Twitter + LinkedIn = Scalable Prospecting – Thanks to @Unfollowersme

In June a new research study by Kitedesk showed that more social sales people preferred Twitter over LinkedIn. I was shocked, but it got me thinking…am I underestimating the power of Twitter for prospecting?

From my perspective, the number one measurement of a social sales campaign is the number of qualified phone calls that are generated from the efforts. Until I saw the incredible results of the following experiment that we conducted, I didn’t consider Twitter to be a major player in sales or even a significant prospecting tool.

I asked Lindsey Olpp, our Marketing Intern and Ghost Writer, to take on this project – to prove or disprove the theory that Twitter was as valuable of a B2B sales tool as Kitedesk reported.

Here is her report:

Social media is currently one of the best tools to reach customers and prospects in sales and marketing, particularly Twitter and LinkedIn. Like any type of tool, it is important to use it properly in order to utilize it to its full potential. One of the ways to do this with Twitter is to focus on growing the amount of targeted followers in your network.  The larger the following the more exposure your brand message gets to a specific audience and beyond.

I began with a powerful resource to help scale our experiment, Unfollowers, a website and app designed for Twitter users to manage and increase their number of followers. According to the website’s About page, creator Tuschar Mahajan started Unfollowers as a “simple unfollower tracker that has grown into an app (and website) that tells you everything you need to know about your social network” and  it now has over 7 million users. It has since offered more features and grown into a powerful prospecting tool.

Unfollowers was designed to provide simple ways to identify and then take the necessary actions needed to follow the right targeted people who then often follow you back, as well as connect with people who will be beneficial to your business and building a network.

Next, I discovered Jerry Banfield, a digital marketing specialist and online advertising expert, who created an Unfollowers tutorial video on YouTube. He has used Unfollowers to get tens of thousands of followers in a short amount of time without paying for any of them. He claims using this method 15 minutes per day for one month will get someone 5,000+ targeted followers. Follow Jerry on Twitter.

For our experiment, I took a personal Twitter handle @BrynneTillman that had under 20 followers and used Banfield’s step-by-step method described in the video, tweaking the time invested to 30 minutes each week for one month.

The most crucial step is finding someone on twitter with a following that you would like to mimic, particularly one with a large amount of followers who has a similar business focus; in our case, someone who talks about social selling and marketing. Therefore, we chose to follow Kim Garst’s followers as well as those she follows, as she is one of the most successful in the business. Even with implementing this method for less time than recommended, we gained over 1,000 targeted followers with a total of 2-hours invested in just a month.

Here is how we converted the new followers to phone calls:

One of Unfollowers features sends automated but personalized messages to everyone who follows us. This is an opportunity to invite these new followers to connect on LinkedIn.

The automated tweet reads:

@HANDLE thanks for the follow – connect with me on my home turf too!http://Linkedin.com/in/BrynneTillman

Out of the 1,000+ new Twitter followers, we received over 50 LinkedIn connection requests (remember, it only took 2 total hours of time invested). Once we accepted, we sent a follow-up message:

Thanks for following me on Twitter, and now connecting with me on LinkedIn. Typically, I like to have a brief call with my new connections so we can explore ways we may be able to work together. Here is a link to my calendar:http://scheduleacallwithbrynne.com. Please pick a time that is most convenient for you. I am looking forward to our call.

Good Networking,

Brynne Tillman

Nine of the 50+ connections converted to phone calls, one became a client and three are still active opportunities.

Unfollowers allowed us to scale quickly. Over the next year it is very likely to reach tens of thousands of followers, and many more future clients.

Yes, I will say it…

TWITTER ROCKS FOR B2B!

As of now, Banfield has over 78,000 followers. Watch the video below and see how he did it. Start building your followers and making new connections today!

*** Do you have an online or social research project that you’d like to run? Feel free to contact Lindsey Olpp directly to help you execute it.