To Social or Not to Social - Twitter for Salespeople?

To continue this series, let me start by telling an old sales joke that I modified for Social Media. One Sales guy says to another, “Hey man, I haven’t seen any posts on Facebook or Twitter from you in weeks. What’s going on?!” The other replies, “I know, I know…I really dig that Social Media stuff, but I figured out that I’ve got to actually sell to make money here.”

After a year of searching for prospects and building a following, it is apparent that Twitter is not the place to go to build a pipeline. Even with its 55 million monthly users and 20% of internet users 25-34 years of age, Tweeting will not help you make your numbers. The struggle that I have as an individual contributor (not a brand) is similar to that of Twitter’s management…how do you monetize Tweets (other than the multi-level, get-rich-quick scammers) and as important, how do you measure return on investment?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe there is value for us salespeople to participate on Twitter. In short, being involved in the social community provides credibility. Call it an edge or the “X-factor” when you can use info from Tweets or interactions to “get in” or to build rapport. There is information here you can’t glean from corporate websites, such as customer complaints or internal meetings*.

Last week, I attended a Social Media Panel with Kyle Lacy, CEO of BrandSwag, Jesse Engle, Co-Founder of CoTweet and Lee Hammond of Interscope Records. I loved the quote Kyle used to open up his pitch, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki. His prediction: 2010 will bethe year of “One powerful experience” for users to leverage a single system across multiple Social channels. According to Jesse, 54% of Fortune 100 companies use Twitter,  1 in 5 Tweets reference brand names and Twitter users are twice as likely to engage brands (over Facebook fan pages, et al.) Lee shared some cool stats on their artists’ fan following demonstrating the power of Social. For example, Lady GaGa (2009) had ~2,600,000 Twitter fans to Eminem (2003) ~451,000. Biggest takeaway for me: the average Twitter click brought $.65 per and the average conversion was $56...reinforcing the premise that Social Media pays the highest returns to brands, not individual contributors.

Here are some essential tools for maximizing your Twitter experience. My favs are HootSuite (for managing multiple accounts, Ubertwitter (Blackberry mobile support, iPhone apps here), Twitter Grader (measures relevancy), and CoTweet (key word search and automation).

So use Twitter and these tools to keep up with the pulse and gain the x-factor. As for me, I gotta run…gonna upgrade my LinkedIn account and go sell something!

Do you Grok it?

*Side note: Please DON’T tweet about calls or meetings with companies that are not yet your customers!!  Mentioning this may tip off the competitors I follow, but I feel like I should say something for the greater good…