Twitter has a lot going for it – from size to engagement; from a network to really awesome conversations. Depending on your business niche, you could virtually reach to practically any company, brand, or individual — just like that. You might be frowned upon if all you did was to “hustle” and “sell” on Twitter. You’d, however, do really well if you manage to maintain great conversations, use Twitter for more than just “small talk” and make it work for your business. While there are tons of tools available, we handpicked a few of those that you can really do something with. Some of these tools help you manage your social activity. Others can help you sell, build your network, or just be awesome. Here are some tools you should take note of:
HootSuite
Ok, HootSuite is a general social media management tool and you can use it for most social media networks (support for Pinterest and Tumblr is expected soon). If you have multiple brands, each with its own network, it makes sense to use services like HootSuite since the tool allows you to post, schedule, and manage updates across networks at the same time. Without ever logging in or out of any one network, you could handle it all from a single dashboard.
HootSuite makes it easy to stay on top of conversations and post/schedule updates (across networks). Hootsuite also supports image uploads, bulk scheduling, and has reporting built-in to gauge how you perform.
FollowerWonk
Content is the engine that pulls your business to profits. Your primary content assets will be your blog, reports, and other downloads. Apart from that, you might also want to reach out to blogs that relevant to your niche. How do you find these host bloggers? Is there a way to utilize the time you allocate for Twitter activity to also find potential web masters, editors, experts, or bloggers? FollowerWonk is the perfect tool for you to find anyone you are looking for with a Twitter account. It allows you to know more about your host bloggers. If you want to go for press releases ( as another aspect of your content marketing), you could reach out to journalists and other experts too.
TwitQPon
What are sales without a bit of a discount thrown in? If you are in commerce business, you could make your followers convert to lifetime customers (assuming you are doing everything else right). But what if you don’t have many followers? That’s sad. How about shooting at two birds with a bullet? The bullet here is TwitQpon and it so happens that the tool allows you to create coupons (covers most types such as percentage coupons, one-off coupons, etc.) while also increasing your follower count since it forces your prospects to “Tweet about it” to claim coupons.
TwitQpon is all about simplicity and effectiveness. Are you spinning in your head thinking about how to use it for selling more already?
Twilert
Finding leads is critical for any sales oriented company. We are guessing that you’d like to get leads too. Instead of going out and looking for leads everyday, wouldn’t it be nice to have potential leads pop into an email, delivered hot and fresh? Twilert allows you to do just that. Set up a Twilert, add as many search filters as you like, and get alerted via email (we recommend you set up another email address for this since it’d flood your inbox).
Nimble CRM
So, you are social as you can get and you’ve been doing all you can to maintain conversations, build your network, and manage your conversations across the network everyday. All that’s fine but is there a way to track some of these conversations that could potentially lead to a sale? If social selling is reality, then where is the accountability for that reality? Nimble CRM steps in as a social CRM tracking conversations and relationships that turn into deals and customers respectively. Nimble CRM also works across social networks (and not just Twitter), but it also allows you to grab content information about followers, helps you keep in touch with them regularly, and a lot more.
Social means business. It might not look like it, but it does.
Do you like/use any tools for Twitter that we should know about? Let us know.