Yes.

I came across a blog this weekend that reinforced my thoughts. This post, written by Christian Fea, CEO of Synertegic, Inc., started off with a this statistic that he found on compete.com: Twitter had around 3 million people visiting the site in 2008, and it grew 640% between November 2007 and November 2008.

Ok, so how do we harness all of social media’s potential and use it to build a lead generation system?

Well, I’ve started to use my Twitter account a lot more, and I’ve found some productive uses for the application:

• Sent mini survey question and got answers quickly
• Promoted new blog posts and upcoming webinars
• Shared articles, resources, and blog posts that I found interesting
• Learned what topics my network finds interesting faster
• Discovered some useful blog posts and resources by using tweetscan

There are lots of great resources out there if you want to learn more about how to use Twitter to generate leads, and I’ve include links to several of them at the end of this posting.

But, first, let me give you a summary of Christian’s blog. He offers six effective ways to use Twitter as a lead generation tool:

1. Target your market to follow the right people. Christian says to ask yourself, “Who’s my ideal client?” Even if you’re in a broad spectrum market you’ve got to narrow down your focus to an industry, niche, or demographic.

2. Offer actionable advice. This is where being relevant sets you up us as an authoritative resource. Focus your tweets on solutions to issues, concerns, cares or problems that your target audience may have. Anything that will help your audience do their jobs better, easier, or more efficiently will hit home with them.

3. Use your 140 character wisely. Just because you have 1,000 followers doesn’t mean they are all going to read your tweets. Your tweets – which you are forced to keep at 140 characters - are in effect your headline and become the reason someone is going to take the action to click your link in your tweet. Use defined, tangible, and clear benefit in your tweet.

4. Your offer and call to action. Obviously, you can’t provide a solution in 140 characters. Christian suggests providing a link back to your blog before directing them from Twitter to another site.

5. Frequency of your tweets. If you’re serious about using Twitter as a lead generation tool, Christian suggests that you tweet a minimum of three times a day. His reasoning is that your target audience is online at different times of the day, so a tweet in the morning, midday and at night raises your chances of getting to more people.

6. Tracking your results. Christian says a good way to track tweet subjects is to name your blog post the same as what you use for your tweet post. He uses Google Analytics to track website traffic by copying and pasting Javascript code into the blog page header and then every page on his site is tracked.

Additional Resources:

Don’t have a Twitter account?
This site also offers help in getting started: “Using Twitter…‘The Smart Way’” by Mark Ramskill on TwitTip.  

Looking for more Twitter followers?
Read this post by Guy Kawasaki: Guy offers some great tips for using Twitter including Twitter etiquette and how to write headlines. He also addresses the importance of links, and tells you the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible.

Need help organizing the world of microblogging?
TweetScan will give you daily or weekly email alerts on topics or people.

Have questions? Just give me a tweet! http://www.twitter.com/brianjcarroll