MBA2004 How To Use Twitter to Build a Better Product

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Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Business Insights you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's lesson you will learn how to use Twitter to build a better product. Yep. Twitter an absolutely free resource and you don't need a big following and you don't need to be a longtime member of Twitter or user of Twitter. Twitter is a product research gold mine. There's so much great information on Twitter that can tremendously improve your chances of creating a product people want. I'm going to share with you the strategies that I've used in the past and continue to use to learn more about about my audience, what they need and how I can create a better solution with my products and services. I'm gonna give you real life examples so you can repeat the process with your own business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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There are over 217 million active users on Twitter. And get this, over 500 million tweets are posted every single day. This is a goldmine of information, and it's at your disposal for free. And what the good thing about Twitter is that it's not like finding a needle in a haystack. It's actually quite easy to find the information you're looking for. Now, what does this all have to do with creating a better product? Well, if you look at the products that you love the most, they probably solve your problem or pain or make your life just a little bit better in a very, very interesting way. They do it better than anybody else, and that's why you use that product. And in the marketplace, the people that solve a problem the best win over customers. They win the market share. So your job is to create a great solution, and that's your product. Now, the thing about solutions is they're actually born out of understanding the problem or the complaints of your customers. This is where Twitter comes in. This is where people talk about what they're struggling with, the questions they have, the things that really bother them. For example, with our software company, Webinar Ninja, when we started to develop this software seven years ago, I used Twitter to find out what are the biggest pain points people are experiencing when it comes to creating webinars. Now, if you're entering a market that has competitors, all you gotta do is search for that competitor, search for their keyword. So, for example, for us, when I was going into creating Webinar Ninja, our biggest competitor was GoToWebinar. So I searched all the tweets that mentioned GoToWebinar, and basically the tweets I was really interested in are the ones that people talk about some of the challenges they're having, saying things like, it takes forever for me to create a webinar. It's confusing, it's complicated. I'm not sure if my audience hears and sees me, things like that. So I really created a list of all the complaints people are expressing about my competitors. Why? Because if I can come in with a better solution that solves for those complaints, I can take some market share. I Started to see trends in these complaints and I realized, okay, what really is lacking in the marketplace is an easy to use software to run webinars. And this is really what was the focus of Webinar Ninja for the very beginning and even till today, even as we have all these great features and it's a feature rich product, our biggest priority is to always keep it easy to use and simple for our users. So when we came into the market, people were actually quite surprised. And the number one piece of feedback we got was, this is dead easy. This is so simple to use. This is the easiest software I've ever used in my life, period. Forget about webinar software. And that all came from the fact that I used Twitter to find out what people are complaining about and went into the marketplace with a unique selling proposition that solves for the biggest complaints. Now, I'm going to say that it's going to be tempting to try to solve all the problems, but you really can't do that, especially in the beginning. Take one problem one by one and choose the biggest problem, the loudest problem you see on Twitter when it comes to your competitors and when it comes to your product. Your. One of the other things that I did as well that I recommend is engage with people on Twitter to learn more. This is like customer research. So for example, I would see tweets where people say, I'd love to be able to register my own people to my webinars without having them have to go through the registration process or fill out a registration form. And I saw this from a few people that are kind of power users or known for running a lot of webinars. So I replied to that tweet asking, hey, I'm just curious, why do you want to do this? Can you give me the use case? Now, it's not that I don't believe this person. I actually really understand why they may want to do this, but I want to understand their workflow. Because if I better understand why they're doing this and how they're pulling this off, I can better create a solution that fits within their workflow so they're not doing something, or I'm forcing them to do something outside their workflow or that's not natural to the way they work. What I learned was they have other members of other programs, so they're running webinars for their paid customers, for their users, and they don't want to have them register, they just want to send them the links so they can attend. So when we created our ad Registrants feature. We allowed them to register people manually, but also allow them to upload a spreadsheet of all their registrants. Because most people are going to do this, because I learned in their workflow is that they have a spreadsheet from their CRM of all the people that should be registered to this webinar, and they just want to upload a sheet. And we created a solution that fits within the workflow that makes sense, that is super simple. And what's great about this is that we learned that they want it to act just as if they did register themselves so that they get all the email reminders and notifications. And we incorporated that in the feature. This allowed us to create the product or the feature in the product that fits the needs of our typical user. Because we don't want to, you know, try to solve a problem or build something, spend time and money and energy and realize, oh, that's not exactly what they want, or this is not how they want it. So Twitter helped me because I just engaged and asked questions and just, you know, people are willing to answer these questions because, hey, they're in pain. They want some solutions, and this is a point or a topic that they're interested in themselves, and a discussion is something that they welcome. The thing I love about Twitter the most is that because of the character limit, people are forced to be concise. But when you have to be short on words, you tend to just go with what you feel and not try to be as eloquent as possible. So you're getting people's gut reactions to products, to services, to the way they do things. And this is important because people are emotional characters and they buy and make decisions based on how they feel, and they're going to use the language of how they feel. And this is great, great research for your marketing copy. So, for example, if people in your industry, in your market, say things like, I'm frustrated, I'm tired, I'm annoyed. This is terminology you want to use in your marketing copy. Like, do you feel annoyed, frustrated, angry? These are the words that they use. Use it in your copy. So they'd be like, yes, that's how I feel. And you don't need to worry about what words use. It's in Twitter. You just go ahead and search for your topic, search hash, hashtag, webinars. In my case, your genre, your market, your product, your service, your topic for your course or coaching. I can't tell you how much great copy I got from Twitter.

