Twitter can act as a lucrative platform for building a thought leadership presence. Ali Jones, independent B2B marketing consultant, shares six steps to success
Thought leadership has become a part of everyday business as a tool to build a brand and generate leads. In B2B, it is the holy grail of industry positioning that’ll drive speaker invitations and the big brands towards you – putting you at the cutting edge of your industry.
Of all the tools available none are quite like Twitter; it’s personal, direct, concise and can talk directly to the audience you desire – assuming they are on Twitter in the first place. Twitter will help to humanise your business and can be seen as the glue between your content and the audience.
Here are the six key commandments for building thought leadership engagement through Twitter.
1. Listen before you talk
Listening is often more valuable than talking, and on Twitter nothing is more true. The content quality bar is increasing and your audience will engage with you rather than respond to your broadcast.
Listening to conversations and understanding what content, and when and how your audience want it, is critical. You’ll form your content topics from listening to what your target audience want to hear.
2. Create an audience
Twitter is the only tool of its type that allows you to directly connect with your audience and build a list of engaged stakeholders. Segment your followers and who you follow by topic, industry, message etc and deliver relevant content tailored to their group that will make them take notice of your business. You need to think ‘relationship marketing’ when it comes to Twitter – build professional and personal relationships.
3. Curate content
The beauty of Twitter is that while it can be a place for you to showcase your thought leadership, your industry peers, publications and associations are doing the same. Listen to what they are saying and map which of your stakeholders are listening to them. It will indicate what they feel is useful and engaging so you don’t have to waste time on the things that aren’t. Before you launch into pushing content, curate and develop an idea until you have material for more than one tweet in more than one format; mix it up to keep it interesting. It isn’t just about what you know; it is about what you can share. You will often have to share/retweet other thought leaders and influencers to your followers – be the thought leader of thought leaders.
4. Showcase your experts
People buy from people. The people delivering your products or services are at the heart of achieving success as a thought leader. Without them you are just another faceless corporate engine churning out content. Develop your subject matter experts into the human touch point they can engage with in real-time. Invest time in picking the right people and train them as you would a media spokesperson. Don’t forget to protect your brand though, implement a suitable social media policy and guidelines so your experts can get their personality across without going too off-track from your brand.
5. Integrate Twitter
Twitter is not the final destination for your followers. If you are utilising different content formats effectively they will at some point experience your website, blog, publications, landing pages, events and your subject matter experts face-to-face. If you successfully position yourself as a thought leader, your entire marketing mix and user experience needs to echo this positioning.
6. Track and measure
In the B2B space it’s usually quality over quantity when it comes to Twitter. Don’t be scared to set the expectations of your board by explaining that achieving a ‘pounds and pence’ result is not a metric you’ll be working to. Brand advocacy, a client recommendation, getting mentioned by an industry influencer or being asked to speak at an industry event are more realistic and valuable metrics for measuring thought leadership. Make use of the free tools that track click-throughs to landing pages to give you an idea of content your audience finds most engaging. If you track everything, you can forecast and report on ROI as you would for any other marketing channel.
To be a thought leader it has to be part of the company culture. You can’t automate it; it is your people that enable thought leadership not tools and technology, so make the most of them. Remember, never call yourself a thought-leader – you need to earn that title.
