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If you aren’t using Twitter, your company is missing out on a prime marketing platform.
Launched in 2006 and now hosting over 237 million active users, Twitter is an undeniably powerful social networking tool. It has opened the door to new opportunities for business-to-business (B2B) marketers to connect, communicate, and engage with their target markets. You can use Twitter to further enhance the potential reach and effectiveness of your overall inbound marketing strategy.
B2B marketers in all industries need to carefully and intentionally develop a Twitter marketing strategy that takes advantage of this avenue for connecting with potential and current customers.
The Benefits of Using Twitter for B2B Marketing
Social media platforms like Twitter allow you to reach people who may not otherwise engage with your company. They give you the opportunity to attract prospects, interact with buyers, and encourage followers to enter your sales funnel.
Here are a few of the ways that you can use Twitter to promote and grow your B2B business.
Define Your Audience
By using Twitter, you can gain valuable insights into your target audience—everything from what they like and dislike to their demographic data. Monitor who engages with your Twitter profile and what content your followers find most interesting to further develop your buyer personas.
Twitter Analytics also collects data on the best days and times to tweet, which gives you an idea of how and when to most effectively market to your audience.
Create Brand Awareness
B2B marketers can build a strong brand reputation on Twitter by consistently posting high-quality content that followers want to see. The first step is getting your content in front of the eyes of your target audience; then, your Twitter activity should drive traffic to your website, pointing your followers to landing pages that regularly convert visitors into leads.
Maintaining a reputation for well-written and informative content positions your brand as a leader in the industry. What does that mean? It means your company will be the first resource people go to when they have questions or want to buy a product.
Identify and Engage with Influencers
Working with influencers—people in your industry with a large, active following—is an excellent way to increase the credibility of your company as well as build up a strong social media following.
The first thing you need to do is find influencers. Fortunately, Twitter’s search function has extensive filtering options that make it simple to sort through the millions of accounts on the platform and identify the top users in your industry. Once you know who you want to build a relationship with, you can follow them and then start interacting with their tweets, sharing their content, and replying to their posts.
With regular engagement, influencers will begin to notice your company and (hopefully) be interested in hearing more about endorsing your products or services.
Maximize Social Monitoring
Social monitoring is like an extension of your customer service department. Through social monitoring, you track key phrases, names, and terms important to your business and get an alert when they are mentioned online.
Twitter is an excellent social monitoring tool. The platform is built for quick interactions and instant replies, so customers with questions or complaints can reach you far easier than calling a help number.
To maximize your social monitoring efforts, set alerts for your brand name and the names of your products as well as common misspellings of both. You can also track your main competitors to see when they are mentioned on Twitter.
Don’t forget to centralize your social channels into one cohesive social media management platform so your employees can respond to messages and alerts across all your accounts at once. Marketing automation software may be able to streamline this process even more.
Study Competitor Analytics
If you don’t know what your competitors are doing, how can you set a benchmark for the success of your company?
There are a wide variety of social analytics tools on the market that you can use to study and interpret competitor data, including follower growth, tweet activity, impressions, hashtag use, and target audience. Or, to go back to the basics, you can simply look at the Twitter profiles of your competition to see what they are posting and who is following them.
You can also take things a step further: Keep an eye out for potential customers tweeting about being dissatisfied with your competitors. You can swoop in and offer an alternative solution.
Tips for Using Twitter Effectively
Twitter is a unique social media channel, with original features and best practices that are deeply ingrained in its user base. Although you should be using of a variety of social media channels as part of your B2B marketing strategy, you need to take full advantage of this platform.
Follow these tips to start using Twitter today.
Understand the Basics of Twitter (What It Is, How It Works)
Twitter is a free, wide-reaching social media platform where users share messages called tweets in a compressed format—each post has a 280-character limit. Tweets can contain multimedia like emojis, photos, GIFs, and videos as well as interactive content like links and polls.
Each account on Twitter is identified by a profile with a unique handle, also called the @name. Users follow other accounts, and any tweets those accounts publish will appear on the user’s timeline. People can like or ignore the tweets they come across or even retweet the message, which shares it to their personal profile where their followers can see it.
Your goal on Twitter should be to entice your audience to engage with your tweets, click through to your website, and enter your sales funnel.
Create a Twitter Profile That Represents Your Business
Your company’s Twitter profile will represent the business across the social media platform, so it needs to be both informative and appealing. The profile consists of several parts:
- Handle (@name)
- Display name
- Bio
- Location
- Website
- Profile photo
- Header photo
- Pinned tweet
Choose a handle that brands your business. It will serve as both the phrase at the end of your Twitter URL and the name other accounts will use to tag you in tweets. Your handle can be up to 15 characters, and since it’s your identifier, you should avoid changing it too often.
Your display name appears above your Twitter handle on your profile and is easy to change. You’ll most likely use the full name of your business here.
Twitter bios can be up to 160 characters and need to be a brief, engaging summary of your company. Including a hashtag or two is a great way to show followers what industries you serve.
