Twitter for B2B Marketing

Twitter is probably the easiest social medium to get started with and use on a regular basis. You create an account and then start to tweeting. That’s it! Of course you do have to adjust your messaging to the medium. In Twitter’s case, that means creating post that have no more than 140 characters that the maximum you can include in a tweet. Part that, what you tweet is up to you.

Strategies and tactics

1. Branding and voice: Being aware of who you are and who you aren’t is critical on Twitter. You only have 140 characters to communicate your thoughts, so every word matters. Your company’s brand and voice seeps into every interaction, passive or active, that you have here. As you grow, you will naturally get a good sense of whom the idealized brand representative should be. How would they talk? How would they respond to conflict? How would they joke around? Questions like this may initially seem silly, but it’s better to answer them ahead of time than to create answers based on your mood or the amount of sleep or coffee you’ve had in a given moment. Consistency of voice is important, as people like to know what to expect in their interactions with you. Over time, this consistency will help you build trust and confidence with your audience. Also, ensuring your account name and profile are filled out according to your brand guidelines is critical. Think of these fields as your “first impression.” Many people will visit a Twitter profile only once to decide whether or not they want to follow you. Your bio should be on-point, and your handle branded and appropriate. Your location should accurately reflect where you are. Your follower count may come into play here as well. Controlling your follower:following ratio can help you further establish credibility, showing that you care enough to follow your community members back. Utilise tracking and variables in all of your shared links. This will help you to better evaluate the success that individual content pieces have. Look at the day and time your audience is most active, the types of content they engage with most frequently, and the style and tone of your language. From there you can better understand how to share and engage with your community.
2. Be interesting: There’s nothing worse than boring tweets. “Boring” is understandably subjective, but you should strive to be interesting to your target audience. Streams that constantly push promotional messaging get old very fast. How do you establish brand loyalty when the only thing you say is, “Here’s 50% off [something]?” There must be more than that you can say about your business, and if there’s not, you may need a new lens with which to view your organization.
3. Be relevant: What should you tweet about? Whatever your customers want to read, of course. You might post about new products, specials, industry news, whatever is of interested to you customer base. In short (and short is important in Twitter), you need to find some B2B companies, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem – there‘s always something new and interesting to tweet about. And if you can’t find anything interesting to tweet about you shouldn’t tweet.
4. Add value: It’s important to be consistently present, but not so loquacious that you tweet simply to hear yourself speak. Every tweet you send should add value in some way. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself why you would want to see this information if you were a follower.
5. Keep in short: Your tweets cannot exceed the 140-character limit. Because of thi, tweets do not have to conform to proper grammar, spelling and sentence structure – and, in fact, seldom do. It is common to abbreviate longer words, use familiar acronyms, substitute single letters and numbers for whole words and refrain from all punctuation. Twitter now auto-shortens your links, but you should consider using a separate shortening service with built-in analytics, as it will allow you to track clicks of your content that don’t point back to your own web properties. You should use a link-shortening service, such a bitly.com/, when you want to include links in your tweets.
6. Break up long post: When you are posting to Twitter. Think in terms of single sentence communications, a single thought sent out into the Twitterverse. Instead of serving up all thoughts for one long blog post, post then throughout the day in short, individual tweets.
7. Link to more information: Sometime you just can fix everything you want to say into 140 characters. In this instance, you can tweet a summery, something akin to a headline and then link to a longer article on your blog or website.(or, for that matter, to industry news on another website).
8. Tweet about other media: Use Twitter as a promotional vehicle for other marketing activities (Facebook, LinkedIn, Blog, etc.). There’s value to be gained by pointing from Twitter to another things you’re doing in your company..
9. Responsiveness: Due to the condensed format and quick pace of Twitter, it’s essential to respond to your community as swiftly as possible. The platform makes it easy for people to find your brand, and you’re sure to get many customer service requests that need your immediate attention. If you ignore a critical tweet for too long, you may find that one person’s voice is soon amplified by their followers. Also, don’t just respond to emergencies or questions—make sure you also say hello and respond to kudos given to your brand. As you grow, you’ll have to figure out how scale, but too much tweeting is a great problem to have.
10. Measurement: The beauty of Twitter is that data is plentiful; the tricky part is setting up those measurement frameworks and dashboards so that they align as closely as possible with your business objectives and goals. Data is what really influences your bottom line in social; it helps you tell your own story and find both opportunities and successes.

