Twitter Sales Leads launches for small businesses

[wecando.biz]

Service helps SMEs identify and track potential opportunities through leading social information network


London, UK – 30 November 2009: WeCanDo.BIZ Limited, the online sales leads and business referrals network, has launched a Twitter Sales Leads tool to help owners of small businesses identify potential opportunities through the leading social information network Twitter. The service is available from www.twittersalesleads.com.


Twitter Sales Leads works by automatically searching the 27 million daily ‘tweets’, short text posts submitted by Twitter users, for those that include keywords describing specific products or services entered on the WeCanDo.BIZ website. But as well as looking for business keywords in tweets, Twitter Sales Leads also filters the results to show ONLY tweets which include an expressed need, request for a product or service recommendation. A business with fifteen keywords would need to perform 90 individual Twitter searches to produce the same results as the Twitter Sales Leads tool presents in a single view in seconds. Further, the sales leads can then be recorded and tracked with the WeCanDoCRM integrated Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system with just one click, helping turn those contacts into customers.


WeCanDo.BIZ has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from users during testing:


“I totally see the usefulness of this feature,” says Debs Williams of the Debbidoo marketing consultancy. “There are lots of people discussing marketing on Twitter, but with this addition to WeCanDo.BIZ it tells me if someone’s saying something more specifically related to wanting or needing marketing. Now if that’s not handy, I really don’t know what is!”


“I have discovered that my products and services are getting mentioned by thousands of people on Twitter. As my business is niche that is huge for me,” says Peter Syme of Splash White Water Rafting. “Software that helps me do something with the leads I get will make a big difference to my business.”


“Smaller businesses are fascinated by the opportunity presented to them through social networks, but many struggle to get to grips with what they offer and how to use them effectively,” says Ian Hendry, founder and Chief Executive of WeCanDo.BIZ. “Twitter already offers access to many millions of users tweeting needs for products or services, asking for recommendations and more. Our Twitter Sales Leads tool improves on that by cutting out the noise and taking business owners straight to the where the opportunities are.”


Hendry believes that Twitter poses the biggest threat yet to search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing, as users increasingly ask their ‘followers’, their network of connections on Twitter, for suggestions of products or services in preference to using traditional search methods.


“Go and ask Google for a business that can get you a pop-up exhibition stand in time for a conference on Monday, for example, and it’s like having a conversation with Rain Man,” says Hendry. “You get hundreds of thousands of results which touch upon what you’re asking for without really providing the answer you need. Crowd sourcing by asking Twitter users the same thing is likely to bring up fewer responses, but one solid reply with a link to supplier is all you need. After all, you’re only placing the business once. Smart businesses are tapping into this new source of potential business as an alternative to scrapping over the top placings on Google where the most you are guaranteed is a click, not a lead.”


The Twitter Sales Leads tool is available at www.twittersalesleads.com and www.wecando.biz as part of WeCanDo.BIZ Pro Networker membership, which enables small businesses to use social media to grow even faster, from £19.95 + VAT per month with no contract.

[Designer-J]

How does this work compared to say, setting up an rss feed myself which grabs the twitter postings containing my selected keywords?

[wecando.biz]

How does this work compared to say, setting up an rss feed myself which grabs the twitter postings containing my selected keywords?

Quite a bit.

First off, we don't just search Twitter for your keywords. We search for ONLY those instances where your keyword is mentioned along with an expressed need. This means the Twitter Sales Leads page will ONLY show matches where someone is asking for what it is you do. In other words, we filter out all the irrelevant (in this context) instances of your keywords occuring, focusing only on the tweets where it looks like someone has a need for you what it is you do. This makes it easier to see the real opportunity.

Secondly, Twitter can be likened to a waterfall. Even if you can spot an opportunity amongst the many tweets matching your keywords, it can easily disappear to be replaced with a whole load of new tweets. So we enable you to capture the opportunities into a Social CRM system, which stores details of the opportunity as a Lead, associated with the details of the Contact. This means you have easy access to the potential opportunity and can take it through a structured sales cycle to close. You can even invoice from within the Social CRM if you have it integrated with Kashflow accounting!

Some key differences, all focused towards ensuring that people who have a real need for what it is you do don't slip through the net.

As the release says, if you have 15 keywords associated with your business then you'd need to be doing 90 different Twitter searches -- or six different filters on the RSS results -- to get the same results. And then you need to find an efective way to capture and track the identified opportunity.

There are some other detail differences too, such as us showing followers, website URL and location of a Twitterer on the page, plus enabling the ability to respond to a need fro mwithin the page also.

I hope this helps.

IH