Twitter is where people vent out their anger on a bad product. Twitter is where people post about their immediate emotions. And that makes it one of the best prospecting strategies.

LinkedIn is where almost everyone behaves professionally. It is a platform for good long-form posts (and unfortunately a ton of “good morning” and “motivation” pics and posts, largely plagiarised).

But we are humans. And we have emotions. And LinkedIn is not where we burst out. So where do we? Twitter.

And as such Twitter is a treasure trove for sales folks and yet very few folks get it. So very few that in one of my last jobs, I had to practically plead and get some of the sales leaders on Twitter against their wishes just to get them started. Why would they not use it? It was all in their heads.

“Rajesh am not used to Twitter buddy.”

But have you tried.

“No. But I don’t think I get it.”

Why don’t you try first.

Why does Twitter work?

It is a short-form content platform where you can punch in your emotions in under seconds and click “tweet” and it goes! You vent out there really.

Here’s an example of my own venting out on a bad experience I was having with Outreach, one of the B2B SaaS providers back in 2019. Take a look at the images below. Note that within moments a sales rep from SalesLoft, a competitor to Outreach, reaches out to me. And coz I was angry with Outreach, what do you think happened? I of course said “Yes! I wanna see your demo now!”.

Point to be noted: Prospects unhappy with your competition’s product or service are far more receptive. But that is not the only thing there is to Twitter.

Twitter is where people post going to a movie they have loved as kids. No one posts on LinkedIn “Can’t wait for the new Star Wars show!” No one posts on LinkedIn “If only Dravid was playing today!”

No one posts their punchy one liners on LinkedIn. Or about his daughter’s funny habits.

Or their quick takes on meetings or quick advice on managing up. LinkedIn is for long form content. Twitter for quick takes. And we all have too many quick takes.

Now if you had a daughter too and you were in sales, prospecting Dave, imagine your email could be so much more funnier and relatable if you started:

“So did you figure how to put your daughter to sleep at bedtime, Dave? Writing as I feed my lil hungry monster at bedtime😁“.

And then you went onto explain the reason for your mail. Wouldn’t Dave be far more receptive than to your usual:

“Hi Dave. Hope you are doing good. I wanted to reach out to see if you would be interested in our product XYZ…..”

If you have followed Event Campaigns like annual Dreamforce events by Salesforce, you know that people attending the event are encouraged to use a specific hashtag. Like 2019 hashtags for Salesforce’s event were #Dreamforce19 and #DF19. Twitter is full of people proudly telling you they will be at these events. And it’s like the prospects are telling out loud about their interest.

If companies using CRM/Salesforce is a good persona to go after, isn’t this hashtag a goldmine of prospecting for you? Heck yes!

The message is crisp on Twitter. And the personal info shared by your prospect makes it for interesting prospecting possibilities – bound only by your imagination.

Now presume if you could track all people using a specific hashtag or specific keywords on Twitter, in one single google sheet – automatically and without shelling a penny?

The next post will be all about the easiest and a free way of automatically tracking important hashtags or keywords on Twitter for prospecting.