Twitter 101: Prospecting For Annuity Business

By B. Scott Minor
AnnuityNews

If you’ve worked in the insurance industry for many years, you’ve witnessed the drastic changes in how to find and keep customers. Twitter, for example, is one of the many revolutionary social media outlets that you can use to discover top prospects. First, however, you must familiarize yourself with how to begin to use this new age prospecting tool to your advantage.

But if you feel like Twitter is a foreign language and very confusing, don’t worry because you’re not alone – many people are stuck in the same predicament. But once you learn the necessary skills for building appealing reputation for your agency, you’ll not only master Twitter, but begin to ultimately profit from it too.

So here’s a little Twitter 101: once you sign up, you can create a profile, consisting of your name, location, website address and a very short bio. Other Twitter users can then follow you, creating your list of “Followers”. In turn, you can follow others, which is where your prospects come into play. Additionally, you can update your status with what you are doing “right now” or offer a link to some sort of valuable content, always using 140 characters or less.

Now that we touched on some of the very basics that will get you started, here are five ways that Twitter can help you market your agency and find prospects:

• Monitor: You can monitor what people are saying about you and your brand by using the Twitter search. If you have someone managing your Twitter account for you, you can monitor what they are tweeting and how they are responding.

• Engage: Now that you are monitoring what people are saying about your brand, when someone tweets, “X Insurance Agency is great!” you can reply back, “Thanks for the mention, we appreciate it”. This allows you to connect with your audience on a more personal level. You can both reply to tweets coming through and send out your own personal tweets.

• Sell: You can tweet out different promos that you are having. Utilizing Twitter in this manner will aid in increasing sales for your business.

• Support: You can compose specific tweets to deal directly with customer service issues and concerns. This will let the public know that your agency cares. Something like, “happy to answer any questions you may have about our business,” is showing your customers that you’re there for them.

• Prospect: Conduct an advanced search, with a key word, ideal customer and where they would be located. Once the results come up, you can follow these people on Twitter because there is a good possibility that they will need your services.

By following these helpful tips, you can begin to create and maintain relationships with your customers online. Plus, your prospects will increase due to the loyalty and trust you have created through your Twitter account!

B. Scott Minor is the co-owner of Missouri’s Trust GDC. Scott has pioneered many innovative programs and is driven by an intense passion to improve the industry – especially risk management and Missouri workers compensation solutions.

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