Q: “I’ve lost faith that Twitter is the right channel for our B2B efforts, and yet I can’t bring myself to shut it down. What say you?”
A: You should never use any social media platform because you think it’s the right thing to do. Your metrics will tell you what choices to make. If Twitter is not delivering quality traffic, productive conversations or customer engagement, then by all means redirect your efforts elsewhere. Be aware that if some valued constituents – even if it’s just a few – rely on Twitter as a means to contact your company you should keep the channel open, even if you don’t use it very much.
Twitter does continue to consistently rank as the second or third most valuable B2B social networking platform in all research I’ve seen. Despite its recent troubles with traffic growth and abuse, it attracts a high-quality audience, and it has evolved into an important channel for news about companies and people. It is not a great discussion channel, but it is an effective way to promote other content.
Rather than abandoning Twitter, you might consider changing your approach. Perhaps use Twitter to recognize and celebrate customer and employee successes or simply as a fast, low-cost bonus delivery channel for company news. You can automate tweeting of new press releases, blog posts and content assets so that you don’t even have to actively manage those activities. Just make sure notifications are turned on in case someone tried to contact you, but otherwise set it and forget it.
I recommend against abandoning a channel entirely or shutting it down. It can raise questions about the health of the company. Better to manage your frequency down to one or two tweets per week so you don’t raise unfounded suspicions that something may be wrong.
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