Location data displays the city, state, and/or country of your business headquarters, and you can also include a direct link to your website. These items are optional, but we highly recommend them.
Companies commonly use the business logo as their profile photo, which is an easy and effective branding strategy. Don’t forget about the header photo, however; it’s an opportunity to display additional information about your business.
The final piece of the puzzle is a pinned tweet. This option pins the tweet of your choice to the top of your profile, which makes it the first tweet people see when they visit your Twitter page. You can use this feature to highlight upcoming events, share engaging content, or display your top products.
One last tip: Make your profile public instead of private. Otherwise, potential buyers will have a tough time learning about your company.
Follow Other Businesses and Individuals in Your Industry
To connect with other people and companies in your industry, follow them on Twitter—they just may follow you back.
Follow as many businesses and individuals in your industry as you can as well as any accounts that have similar interests. It’s the first step to building a Twitter following of your own.
If you’re not sure where to start, use Twitter’s search function to generate a list of relevant accounts or look up lists of influential accounts in your industry on the search engine of your choice. You’ll find a lot of options at your fingertips.
Use Hashtags to Reach a Wider Audience
Hashtags are now used all over the internet, but they started on Twitter.
A hashtag is a word or phrase following the pound symbol (#) that relates to a topic, category, event, or other conversational niche. They are a helpful way to cut through the clutter of users’ Twitter feeds and get your tweets seen by a more engaged audience.
You can create your own company-branded hashtag to start a conversation or use Twitter’s advanced search options to see what hashtags are trending in your industry. After you determine which hashtags are relevant to your content and start including a couple in your posts, you’ll build brand awareness and increase follower engagement.
Share Interesting Content from Other Sources
Other businesses and individuals in your industry are sharing content. When you see interesting tweets from these accounts, retweet them to share them with your own followers.
Sharing content from other sources helps you build a relationship with industry leaders and establishes your company as a place for your followers to find helpful, intriguing resources.
A healthy mix of your own content and content from other accounts is a key part of ensuring your Twitter presence is well-balanced.
Promote Your Own Content, Products, and Services
With Twitter, B2B marketers can share their content, products, and services with members of their target audience. It’s important to publish tweets that add value to your followers—similar to other forms of content marketing—so your posts are more likely to drive people toward your products or services.
Adding multimedia to your tweets is a great way to make your account stand apart from the competition. Include photos, videos, GIFs, and emojis to encourage followers to link and retweet your posts.
Above all, as you craft content for Twitter, keep your buyer personas in mind.
Examples of Successful B2B Businesses on Twitter
Are you ready to reach new audiences and communicate with buyers on Twitter? Get inspiration from these B2B companies that have a successful Twitter presence.
HubSpot
HubSpot (@HubSpot) uses clear branding and a mix of polls, images, and emojis to make its posts stand out from the crowd. Take a look at the pinned tweet on their profile; it’s a great example of effectively using the feature to further engage with followers.
General Electric
General Electric (@generalelectric) has a track record of successful B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing on Twitter. With its prevalent use of both GIFs and video clips, it’s clear that General Electric knows exactly how to communicate with its customers.
And you can’t get better than the bio: “Every minute of every day, GE rises to the challenge of building a world that works.” Their tagline tells a memorable story, and it’s also referenced in the header photo to reinforce the message.
Salesforce
Salesforce (@salesforce) features a mix of eye-catching images, helpful industry tips, and branded content on its Twitter page. The account shares posts that are sure to catch the attention of their visitors, and the company excels at providing value to its followers.
Follow Salesforce’s lead and include plenty of multimedia like images, GIFs, and videos in your tweets.
Adobe
Adobe (@Adobe) is known across the internet for its striking visuals, which are easy to find on its Twitter page. It also stays active, regularly engaging with followers and responding to questions or comments.
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are another thing that Adobe specializes in. Scroll through their tweets to get some ideas.
IndustryWeek
IndustryWeek (@IndustryWeek) has mastered the balance between conversational and professional. Its bio is clear—page visitors know exactly who the account is for and what to expect from its content. IndustryWeek also includes lots of high-quality images, keeping things fresh and interesting for followers in the manufacturing industry.
LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads (@LinkedInMktg) showcases an informal approach to B2B marketing. The bio clarifies the purpose of the account: to provide resources to people interested in advertising on LinkedIn. Its tweets are engaging and informative, featuring both research reports and original content. If you need some inspiration on how to educate your audience, look no further.
Conclusion
OneIMS is a leader in the field of social media marketing, and we are ready to help your B2B company transform your social media pages, develop a social media strategy tailored to your target audience, and leverage your social media presence to increase revenues.
Our marketing team has the strategies, tools, and solutions you need to engage with clients and meet your social media marketing goals—and we pride ourselves on producing measurable and sustainable results.
With an effective social media strategy in place, you can market your products or services across channels like Twitter in order to reach new customers and generate more leads.
But you don’t have to take our word for it. View case studies from some of our happy customers and read our blog to get an idea of our training and experience.
Interested in learning more about how we can help grow your business? Schedule a consultation with us today.
