get more precise. If you’re not seeing enough traffic, then broaden it a bit.”
Hashtags are helpful
If you want to go broad without overdoing it, Bujold suggested following keywords preceded by hashtags. For instance, rather than simply follow “travel” or “cruise,” follow “#travel” or “#cruise.” When tweeters use a keyword with a hashtag they’re indicating that that subject matter is important to the tweet.
There are also several weekly travel-related conversations that agents should consider monitoring and participating in. They include #TTOT (travel talk on Tuesday), #CruiseChat, #TNI (travel night in), #TravelTuesday and #MexMonday.
Monitoring frequency
“A day in Twitter is like a year in real life,” Bujold said, so agents should monitor their keyword streams at least daily.
Bujold suggested that agents check their streams at least three times a day: in the morning when you start work, at noon and just before the end of your workday. If you’ve got a free minute in between, take a peek to see if there’s anything worth jumping on.
You can set up both TweetDeck and HootSuite to alert you when a relevant tweet has been found, but if you’re monitoring several keywords you may get alerts nonstop, which will be more of a distraction then a help.
Responding to leads
It is considered polite to follow someone with whom you want to interact, so the first step, once you’ve identified a lead, is to follow the person you want to contact. Once you’re following them, reply to the relevant tweet right away.
For instance, if someone tweets that they’ll be visiting Oahu and are looking for hotel suggestions, first follow them, then reply, “I’ve been to Oahu and know of several great properties. Let me know if you want info.”
Don’t sweat what you miss
It’s important not to get overwhelmed, Bujold emphasized. “Don’t sweat what you’re missing. Yes, you’re going to miss some leads, but if you don’t have the time to do this on a daily basis, check as often as you can and respond in that moment to the leads that are in front of you.
Also see:
Facebook Ads: 10 Steps to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck, June 30, 2011
Facebook Ads: Do It, They’re Worth the Money, June 27, 2011
Use Google and Yahoo Profiles to Ramp Up Your Visibility, June 20, 2011
About Sophie Bujold: Before starting her own social media consulting company for travel agencies, Bujold spent eight years working with first Uniglobe Travel and more recently Ensemble Travel Group in their online marketing divisions.
