We all know social media is an increasingly important component of our marketing strategy. However, how many of us really try to get the most information possible out of our followers?
Enter Twitter Cards
Twitter cards are a type of tweet that allows you to get a little more than 140 characters. The card in particular that I am interested in is the lead generation card. With this card you can capture information about your followers as well as advertise to reach non-followers. The information that you can capture from the user is name, email, and screen name.
On top of the main user information you can create hidden fields. Many may overlook the hidden fields, but I think they are one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.
Making The Most Of Your Card
When you create your Twitter card you have the opportunity to give out free advice, offer discounts, or introduce new products. These three tweets would be offering something completely different to the follower. This is the perfect opportunity to capitalize on that difference. With your hidden fields you could create a field such as "Interest" that will tell you what caused the individual to give you their contact information. This information is powerful when sending out emails because you can segment your audience, and offer similar information in the future that they have already shown interest in. Doing this can increase your email engagement.
Integration
One of the other cool features of the Twitter cards is that they can integrate directly into your CRM software or email marketing solution. This saves you the trouble of downloading the list in an excel file, and dealing with the manual transfer...No thanks! Save yourself the trouble, and push that information straight to your solutions. You can do this by inputing a URL for the information to be sent to. If you have ever set up a form submission for your CRM then the process will be similar. You will need to know what fields the information should be mapped to which you should be able to get from your CRM or email marketing provider.
More Social Interaction
My final advice for your new Twitter audience is to re-introduce social media to them through your email. They have already shown that they are socially engaged, and the best thing you can do is give them more opportunities to be social. If that is not reason enough then do it for the 158% higher click through rate that can happen when social icons are present in email.
Social is growing, and this is one way we can help close the loop between our other forms of communication.