Please tweet this to your followers (just copy and paste the following into your Twitter bar): Twitter is Essential to Your Company’s New Product Launch http://bit.ly/TwitterLaunch

If your company is planning a new product launch, social media should be part of your go-to-market plan. Within your social media plan, Twitter should play a large part. Your potential reach on Twitter can be massive. You may connect with people you never anticipated. The power of Twitter is quite incredible. If you meet with skepticism about the effectiveness of Twitter within your organization follow my advice and ignore it.

Your main priority with Twitter should be to find “influencers” within your industry. Influencers are people who have a lot of clout and whose opinions carry a lot of weight. In most cases they’re reporters, analysts and bloggers but they also include people in online forums. Because the former are very active on Twitter, you’ll want to connect with them and get to know those people before your new product launch.

Top 3 Tools to Find Analysts, Bloggers and Reporters.

Finding influencers doesn’t have to be difficult. I’ve used the following tools to successfully identify my influencers.

1. WeFollow.com – Enter a term (tag) and get two lists. One list has the top Twitter influencers and the other has the most Twitter followers. This is useful tool.

2. Klout.com – This is very useful tool in more ways than one. Not only will it show you your own influence in the Twittersphere, but it will show you other metrics like the number of original retweets for a person.

3. Twellow.com – Often referred to as the Twitter Yellow Pages. It’s useful for finding people in geographic locations and specific industries.

Use these tools to compile your final list of influencers in your spreadsheet. Include their Twitter bios and add a note as a reminder about why you added them. Don’t limit your search to these tools, ask others in your department or company to provide names of people and search for their Twitter handles on Google e.g. “[first name] [last name] twitter”. This last method is a little hit or miss. But in my experience it’s mostly hit. Also, search blogs for “follow me on Twitter” icons.

Top 10 Twitter To-do List Before Your New Product Launch

First of all, you’ll need some organization. Create a spreadsheet to track all of your activities. This is good practice because I promise you’re going to forget half of what you’ve done over and I speak from experience. Follow these 10 steps 8 weeks before your product launch and you’ll see good results.

1. Create a Twitter account. Include your name and interests in the bio. Also include a photo of yourself. If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like to use a photo of yourself then stop here and turn back. Social media isn’t for you.
2. Next, create a spreadsheet to include analysts, reporters, bloggers, thought leaders, SMEs etc.
3. In the spreadsheet, include names, title, function, Twitter handle and blog address.
4. If you’ve got more than 10 influencers prioritize your list.
5. Start following your list of people on Twitter and retweet their good tweets once a week.
6. Let them know you appreciate the information they share by including their Twitter handles in your tweets.
7. Visit each influencer’s blog and add a comment or ask a smart question.
8. Leverage #FollowFriday by tweeting each person on the list. Tip: Don’t tweet “#FollowFriday with [list of] Twitter handles”. Send a tweet for each person stating why people should follow them.
9. If your influencers have blogs add intelligent comments to their posts to build a relationship.
10. You should devote an hour a day to connecting; retweet, start communicating with people using @[name] and add comments to their blogs.

This is a very important point to remember, please be transparent. Be open and honest with each person you connect with on Twitter. Spamming or shilling is not accepted and will get you blocked and reported.

Begin this Twitter strategy 6-8 weeks prior to the launch of your product. Then, about a week before your official launch date send a DM to your influencers asking them if they want a sneak peak.

What are your thoughts? I’d love to hear from you with other ideas.

Follow me @ronankeane

Please tweet this to your followers (just copy and paste the following into your Twitter bar): Twitter is Essential to Your Company’s New Product Launch Plan http://bit.ly/TwitterLaunch