2: Observing Twitter

In their most prosaic forms, observing and engaging are the two activities you need to master for business. This article is going to deal with the first and show you how to observe and give you an idea of what to look for and what it all means…

To simplify this article we are going to use the search box at Twitter.com to reveal how some Independent Financial Advisors (IFA’s) are already using Twitter for business development.

In twitter there are apparently, now, 500 tweets per minute. As you can imagine, there is a lot of data that can be searched through. In twitter you can search easily using the search box that is visible on the front page, just like Google.

Try searching for your industries key words, so if you type in finance, as I just did then you will find 20 messages (tweets) that were twittered in the last 20 minutes. So our first observations include the fact that there are people active in this sector and that there were quite a lot of tweets in just the last few minutes (sometimes you will see that many in the last second).

If you modify your search to ‘financial advisor’ Twitter showed me the last twenty tweets spread over the last five hours. I just did that. I can see about a quarter of the posts were from recruitment companies looking for applicants – a commercial application of Twitter if there ever was one! We can see that Twitter is being used for business development for sure if the recruitment industry is involved.

If we modify that to ‘financial advisor UK’, we see nothing but recruitment offers! If we alter this to ‘financial advisor services’ we will see how Financial Advisors promote themselves on Twitter and I could see that the promotions span out back over the last 24 hours. So for sure, financial advisors are pretty active using Twitter for business development too.

So far we are seeing the kind of activity that probably is not very effective, all these advertisements are not very engaging. Indeed, the messages that we can see represent what most people do not like to see and they run contrary to the way that Social Media was designed to work. No doubt though the recruitment companies will be filling vacancies this way!

The key with Social Media, which is difficult to grasp is that it is not a place to advertise… We have seen mostly ‘advertising’ so far and this is not likely to attract many clients. It does depend on what business you are in. Recruitment could be an exception to the ‘rule’.

What you should look for is to see how competitors of yours may be trying to stand out. If they are using twitter ‘properly’ they will offer interesting, enticements. For instance, there may be Financial advisors offering guides to selecting insurance products. Perhaps a review of common misconceptions of Life Assurance, or a guide as to the essential elements of Property Insurance.

Often, it is not possible to put out information like this as a result of restrictive legislation. In this case you could search for financial advisor or consulting news stories in Google. Whilst some may be negative, others could be positive – a claims win perhaps, a case study on Accident Insurance paying out etc.

Offering helpful information that you have found or created positions you as the person to go to for impartial advice. It proves that you are aware of what is going on, you know your stuff.

On Twitter, one of the first things that consumers do if they think they might like to talk to you is either click on the link supplied in your tweet to read or download the information that you offer or to click on your photo and read your profile. When they view your profile they will see all your past tweets, the more ‘giving’ you are, the more likely that person will make contact with you…

See if you can find any that use twitter that way, they are the people you might be competing against!

I hope you found those insights useful, particularly the competitive ones…

Bye for now, see you soon. You can click through to the next article in this short series here.