In the last blog post I discussed on how Twitter is a lost prospecting opportunity making a strong case for it. In this post we will work in detail on how best to prospect on Twitter. This blog is gonna be a hands-on workshop so be ready to put in the effort to see amazing results in under 30minutes!

Before venturing down a detailed blog, let me clear who is this blog suitable for:

• Sales/Business Development Reps

• Any GTM reps: Sales Managers, Partner Managers, Customer Success Reps, Account Management Reps

• Startups with a tight budget or startups with a thoughtful expense plan aka RoI conscious on tech-stack investments

• Event Management Teams

• Marketing Managers

With that let’s hop on!

Step 1: Who do you wanna find on Twitter?

What we will get is entire lists of tweets, the profile information of the person and the meta data associated with it!

Finding a person on Twitter is easy if they exist. You could actually create a custom button on your Salesforce CRM on every lead/contact record to search if they exist on Twitter.

But presume any company that uses Salesforce is your persona. By that definition, Salesforce’s Dreamforce event is a treasure mine for your prospecting. In fact companies that have significant presence at Dreamforce will tell you how many days and weeks’ efforts they put to ensure they know who is attending the event from ongoing prospect accounts where an active conversation is going on to customer contacts who might run into your booth. And so well planned is half the battle won and in prospecting well planned is the entire battle won in a war of closing the deal!

So find your hashtag or keyword of interest that you think your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) would use on Twitter. For our example let us consider all people attending Dreamforce at a target persona. Since pandemic Dreamforce has shut shop for their amazing physical events, if you were to go back in time to last event in 2019, hashtags in use were#Dreamforce19 and #DF19.

But manually searching the hashtag and copy-pasting is hard. As would any financial advisor tell you: your money working for you is the best use of your money, likewise, a tool working for you while you worked on things that need your personal attention is the best use of your time.

What I mean is we will automate this part of search and copy-paste! Yes you heard that right! What we will get is entire lists of tweets, the profile information of that person and the meta data associated with it!

Let us say we wanna know about all tweets and every one tweeting about “Digital Adoption”.

This is what you are gonna do (but first ensure you have a Twitter account):

• Open a Google Sheet and go to Add-ons > Get add-ons

• Search and install Tweet Archiver add-on

• Once Tweet Archiver is installed you will need to Authorize Twitter. This is a one time setup to only fetch tweets and it will never post any tweets on your behalf.

• Once installed and authorized, click Create Rule.

• Under Create Rule you will notice the choice to search tweets by keywords or hashtags. The choice to search “Near This Place” is a premium feature and not available out-of-the-box. We won’t be needing that for our search. You can choose language. Note the hashtags you wanna search have to be separated by a SPACE and not COMMAS. List out all your hashtags under “These #hashtags” with a space/blank to separate them.

• Under “Advanced Rules” note you can further filter down the tweets you are looking. Under Advanced Rules you can delve deeper too. Say you only want to fetch tweets that have minimum 10 Retweets then your rule in Advanced Rules will be min_retweets:10.

• Click “Create Search Rule” and voila! Your query is running in the background fetching all tweets matching your rules!!

• Note that with free version you can only create one search rule. The query will run in the background and fetch all tweets meeting the criteria every hour and update your gsheet automatically.

• You can build pivots on this data and do all kind of data magic! If it is in your capacity to pay, I would highly recommend tipping the developer or upgrading to premium version. It costs about $4 per user per month. For an exercize like this a single license suffices and you get the benefit of creating 15 rules and auto-search and update every 15mins as against an hour with developer support for 60 days from the date of purchase.

Following is the result of a my search query to find all tweets that mentioned “#digitaladoption”. Since there were too many columns, I have pasted two images to accommodate them all.

Notice information is so diverse:

• Date of Tweet
• Full Name of who Tweeted
• Tweet text
• Location
• No. of Retweets
• No. of Favourites
• Using which app
• How many followers the profile has
• How many people the Twitter account follows
• Is it a verified Twitter account?
• Twitter user since?
• Bio
• Website
• Link to profile image

For someone working with raw data, this is incredible stuff if you knew what to do with it! The usecase for this method of prospecting is only bound by your imagination.

I, for one, have used this method to track every time someone mentioned one of our competitors in a tweet! Imagine the RoI on responding to an angry tweet from a prospect using your competition – they are most open to the idea of talking to you right then, now aren’t they? 😉

You could track industries, specific personas and so much more.

Over to you then amigos!

Happy Prospecting!