Turn Your Customer Email Addresses into Social Profiles

Posted on | July 22, 2010 |

I’m often asked by clients where they should engage in social media. “Should we be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Linkedin, or YouTube, or some other places?” Flowtown gives you the answer in seconds. Export your email subscriber or customer database to Flowtown (they do not store any of your data), and you’ll know in minutes what percentage of your audience is on Facebook or some other social outpost.

Check out this video introduction for a quick overview:

This is a paid service, but there are no long term contracts — a basic month-to-month plan starts at $14.95USD plus 5 cents per imported contact, or you can “pay as you go” — and Flowtown offers a free trial so you can check it out first. Have a go right now, put your own email addresses in first and see how accurate it is.

But hold on a moment…
You’re probably thinking, this is taking it a step too far in terms of collecting personal details. So, first things first, Flowtown does not provide:
• Personal stuff, like house address, or even status updates
• Phone numbers
• Pics of you at that party on Friday night

In short, it aggregates general information, like city and gender.
Now this isn’t going to be perfect. As with any data-harvesting service, Flowtown results aren’t 100% accurate. The more email addresses a customer uses across the social Web, the less ideal the results.

However, Flowtown is a powerful tool because once you import a customer email list you can determine who your most influential customers are. You then can sort your contact list by influence, prioritize personal outreach (1-on-1) and even export the data to enhance your existing customer databases. Flowtown is a good first step in helping to answer the question: “which social media outposts should we use to engage with our customers?”

Give it a try and let me know what you think.