One of the greatest, untapped, benefits of Twitter is the list building feature. Segmentation and advanced Recency-Frequency-Monetary analysis can only begin when you build lists. Considering that Twitter is quickly becoming a sales and marketing channel the equal of traditional channels like postal-email-phone, it is time for businesses to create lists of their prospective and current consumers that choose Twitter as a channel for communication. Building Twitter lists begin with two steps:

1. Identify Your Customers & Prospects on Twitter

• Email Addresses: extract and build a list of the email addresses of your customers from your database
• Data Append: utilizing your list of customer email addresses, contract a data append service to find the social network (Facebook-Twitter-LinkedIn) url addresses of customers who have adopted Twitter and other networks
• Data Search: use Google or Twitter Search to input keywords or names of your customers. Example- Google search “Dean Guadagni on Twitter” or “Dean Guadagni: Twitter.com” to find Dean Guadagni’s Twitter url aka handle
• Prospect Search: input keywords that will identify real time conversations on Twitter relevant to your business. Record the Twitter url of each prospective customer and build a list of these prospects

2.  Build Twitter Lists

• Customer List: build a master list of the customers you currently service who communicate on Twitter. Note- Lock this list for your eyes only so that no competitor can view the list
• Segment: from the master “Customer List” segment your customers into different lists such as location, clients, prospects, most active purchasers, etc.
• Engage: send a tweet to your customer or prospect bundled around an offer to entice them to follow your Twitter account if they are not following

Benefits

• New Touch Points: identifying customers and prospects who use Twitter provides businesses a new place to communicate and deliver offers
• Database Enrichment: adding social media information to  your database increases the value of your database
• Measurement & Analysis: building Twitter lists is the first step in creating a measurement strategy that will allow you to analyze the effectiveness of Twitter as a sales and marketing channel for your business

Facebook and Twitter share  synergy as “must have” business tools for today’s marketing and sales efforts. Facebook is often used as a CRM for businesses and Twitter a prospecting funnel to move people to a Facebook page. With this in mind, how do you cross market and provide exposure for a company Facebook page using Twitter? Answer: hashtag events.

Hashtag Events On Twitter

#FollowFriday and niche hashtag events have provided participants with exposure, viral marketing power, new followers, and recognition. The next step in hashtags should be the creation of an event called #FacebookFri. Inner Architect has announced #FacebookFri with the intention of creating a new event with the same viral power of #FollowFri.

How Does #FacebookFri Work?

#FacebookFri provides Twitter users an opportunity to recommend their favorite Facebook business pages to their Twitter following and other Twitter users:

• Friday: although competing with #FF, the idea is to feed off of #FF traffic much the same way TV networks use strong shows to provide “lead in” audience to their new shows
• Hashtag: each tweet must include the hashtag #FacebookFri to join the event
• Link: capture the url address of the Facebook page you wish to recommend and include it in your tweet

What Are The Benefits of #FacebookFri?

• Exposure: by naming your favorite Facebook pages you are providing exposure for that page
• Friendsourcing: friendsourcing, known by many other names, works like this: by naming your favorite Facebook pages you are providing your stamp of approval. Friends have a greater tendency to adopt other friend’s recommendations
• Viral Marketing: when you recommend a Facebook page you are moving the link for that page into the Twitter stream of your followers and possible new followers
• Networking: #FacebookFri would help other Facebook page owners meet their peers, connect, network, and form possible alliances
• Lead Generation: #FacebookFri would be a prime activity to generate more traffic to your Facebook page enhancing the possibility of new leads for a business owner

Let’s face it. While social media is the trendy new marketing kid on the block, email remains the channel that most companies rely upon to execute their direct marketing programs. Why?

• Email is easy and inexpensive.
• Social media is new and time-consuming.

Many marketers make the mistake of assuming that since email is cheap, there’s no harm in blasting the whole database with the same message. Yet this strategy produces an unhealthy syndrome called list fatigue. Without a strategy for sending the most relevant messages to the most targeted customers, your emails can begin to be perceived as irrelevant and your customers stop opening them. If your customers shut down your only touch point, you lose your ability to communicate with them and increase the likelihood of losing them. Not good.

This is where social media can play the hero. Social networks give you another channel in which to get your customer’s attention. By making the effort to maintain social network contact information on your database, consider the power of what you can do:

• Best customers: Show them that you care by acknowledging them in a social relationship.
• New customers: Get the relationship off to the most promising start by welcoming them to a social relationship.
• Lapsed customers: Seize the opportunity to re-engage those who are no longer responding to your emails.

Are you thinking this sounds too time-consuming and something you can’t afford? Think about it this way. Back in the day direct marketers spent tons of money on four-color printing on high quality paper. But they didn’t mail these expensive pieces to everyone. They only invested in the people they predicted were most likely to buy or those they sorely did not want to lose.

This is the kind of science that now needs to be applied to social media marketing. How prepared are you?

Last week we met with a small retail business whose direct sales dollars depends heavily on direct marketing efforts. We were on the topic of email marketing and I learned that they had never done any testing. I described the concept of A/B testing, and while they understood the potential value, they perceived it as “too complicated”.

Trust me on this one. Over the course of a 20+ year career, I’ve tested pricing, lists, subject lines, offer copy, packages, creative, engagement devices, premiums, even stamps! Here’s what I learned:

1. Slight variances in performance can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Over the course of time, a better performing effort can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
2. There is psychology involved in motivating a customer or prospect to buy. Testing enables you to learn about what works and what doesn’t, which can lead you to develop your own theories that guide you moving forward.

Where should you test? Every channel where you are delivering marketing messages should be considered fertile testing grounds. Despite popular fallacies, you can measure ROI on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Tips for testing:

• Keep your laboratory as clean as possible. Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples with regards to list and delivery times. Any variances between the two samples will fuzzy your results.
• Create test panels of equal size in channels which allow for list segmentation.
• Think in terms of having a “control” and “test panels”, with your goal always to beat your control to increase your sales.

Let me close now by passing on my mantra: Always be testing!

Having grown up in the subscription and later the catalog marketing worlds, one basic concept permeated everything we did. Every effort, every offer, every list and every test is assigned a key code, an alpha-numeric code that enable results to be tracked, measured, and attributed to the source from which the customer acquisition or sale came.

This practice of using key codes can and should be used to measure social media marketing efforts.  If it sounds too complicated, it’s really not. It’s more about discipline than it is sophistication, and measuring ROI is all about discipline.

How do you capture key codes?

1. Create a code to attach to your special coupon or offer.
2. Publish the codes from Twitter, Facebook or whatever social network where a majority of your customers reside.
3. Create a field on the input screen that the customer will use to redeem the coupon or offer.
4. Refine a system for ensuring the codes are added to your customer database.

How do you create key codes?

Depending on how expansive your marketing programs are, you’ll probably want to think about a 5 to 6-digit coding system. Consider this as a possible structure:

Digit 1: Alpha or numeric character to identify source of conversion. A simple example would be T=Twitter, F=Facebook, E=Email.

Digit 2: Year of campaign/effort.

Digit 3: Month or season of campaign/effort.

Digit 4: Type of effort. Examples: coupon, contest, special promo.

Digit 5-6: Specific identifiers for the effort.

If you follow these instructions, you will create for yourself  a vehicle for measuring results and the opportunity to approach your social media marketing as the fascinating science it can be. What’s stopping you?