As Twitter zooms up the hype curve, it can be hard to make sound judgements about its value for B2B marketing. But your personal feelings about sharing 140 characters worth of personal insight with a few thousand strangers are largely irrelevant now. You’re a marketer – you need to know this stuff.
In March, B2B Marketing featured ‘Marketing in the Twitter stream’ by Tom Chapman. But here are some more tips to get you going:
1. Get an account
Hurry before the good names are gone. And make sure you use a photo, a compelling mini-biography and your web URL in your profile. Descriptive profiles get more (and more relevant) followers. There’s some debate about whether a personal account or a company account is best. Do both. You can use a tool like CoTweet to manage a multi-user company account.
2. Build an audience
Seek out followers by searching for your keyphrases in Twitter Search, then follow people who tweet about it. They’ll follow you back. Get your profile in the directories (Twellow, JustTweetIt…). Check out the hashtag groups for your topics (see below). A point of etiquette: when someone follows you, do you have to follow them back? No you don’t. Follow people you want to follow.
3. Get tweeting
Have some fun. But keep it relevant – no one really cares about your cat’s operation. Include plenty of links – at least half of your tweets should have a link to something interesting. If that also happens to be a white paper you just published, so be it. Promotion may be your primary goal, but if it’s too crass, people will stop following you.
4. Add value
If someone tweets on an issue, send them a reply (using @username) with a link to a helpful web page. If you see a tweet you like, re-tweet it to your followers (the originator will thank you for it). Feeding back into the conversation is what it’s all about.
5. Set up a hashtag
Sounds techie but it’s just like a LinkedIn group or a tag on Flickr, on any topic at all. Look up #B2B as an example. Whenever anyone adds the hashtag to a tweet, it gets sent to that group. Instant community.
6. Direct message people
An easy way to take things offline. As artificial as it sounds, you really can make good connections on Twitter.
7. Syndicate
Add a Twitter widget to your blog, LinkedIn profile and Facebook page.
Is it worth the effort?
A lot of the debate about Twitter seems to be around ROI. But Tweeting costs nothing; the only investment is time. Surely, Return on Time Investment (ROTI) has a different break-even point (is connecting with one potential influencer worth five minutes?)
ROI-tinted spectacles also filter out the real benefit that Twitter offers: engagement. Twitter is a medium for engaging with audiences – including customers, prospects, influencers, editors, analysts and lonely people with lots and lots of ‘followers’.
In other words, Twitter’s value depends on your ability to attract and nurture these audiences. For more and more B2B marketers, this value is going up all the time.
Here’s how you can harness Twitter to your goals as a B2B marketer:
- Listen – Twitter is a new way to find out what people think about your company, products, competitors and the issues affecting your market. Use Twitter Search (or similar) to track what matters
- Lift – It’s a great source of ideas for the next blog post, white paper or video. Hot issues get more attention.
- Link – At Velocity, we’ve come to see Twitter as an important vector in any content marketing campaign. Twitter gives your followers a direct line to your latest eBook, micro-site, blog post or viral.
- Learn – Ask a question and get quick answers from informed people; or run a poll on twtpoll…
- Love – Nurture your existing network of contacts with a quick direct message or re-tweet. A low-stress way to keep in touch.
- Extend – Twitter grows your network to places you might never reach (hey, I never promised you all L-words)
Related articles
SOCIAL MEDIA: Marketing in the Twitter stream – 02-03-2009
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