Monday, November 12, 2012

Sales and Twitter

Here's an article about how salespeople can use Twitter:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2012/11/05/the-rise-of-social-salespeople/

This column claims that engaging with potential customers first through Twitter before trying to pitch to them is a far more effective way of generating leads than making coldcalls. Which makes sense to me, and though there are no hard numbers to back up that claim (other than an anecdote the columnist swears is true), we do learn of a study that shows that 90% of CEOs say they never reply to coldcalls (and "cold e-mails").

The columnist doesn't mention why you should use Twitter to generate sales leads and not Facebook, no doubt because the reason should be obvious to anyone who's used both apps, as I've mentioned in a previous post: Twitter is a lot more open and public, whereas Facebook usually tends to require you to actually know someone in real life before you can start sending them messages.

Speaking of Twitter versus Facebook, I also found an article from a few months ago describing how a Campbell's Soup executive trashed Facebook's sales force at a conference as being totally unhelpful to their customers:

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-twitters-ad-sales-team-trumps-facebok-2012-9

Not a good sign for Facebook -- something they'll definitely have to improve on. The executive mentions that, by contrast, Twitter's sales force are proactive in helping their customers gain insight into what works and what doesn't in a Twitter ad campaign.

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