Tips on leveraging Twitter for Social CRM purposes

Posted on 22. Jan, 2010 by Freddie in Blog, How To Guides

I recently bought all twelve books in the Saga of Darren Shan from Dial-a-Book. Dial-a-book was able to sell me all the books via Twitter. They don’t have a website and I’m not sure if they even have an actual store. More prominent organizations who have used Twitter to close deals are Avaya – who finalized a $250,000 sale from a single Twitter post – and Dell Outlet which recently announced that revenue from the twitter account reached $6.5 million. In India, Infosys closed a sales deal following a query on Twitter by a prospective client. All these firms were able to identify a potential customer, engage in conversation with him and close the deal. Essentially that is what Social CRM is all about.

There is hardly any doubt that Twitter can and should be used as a social CRM channel. Here are some helpful tips on how to go about it:

Step 1: Listen

Listening on Twitter includes setting up one or many searches to follow any conversation that relates to the brand, company, products, services and industry.

Tools that can be used for this:

  • Twitter Search: Once you get the hang of its advanced search feature it is easy to see why this is probably the best Twitter search tool. It allows you to create complex search queries with a lot of ease.
  • Some other good tools are Twitterfall, Twendz and Ubervu
  • Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet and PeopleBrowsr also have commendable search features.
  • Listening tools such as Radian6, SM2 Techrigy and Buzzstream have search features. However the tools listed above are capable of streaming results in real-time.

The key to good listening is setting-up the search string which for the most part is an art dictated by one’s need rather than a pre-defined set of rules. Life could, however, be made easy if one were to pay attention to the following:

  • Geographic limit
  • Language restrictions
  • Date range
  • Use of operators (AND, OR, NOT)

Step 2: Profile

This step includes:

  • Checking the authenticity and relevance of tweets to identify influencers.
  • Profiling the influencers.

Going through the tweet history of the account is enough to reveal whether or not the account is a bot. This will also provide some data to do a quick analysis of the person or organization behind the account. In addition to this, the bio section and any link provided by the account could reveal more information about them. All this information should be collected so that there is more to the person or organization than just one tweet that matched a keyword during the search process.

In my experience so far, Buzzstream has been the best tool when it comes to profiling influencers.

Step 3: Assign

This is the part where the external consumer facing CRM process meets the internal employee facing world of enterprise collaboration. It includes:

  • Figuring out who in the organization is most suitable to respond to a particular tweet. Then assigning tweets to employees and departments accordingly.

Conceptually it might seem easy to take a tweet from the search result, profile the person and send the information to the appropriate department or employee. The big issue lies in how-to merge two different technologies. While Step 1 and Step 2 involve external tools, this step calls for combining of those with an organization’s internal systems. It is understandable that organizations are hesitant to allow external tools to interfere with their legacy systems.

From the above mentioned list CoTweet, PeopleBrowsr, Radian 6 and Buzzstream have features that enable a user to assign tweets to different employees. However, this requires everyone in the organization to have their own accounts to access that interface. In addition, emailing tweets and profiles to colleagues or departments could easily flood inboxes. While small start-ups would be able to work with this set-up, it is far from ideal for medium and large organizations.

Step 4: Respond

It is important to realize that this step is the organization’s first conversation with the consumer. From a marketing and communications point of view, responding is probably the most important step. While one person might have been assigned to respond, it would not hurt to include others in composing a response. This step includes:

  • Making sure those responsible to respond have been given all necessary details and that they reply within a ‘reasonable’ timeframe.
  • Making sure the best possible response is composed.

The key to this step is creating the right response. This is again more of an art that depends on the original tweet. If it was a query or complain then obviously a helpful answer would be the best response. At times, however, one might have to ask the person for further explanation so that appropriate help can be offered.

The tools necessary to carry out this step need to be built internally.

Step 5: Track

Once the response has been sent track any follow-up conversations. In essence this step includes repeating everything mentioned in Steps 1, 3 and 4. However, this time around the activity is more focused because one knows who to listen to and who to assign to.

Tools that can help you do this are:

Reviewing the above explained steps of Listening, Profiling, Assigning, Responding and Tracking, Salesforce seems to be one vendor who is moving close to providing a complete solution. Last year they integrated Twitter in their CRM offering and introduced Chatter – a collaboration tool. Another tool that seems exciting is PeopleBrowsr. It is rich in feature most of which are free to use and others are adequately priced.