A lot of B2B business owners face issues when it comes to social media marketing for their businesses. Sometimes they reject some channels altogether, for instance, Twitter. But the opportunities provided by the Twitter marketing opportunities are simply too great to ignore them!
There are 288,000 CEOs and 366,000 start-up founders alone on Twitter as per Twitter for Executives, 2015 report!
So definitely it makes sense to invest in Twitter for business. And Twitter Business marketing is fast gaining grounds in B2B space.
In this post, we’ll explore the ways in which B2B marketers can fully utilize the potential of Twitter!
1. Establish Your Company As A Brand Leader With Valuable Content Rather Than Just Promotion
Consistently offer valuable information to your users to build a strong brand reputation that increases both the size and effectiveness of your audience.
Sharing too much promotional content hurts your brand image, whereas educational content will not only boost brand awareness, but it will also increase the loyalty of existing buyers.
The goal here is to establish your brand as a reliable resource for information.
For this you must follow the 80-20 rule i.e. only 20% of the social media content should be about your own company and rest should be a mix of facts, humor, and educational posts.
Here is a great example of how a domain registration service like Namecheap attracted more than 100,000 Twitter followers. They provide the right mix of business and fun.
2. Do Live Tweets For Twitter Business Marketing
Live-tweeting is kind of like note-taking, only it’s online, collective, and interactive. When you hear a great quote from a speaker, or “tweetable takeaway” all you have to do is type it up in a tweet. The upside is that not only your followers will see the tweet, but so will everyone following the event hashtag.
There is a whole process involved when you decide to promote a B2B event. Let’s take the example of HubSpot’s Inbound 2014 event. They divided the whole process into three parts: Before the event, during the event and after the event.
Before the event, the decided their official hashtag, in this case, #INBOUND14 and started to include it on all their social channels including Facebook to make it visible and popular.
During the event, to make their task easier, they followed the following approach:
Using the event’s hashtag in every single live tweet.
Make sure no tweet goes out without the official hashtag. If needed, shorten the copy of the tweet but include the hashtag.
Making yourself aware of unofficial hashtags.
Sometimes, people tweet using hashtags that make the most sense to them instead of bothering to look up the official hashtag. In such cases, keep an eye on the regular hashtags as well to get the most traction.
Interacting with Twitter audience
Look out for questions you can answer, positive comments you can respond to.
Including speakers’ Twitter handles when quoting
This one is of utmost importance. Here is how HubSpot did it spot on.
After the event, keep interacting with your followers and their queries related to the event in order to capitalize the most on the new gained follower base.
3. Involve Influencers For Twitter Marketing Opportunities
There are many ways that B2B marketers can use Twitter to find influencers and start interacting with them to establish valuable relationships. The Twitter search would be the number one choice here followed by other steps.
There are also third-party tools that you can use to find influences in your industry. Some of them are BuzzStream, FollowerWonk etc.
Once these influencers are identified, you can do some of the following to build a relationship with them before asking for promotions:
- Start following them on Twitter and start a casual conversation
- Retweet their content to introduce them to your audience
- Discuss something they have tweeted recently
- Share their blog posts on Twitter
- Connect on other social media platforms
- Send products to them as free samples to review
Here is how Corona started its #CoronaFakecation campaign where it collaborated with several influencers for beautiful summer tweets.
4. Use Advanced Search For Finding Leads And Opportunities
Advance search on Twitter has grown many folds since it first began as a service. Now you can add specific queries, set date ranges based on how new or old the tweet should be and also add location making sure your target the geography of your choice.
Here is how you can do an advanced search for lead generation:
- Step 1: Go to the regular search filter and choose the advanced search option
- Step 2: Search for the specific keywords or queries and apply necessary filters like geography and date range. Here we are taking the example of a Digital marketing agency.
On searching the phrase “recommend a digital marketing agency” with geography USA, we got the following result.
These all could be potential leads for the agency. Similarly, a lot of B2B opportunities can be found ranging from various sectors like app marketing, manufacturing, and SaaS businesses.
5. Involve Employees To Get Wider Reach
Involving employees can help in building brand awareness comes as these people are already committed to your company. The first step should be to ensure that employees follow the company on Twitter and encouraging them to tweet, retweet and engage with the company profile to help boost visibility and reach new audiences.
B2B companies should not limit themselves to just one account. Instead, encourage your employees to create a work-based account where relevant information can be further shared.
For example, Zappos involves and encourages employee engagement on all their social platforms. The below tweet shows, Zappos sharing job interview experience on Twitter. This encourages employee participation.
Employees use a number of social networks and tag their posts with the hashtags #ZapposCulture, #Zapponians and #companyculture to reach an audience beyond Zappos.
I hope the above article has given you many ways in which business can be developed on Twitter from a B2B perspective. There can be numerous ways to use Twitter and other social networks for your B2B business promotion. The key is to find the right strategy for yourself. By providing knowledgeable information to your followers and getting noticed by industry experts, you will gain brand leadership as well as a new source of getting possible leads. If you know of some other ways that have proved beneficial for you, let me know!