When it comes to using social media for business to business (B2B) marketing, Twitter can be often be overlooked in favour of LinkedIn. However, if your target market is on Twitter, then you need to be too.
Using Twitter as a B2B marketing tool has a number of advantages for your business – you can engage in more meaningful real-time conversations with your customers, connect with industry leaders, build your brand and your reputation, and generate leads. And, for the most part, it’s free!
We’ll show you 10 easy ways you can get the most out of using Twitter for your B2B marketing.
Don’t forget the basics
It may sound obvious but, just like your website, your Twitter bio should clearly say who you are and what you do. Make sure you include your business contact details and a link to your website or landing page to make it easy for people to contact you or find out more about your business.
Identify the movers and shakers
Find out who the key influencers and experts are in your particular field of business. Follow them, start engaging, and share and retweet content which is relevant to your audience. Adding them to a Twitter list will help keep you more organised. Regularly engaging will help you to get on their radar and they may add you to their network or look to collaborate with your business.
Keep an eye on your competitors
If your competitors are on Twitter, follow them so you can monitor what they’re up to, the type of content they share and also how they engage with customers. If they’re getting better engagement or developing better customer relationships, consider what you can learn and adapt from them.
Become an industry expert
Do your research and keep up-to-date with the latest news and trends by subscribing to newsletters, reading publications, and following key people on social. The more you tweet topical, engaging, newsworthy content which is of interest to your target audience, the more you will sound like an expert, and position yourself as a trusted source of information.
Build brand awareness
Twitter is great for building brand awareness and showing people a bit of your personality
But be careful, don’t venture off-piste too much. Be consistent with your messaging, and stay on brand. Remember, your goal is to reach out to potential and existing B2B customers, develop stronger relationships, and increase customer loyalty.
Take advantage of Twitter tools
There’s a number of really useful tools out there designed to make your life easier. Social media management platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule posts and keep track of multiple Twitter profiles on your own dashboard. Bit.ly also gives you access to a dashboard and enables you to shorten links, view stats for links shared and, you can even use it to create your own custom domain which makes your brand instantly recognisable, e.g., Amazon: amzn.to.
H is for #Hashtag
There are over 500 million tweets being sent every day. Imagine trawling through these without an easy way to search for what you want. Well, this is where hashtags are helpful. Hashtags are now so popular, they’ve spread to other social media platforms. Great for categorizing topics and keywords, joining in conversations and starting trends – remember #IceBucketChallenge? Create your own hashtag for your brand - for example, you can track Superfast Business Wales’ activity on #Superfastbiz.
Check your analytics
You may think you’re doing a good job on Twitter but you won’t know for sure unless you measure what works and what doesn’t. Twitter has its own free analytics which will give you metrics for every single tweet you post, tell you which of your tweets have performed best, and also provide audience demographics.
Content is King
Use Twitter as part of your content marketing strategy to promote blogs, online articles, videos, and newsletters. Post links to your latest online blog or newsletter and drive traffic back to your website – this in turn will increase exposure for your brand and boost your search engine rankings.
Be responsive
Nowadays your customers are much more likely to contact you via social media, rather than ring or email and that includes complaints. And what’s more, as soon as they’ve clicked on the tweet button, that complaint is in the public domain. So, what do you do? Don’t ignore it in the hope it will somehow go away. The same rule applies to all communication on Twitter – always respond quickly and politely. Don’t use a generic reply, be personable and tailor your response to the individual, as you would if you were dealing with them face-to-face.