Twitter is a treasure of business leads. But the problem is there’s too much noise. Finding and engaging with prospects can be a laborious process and not worth the returns. Using smart automation tools, you can easily discover leads on twitter, increase followers and engage with them in quick time.
Here we present ways to automate twitter lead generation and grow your twitter followers that can potentially convert into customers. This process involves continuously and automatically gathering leads from twitter into to a Google spreadsheet, engaging with them either manually or in semi-automated ways, and convert them to leads or followers.
Free tools you will need:
- Google Sheets
- Hashtagify.me
- Automate.io
Before we jump in, you need to be aware of twitter’s policies around automation. Twitter considers sending automated bulk tweets, favoriting, following as spam – unless the user has shown some intent. I.e. you can automatically follow, or send a message to people who follow you or like your tweets – but you are not allowed to robotically search for tweets/users and do the same.
The process we suggest here follows a similar approach and does not encourage you to do automated follows or favoriting as it is a violation of tTwitterpolicies.
Gather Prospects from Twitter
We start by setting up an automated process that continuously gathers prospects from twitter and stores them to a Google Spreadsheet.
First, you need to define your target prospects. Identify what keywords or hashtags do they use in their tweets and in their twitter profile. Make a list of top 5 keywords or hashtags. You can use tools like
You can use tools like Hastagify.me, a free tool that helps you identify popular hashtags for a given keyword. Once you have the list, it’s time to start collecting prospects into a Google Spreadsheet.
Signup for Automate.io – a tool that lets you automate work by connecting various business apps. Start by creating a Bot in Automate.io that continuously searches twitter for these keywords and aggregates the tweets into your Google spreadsheet.
Be sure to collect important data about the Twitter User – like profile URL, follower count, this will help you qualify the prospects.
You can also add some qualification rules into the Bot to narrow down the prospects. For example, if you are interested only in prospects with more than 1000 followers and with a ‘marketing’ keyword in their Twitter profile description, you can add a filtering condition for it.
Reach out
Once you have the tweets and user profile in your Google Sheets, you can now start verifying and prospecting the individuals who look qualified.
Your objective now is to get yourself noticed and draw them to your twitter profile (and subsequently your website) or get them to follow you.
You can do this by going to their Twitter profile and ‘like’ some of their tweets, follow them or send a reply (@mention) to their tweet with value-add content or offering a solution to their problem.
Once they notice you, it may result in two possible outcomes. They would either come to your Twitter profile (and subsequently to your website) or quickly follow you. For each of these, you can set up a lead acquisition process.
Acquire Leads
When someone follows you on twitter, you can set up a Bot in Automate.io that automated direct message to be sent with a link to a landing page. Alternatively, you can add Twitter followers to a Google spreadsheet so that you can act on them manually later.
If you use Twitter Ads, another way to convert visitors from your twitter profile page is by using Twitter lead generation cards. Lead generation cards allow you to embed a call to action (CTA) buttons into your tweets. You can add a lead generation card into a tweet and pin the tweet to your profile so that the CTA is visible to all visitors.
When someone clicks the CTA, they see a pre-populated form with email, twitter handle, and name. With just one click from them, this information will land in your Twitter Ads account and your CRM.
So, sit back and let the Social Media Bots do the smart lead generation for you.
