Building Connections with Social

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Daily Sales Tip: 4 Tips To Find Prospects Using Social Media

A recent blog by Jay Baer outlined ways to track down prospective clients by using Social Media. He recommends:

1. Hire a Spy
Flowtown and Rapleaf are two of the leaders in the emerging field of social anthropology. It's ingenious, and a bit freaky (like Cirque de Soleil).

You provide a list of your customers' email addresses, and these services figure out how (and who) among your customers are on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and niche social networks, what their "likes" are, and other important details.

Flowtown is perfect for small and medium businesses. Rapleaf is better for larger companies.

2. Ask
Perhaps the most obvious way of finding out where your customers are hanging out in social media is unfortunately the least utilized. Ask them.

3. Email Behavior
Have you added links to your social outposts in your emails? Have you added the ability for email recipients to share content on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and elsewhere? If you send email routinely, you need to integrate email and social immediately.

Most quality email service providers give you the option of easily adding sharing tools, and you can then run a report showing which of your subscribers clicked your Twitter link, and/or shared content on Facebook. Presto! Now you know that person is active on those social outposts.

4. Gmail Stalking
Twitter, Facebook and other social outposts have incorporated functionality that allows you to see whether your Gmail contacts are using the services, and invite them to connect with you. While this integration is intended for personal use, you can utilize it for your business, too. Here's how:

• First, take a list of your customers' email addresses, and create a .csv file (you only need email addresses, not names, mailing address, etc.)
• Next, create a free account on gmail.com specifically for this purpose (you don't want to be doing this on an existing account)
• Third, upload the .csv to your Gmail account.
• Now, go to Twitter and create a brand new account using your special new Gmail email address. On Step Two "Find Your Friends" of the Twitter sign-up process, select Gmail. Bam! Twitter automatically reads all of the email addresses of your customers stored in Gmail, allowing you to track the number on Twitter and/or follow them immediately.
• Now, set up a new Facebook account using your new Gmail address. On Step One "Find Friends" of the Facebook sign-up process, indicate that you have a Gmail account, and follow the simple instructions. Bingo! All of your customers on Facebook are presented to you, and you should be able to become their "friends" with a single click.

I uploaded a list of approximately 2,000 subscribers to my email newsletter (you're a subscriber, right?) and was able to track down more than 1,000 on Twitter, and 500 on Facebook. Total cost? Zero dollars, and about 30 minutes. As the social Web becomes ever more interconnected, understanding how your customers are connected (or connectable) in social media is a sizable part of the success equation. Source: Jay Baer's Convince & Convert Social Media Consulting & Coaching

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