This is a guest post from Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing a Seattle based marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. I saw this piece he had written on how to use Twitter asked if we could share it. I hope you find it interesting and useful.  Enjoy!

PS – I’ll save you some time… if your buyers are not on Twitter (and many of them are not) you can sally forth and do meaningful work or read on for future reference.  

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Twitter will never be confused with a direct response channel, but it’s still a proven and measurable tool for finding and engaging more prospects. Below are five specific tips to start finding more opportunities via Twitter. 

1. Follow your prospects

Create private lists of your prospects in Twitter, and follow them via segmented columns in HootSuite, Tweetdeck or some other tool. If you want to stay more “stealth” until you're ready to reach out and engage, you can add prospects to a Twitter list without actually following them but either way, knowing what your prospects are thinking and saying will help you: get to know them better, learn quickly what their priorities are and give you plenty of opportunities to engage at the beginning of their buying cycle.

"There's something happening here." That was the thought that went through my head when I learned that three folks I respect tremendously (Paul Roetzer, David Meerman Scott & Mitch Joel) are all reading the same book:

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

My second thought was back to a piece of advice from Trish’s new ebook Sales Onboarding: the express route from hire-to-revenue.

So heading over to Amazon, I was blown away to see the Jobs book at #2 in the Top 100 Books (not just business books – all books).

I’d argue that if your perfect buyer cares deeply about:

• Products
• Marketing
• Innovation
• Entrepreneurship
  -or-
• Leadership

 
I recently participated in a conversation over at Focus.com: How can you create a culture where your employees feel comfortable creating content? The idea being, that the creation of content is now an organizational responsibility as opposed to just being Marketing’s.

At one point in the dialogue, I was sick of hearing what all the pundits think (myself included) so I threw down the glove and asked a Sales Exec to chime in. Well, Alex Shootman the Chief Revenue Officer of Eloqua did. His excellent response follows:

18 short months ago I was presenting to a room full of 200 or so Inside Sales Executives at the AA-ISP Leadership Summit.  I asked them the following:

The more I thought about it, the more unfair my final question seemed to me.