Etiquette, tips and guidelines

1. Don’t spam: This should be a rule across all of your marketing efforts, but it bears repeating here. There are many new accounts popping up with marketers behind them having the best intentions, but no matter how you slice it, spam is spam. Jumping in on irrelevant hashtags to market your product is unhelpful. Likewise, relentlessly mentioning every person in your feed to draw their attention to a piece of content or offer is typically received as annoying. Be sure to keep your tweets relevant, helpful to followers, and spam-free.
2. Encourage followers: Twitter working for B2B marketing only if you have lot of content and potential customers following you. To that end, use your other media to publicise your Twitter feed and encourage customers to follow you there.
3. Direct messages: DMs are great when you need private information, like a shipping address. Traditionally, you can only DM people who follow you and vice versa. If you have a verified account through Twitter, you can select a special setting to allow anyone to DM you. However, you cannot respond via DM unless the person DM’ing you follows you.Never send automated DMs as it’s considered spam. Do not, under any circumstance, send auto-DMs to your followers. Auto-messages aren’t engaging, and you aren’t reaching out personally for relationship building. If you’d like to reach out to every single person that decides to follow you, do so in a personalized and unique way.
4. Tweet frequently: Twitter followers expect a regular stream of tweets from the people and companies they follow. Tweeting once a week probably isn’t going to be enough. Heck, once a day not be enough for individuals. Many successful businesses tweet several time a day. It’s all about maintaining a constant presence, and gives the barrage of tweets out there, more is dep better.
5. @ replies: When you start a tweet with an @username, only people who are following both you and @username will see your tweet. If you want more people to see it, just put a period or other marker in front of the username. Or you can always just rephrase your sentence.
6. Hashtags: On Twitter, a hashtag is the equivalent of a keyword. You create a hastag by putting the hash or pound character in front of a given word, like this #hashtag. When you add a hash character before a specific word, like this: #hashtag. When you add a hash character before a specific word in tweet, that word gets referenced by Twitter as kind of keyword and that word becomes clickable by anyone viewing the tweet; is also helps other users to find relevant tweets when they search for that particular topic. By using #hashtags, you’re exposing yourself to a wider audience. Many people follow conversations using various hashtags, but possibly won’t be following you. Hashtags are meant as a shortcut to explain what your tweet contains or to show you’re part of a conversation or event. If your brand’s jumping into a hashtag, you should make sure that you’re contributing value to the conversation instead of just promoting your business.
7. Retweet (RT): There are two ways to RT, manually or through Twitter’s native RT function. RT’s a great way to boost your community’s members content, make them feel good, and say “you’re awesome!” If there’s a link you want to track or a grammar/spelling issues you want to fix before RT’ing, you can edit the tweet and post it as “RT @username: Puppies are cute!”
8. Scheduling updates: A variety of tools help people schedule out tweets. Scheduling updates is the community manager’s very best friend as you are not always online or otherwise available to update Twitter when you need to. You create the tweet, set the time and date, select the account you want to send it from, and schedule. Scheduling allows you to publish content when your community’s most active. Scheduling posts can be an incredibly useful tool that allows you to scale your energy. However, pre-scheduled tweets can be detrimental in times of crises, e.g. global disasters, national tragedies, etc. It’s important to quickly turn any scheduled posts off even if these crises are not directly related to your brand; global events can erupt, creating an inhospitable environment for off-topic content. Worse yet, your posts may unintentionally become the source of controversy during a crisis.
9. Twitter lists: Making lists of users can help your targeting efforts when you’re trying to reach industry influencers or join in conversations relative to your niche. If you’re making a public list, remember to be empathetic to people who aren’t on it; it’s best to stay away from lists that qualify or rate people or their services. Making the lists private avoids this issue.
10. Use Twitter handles: If you’re talking about someone who’s on Twitter, use their @username. It’s just polite, and your community wants to know when you’re talking about them, as it’s an easy ego boost. This also encourages the people mentioned to share what you’ve posted or further engage with your community.

Twitter Tools

• Followerwonk: Use tools like Followerwonk (https://moz.com/followerwonk ) to find like-minded users. Also look at who they interact with and get engaged with those communities
• Crowdbooster: (http://crowdbooster.com/). It offers a fast and lightweight view on growth and what’s working from a content perspective.
• IFTTT (https://ifttt.com/): “If this, then that” allows you to set up rules for your online activity. Essentially, macros that work across your social accounts to create conditional triggers for events. Helpful for many activities beyond Twitter.
• Twitter for Business (https://business.twitter.com/). Twitter’s own one-stop shop for hitting the ground running with your business. It’s a great resource for those just getting started with the platform.
• Commun: (https://commun.it/) Drive traffic, increase fan engagement, grow followers/likes and save time.