I really like this article by Zach Rodgers from Ad Exhanger on ‘Twitter Marketing’ (@zachrodgers). This article captures where marketing lead generation is going right now in the industry. If you can find a more qualified lead on Twitter instead of blasting the social media web-sphere, marketers will be ecstatic.  Imagine marketing in which you can target campaigns to ‘thought leaders’ in an industry or space, positively affecting  marketing ROI.

Among the new segmenting features from Twitter are CRM matching which allow the serving of ads based on a user’s public characteristics, such as keywords appearing in a user’s Twitter biography. This, in addition to the social media plugin’s most CRM applications already provide will expand your capabilities of targeted marketing for your business . For example, in Salesforce.com you can pull up multiple social media profiles in 3 easy steps from one contact record. Below is an example of my contact record and what Salesforce.com found only based on my first name, last name and company.

So above you can see, the persons profile pic (me), and even their Youtube channel, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Klout profiles if needed. I think this is one of the best features coming out of cloud based CRM tools today. You can know your customers like no other time before in modern tech history. For example in my contact page above, I can determine my Klout score and if I have a heavy presence on social media. This does not mean we ignore customers who happen to be less involced in social media and such, but for people who are, this is a gold mine of information to use at your disposal.  Having this type of social media information within your CRM  can allow you to build your own social profiles of your customers and match it against spend at your business.

In the end, with the addition of Twitter’s ‘CRM Matching’ capability, marketing will now have the ability for to target customers like never before.

Hector Perez Jr

• Tags: Salesforce.com, Twitter, twitter marketing