Clues are everywhere but unfortunately, many are missed because the average sales rep fails to listen for them.

I teach my coaching clients to embrace social listening methods and while there are several ways to go about this, listening for “Twitterbitching” can yield a really nice return on the effort!

Twitterbitching (verb) The act of complaining via Twitter. See also piss and moan, hemming and hawing, yakkin about and twittum bitcherendi

Now, just to be clear, the opportunity isn’t in the actual twitterbitching, its in the listening for the twitterbitching!

Listening for things like . . .

Someone mentioning a competitor and twitterbitching about a bad experience, lame policy, pricing etc.

How about someone twitterbitching about a challenge they are facing?

I’ve been told that people can become quite the Twitterbitchmeister when there is a service outage.

In fact, there are many situations where one might complain to their “tribe”.

It’s quick, it’s instant and it gives the person an opportunity to blow off some steam while being validated by those in their network!

Here are 5 quick tips to help you leverage the fine art of Twitterbitching

1)    Use Tweetdeck or Hootsuite to set up keywords and phrases that you need to listen for. You might want to start with key competitors, industry keywords etc. If your competitor is the ABC Widget Company and their Twitter handle is “ABCwidget” then follow @ABCwidget and you’ll see what others are saying about them and to them.

2)    Set up an alert on http://socialmention.com Social Mention is a search engine for social media and searches twitter, facebook, blogs etc.

3)    When you find someone Twitterbitching I want you to remember that “Everyone has a story and wants to be heard” That’s your cue to show some empathy and validate their feelings. Doing so, will set you apart from the masses who will be busy dismissing this as useless play by play.

4)    Don’t even think about launching into an infomercial about how you and your company are the bestest . . . see item #3 again and be sociable (its called “social selling”, right?)

5)    Let the event serve as a conversation starter either online or to warm the heck out of the cold call you were about to make.

Now you have a lead . . . with a potential client who might be a tad more likely to trade up!

Before you go, there is a final reading from the book of Twitterbitcherodomy . . .

Make sure you are listening to make sure no one is Twitterbitching about you or your company. All you have to do is include those two search items in #’s 1 & 2!

There’s a bit more to this all this social listening stuff from additional things you can do within Twitter to things you can do on other platforms.

I’ll be sharing all the juicy details during our online Social Selling Camp this summer!

Want To Learn More About How You Can Leverage Twitter?

Then you might want to check out my online Social Selling Camp this summer!

I have over 100 tips waiting for you to help you build a killer lead generation system! I’m including real world examples of how your peers are leveraging social selling and I’m even going to take you behind the scenes and let you in on a few of my own social selling secrets.

Perhaps it’s time for you to consider some new tools while your competitors slack this summer?

Click HERE for details!