Social Media to Sales Lead

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve certainly heard about “Google Instant.” What you may not know about is Google’s “Realtime,” a new(er) feature that can turn all that brain-bleeding online chatter into useful marketing data that, for the savvy marketer, can translate into uber-relevant sales opportunities.

For the longest time, business executives, sales members and even some marketers have been asking themselves (and me) “how can I turn my social media efforts into profits” and I’m getting pretty tired of hearing about it.  So, let’s talk briefly about how to turn all that mind-numbing chatter into sales leads and do it for free using Google’s Realtime.

First off, we have to find this undervalued feature.  Go to http://www.google.com/realtime and enter a search term.  As an example, let’s say you’re a home remodeling company.  Do a search for “New House” with the quotations to filter out the stupid stuff.

Here you’ll see today’s Facebook updates, tweets, blog posts, etc. from people bragging, complaining and otherwise discussing their new house.  As you run through today’s information and then this month’s and so on, you’ll quickly find numerous opportunities to reach out to prospects (via twitter if it’s a tweet, Facebook if it’s a status update or blog comment if it’s a blog post) to see how your remodeling & renovation business could help.

Whatever the contact medium, the soft-sell is a must, but your contact could not be more relevant or timely!

In reality, using Google Realtime in this way is primitive compared to solutions that can monitor hundreds of key words at once for as little as $500 per month (in the case of MutualMind), but this does, at least, illustrate that all that social media chatter can translate to into a lot more than a necessary evil.  It can translate into a sales contact that is relevant, timely and (hopefully) profitable.

Any chance I’ve put the “how does twitter make me money” stuff to bed?