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A couple more tips when it comes to using Twitter to creating a better product for your business. If you're curious about making a decision between a few things in your product development process, run a poll. Twitter has built in polls and if you are active on Twitter and you have a bit of a following, go ahead and post a poll. Another great little strategy is you may want to add some people that are thought leaders in your area, in your genre, in your niche, to get their ideas, get their thoughts on this topic. These people are open to giving comments and they're on social. And by you reaching out to them and adding them in your tweets, you're giving them a platform. You're giving them a chance to show off their value. Now, this next part is going to take a bit of time, but I would spend a couple hours, once a week for the next few weeks following the right people on Twitter. Twitter is really a great resource, in my opinion, for information because you only get to see, except for sponsored posts, of course, the people that you follow. And you can surround yourself with some smart people that can help inform your product development process. So do a little research on who uses your type of product, who does research or writes about this type of product of yours, and start following them. Start curating your Twitter profile to follow the right people. You won't see me following people that just don't give me value. I don't use Twitter to get gossip or news from celebrities. I use Twitter to inform my brain with good value, good information. And there are a lot of great thought leaders on Twitter that can really help you. And what's great is as you start following these people, you start seeing what they're posting. You can start commenting and engaging in the discussion and you become, guess what, a thought leader. Because your opinion counts, your thoughts count, and because you're replying on a thread that has a thought leader, somebody who's quite popular, maybe somebody who has a big following themselves. Other people that follow them will see your comments and start to think, hey, this person's got a point. This person is adding interesting value. What they're, what are they all about? You know, let me go ahead and check out their profile and they'll start following you and then you get exposed to people that are interesting as well that you can follow back. So be a little bit meticulous and picky about who you follow so you can start growing a strong network on Twitter who can help inform you and your product to making better decisions. I hope that helps. That wraps up today's episode. But don't forget to hit, follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss tomorrow's episode. Q and A Wednesday where I answer the question do I need a dot com for my business website? This is a very popular question. I get asked a lot. Is net okay? Is co okay? What about biz and these other new extensions? Does it really matter? Well, we get into all that in tomorrow's lesson, so make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You gotta use social media to your advantage and don't let it use you. Okay? I like to extract information from Twitter. I like to see it as a research tool and not as a tool that I just passively read what's on my feed and get lost and just be on there for hours. See it as a giant community or group or forum where you're going to get what you put in. So try your best to engage, ask questions and dig into the conversation so you can get the most out of the platform. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's Expired.

Expired in 2012.

Dang it.

Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about 900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.