Would you like to find new prospects with Twitter?

You can use this micro blog platform to get your message out there and add leads to your existing sales funnel. Twitter is a perfect venue to communicate with your audience and attract more buyers for your business. In fact, AdWeek reports that 79 percent of users will recommend brands they follow:

Not sure where to begin? There are just a few simple, free ways your business can use to find leads on Twitter:

Start with your connections

The quickest way to get the ball rolling on your prospect search is to begin with managing your industry connections. These can include top individuals and brands who are active on Twitter, current customers, and the competition. When you log into your account you can begin with searching for people in your email contacts right from the ‘Find Friends’ link:

Tap into Twitter Lists

Once you find relevant accounts to connect with you will want to take advantage of Twitter Lists, which are still a great method to use to start a conversation. You can also search for lists in your niche and subscribe to those as well. Watch for the number of subscribers, active tweets for each day, the type of content shared and how they interact with their community.

Find content and community interactions with hashtags

If you are using a service like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck you can enter a hashtag in a specific topic to find relevant users, tweets, and content. Twitter Advanced Search can also provide in-depth information on conversations, locations, accounts, ect. with more options than just a standard search. This is a great way to learn about what is currently trending, which thought leaders are communicating the most, reactions to brands, and what people are tweeting about with your business’s hashtags:

Use Nimble Contact Widget

If you have Google Chrome then you will love this free extension, which provides the social network accounts for contacts in your Gmail account, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or an industry article.

Start engaging with your contacts on Twitter

Now that your business has built a list of contacts it’s time to start interacting with your community. It’s important to evaluate whether they are tweeting and communicating with their network at least three times a day, and have a large and growing network of followers who are not considered to be spam accounts. Here’s a great example from one my connections, entrepreneur, @JedRecord:

They key to success in building your Twitter community for prospects is to not approach your connections with a sales message, but rather encourage a response by sharing their content, and creating a meaningful conversation with a personalized approach. As you build your network and an interest your own content you can use tools like Nimble to track and engage with your new prospects.