Transcript of a presentation made as part of Social Media Week Glasgow. Some tips on how to use Twitter as a sales tool, based on the experience of working with a Dragons' Den contestant

1. I’ve only got five minutes so rather than bore you with theory I
will just tell you what we did to sell a product on Twitter.
Hopefully then you can see the theory in action and apply it to
your own product or service.
Impact Online was hired by John McMonagle who was going
on Dragons’ Den. He owns a fish and chip shop – a floating one
in Clydebank – but he’d invented an inflatable car bed. It was
really cool – he made me go in it - it was very comfy and I
thought it would be great for T in the Park. So we set up a
Twitter account for the product in order to gather feedback and
drive traffic to the website where the product was on sale.
We chose a Twitter name that had both the brand name and the
product in it, so that it could be easily found. The brand was
Karnap and the product was a car bed – so the Twitter name was
KarNapCarBed, using capitals to make it easier on the eye.
We researched Dragons’ Den fans and followed them, starting
conversations with as many as possible – time was of the
essence before the programme on BBC2 on Sunday night. We
researched them using a variety of methods, primarily the
keyword search on Tweetdeck.
Did you know only about 17% of people use Twitter.com?
Everyone else uses Twitter clients like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite,
which allow you to do much more advanced things, like
schedule tweets, track stats and set up columns for specific
search terms.
Dragons’ Den was on at 9pm on Sunday night. There were two
hashtags for the programme on Twitter – BBCDragons and
DragonsDen. Hashtags are like labels you attach to your tweet
like a “file under” and it’s a live link so if you click it, you’ll see
everything everyone else is saying about the same thing.
So we set up two columns on Tweetdeck to follow these

2. hashtags. We found a lot of followers this way too.
We knew time was limited to the duration of the programme and
a little before and after so we scheduled tweets to go out at three
minute intervals during this time. We used all the relevant key
words and a link to the website. This link was shortened so that
it was a unique link and we could track how many clicks it
received.
Then, during the programme we answered every tweet
mentioning the bed. I think there were over 100. Every time
someone mentioned it, we answered and included the unique
website link. Every comment, positive or negative, got a
response. Some people laughed and said they were taking the
mick. Others were delighted – and congratulatory that John had
gone ahead and made the product himself. A few were chuffed
to bits to get a personal message from a “celebrity”!
We kept tracking the messages during the week for people
who’d recorded it to watch it and gathered all the feedback. We
grouped all the followers according to various criteria using the
private list system – private because we didn’t want anyone else
stealing our market research.
Afterwards we could see how much traffic came to the website
from Twitter, we had feedback straight from the consumers as if
we’d held a focus group and we had direct sales. People were
saying “I want that” and we were saying “OK here you go” –
that’s a pretty powerful sales tool.
Now obviously an appearance on a TV programme is going to
be an example not many people will be able to exactly replicate.
But you can still piggyback on a hashtag to promote yourself,
you can set up unique links to your website so you can measure
the impact of Twitter and you can directly reach your target
market by keyword research and tracking. Then a little bit of
old-fashioned conversation and salesman’s tactics will do the

3. rest!