What Information Are People Looking for on Twitter?
Focus on Your Customer
By and large, people don’t care. They’re hard at work making their organizations great, pursuing their goals, and making their news.
One reason B2B firms are quick to dismiss Twitter is their inward directed content mindset. They limit themselves to a choice between pushing company information or talking about the weather. Neither approach, in and of itself, will get great results for most companies.
If you want to build a presence on Twitter, talk about things that matter to people that matter to you. Here are a few ideas.
Events and Conventions. When folks in the B2B world participate in an event, they scour the web looking for information about it – before, during, and after attending. Who’s going to be there? What new products are going to be on display? What is the speaker saying at the symposium I couldn’t make? How was that big cocktail party last night? Tweet about that and you’ll be relevant. Relevance is the coin of the realm in social media.
Companies. There is no doubt whatsoever that all B2B professionals are interested in two things – what’s being said about their company, and what’s being said about competitors. Do you have insight, opinion, or information about companies in the market for your products or services? Tweet about that, and name names, so people searching for a given company will find your content.
Case Studies. B2B loves case studies. You can talk about your product’s 6000 benefits until you’re blue in the face, but saying, XYZ Corp. saved 30% with our product will get you more business. Tweet about that, with emphasis on the company and industry you served, rather than the product or service itself.
What other content approaches can you think of? I’m sure there are many. The key is to think from the customer’s point of view. What are people searching for on search engines and social media? On rare occasions only, they search for your products and services. But frequently, they search for ideas and information about themselves, their industry, how to be more productive, how to reduce cost, how to be more profitable.
How well does your website or Twitter communication speak to those topics?
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Chicago based SEO copywriting, blog consulting, and content marketing.
Content Marketing from Word Sell
- Content Optimization Checklist for Human Readers and SEO
- Twitter for B2B Starts with Strategy
- Get to Page 1 on Google with Content Optimization
Interactive Marketing from Northbound
- Social Media for Business - The Big Picture (Straight North)
- 7 Ways to Use Twitter for Business (Straight North)
- Engage Customers with a Conversational Web Site (Straight North)
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Brad, you are so right, it’s hard to stick to us and our on twitter and be relevant in any way
As for case studies. As for case studies, they are indeed a gold mine. Customer reviews are usually short and very enthusiastic, but case studies tend to go deeper into the issues and what your company can do to solve problems/make life easier/save money.
Alina, Yep, and the story format of a case study makes all that great information easier to remember.
Hi Brad, you’re revealing some great insights here in your post. I have a significant number of clients catering to both, B2B and B2C. Twitter is a great hit for the B2C, but the B2B segment doesn’t really have much to glorify the use of Twitter over other social networking sites like, say, even Facebook. The fast pace of Twitter just isn’t good enough for extremely niche B2B brands, however hard we try, but your points may have something in it. You do hit the nail with your key ideas in your post! Great info.
Yes, no doubt about it – b2c is using Twitter more widely and effectively than b2b. Glad these ideas help. I think b2b strategies for Twitter (and Facebook) are still very much in the developmental stages.
Words of timeless wisdom, Brad.
In any form of communication, whilst it is certainly alright for any company to share some things which matter from their own point of view (indeed, it is sometimes necessary, and besides, sharing some company news with external stakeholders can help them to feel more of a connection with the company), the bottom line is that people are interested in what matters to them, not what matters to you. If you want to influence others, you must talk about what matters from their point of view more so than your own.
This post reminds me of a story out of Dale Carnegie’s all time classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” On pages 67-69, Carnegie details a letter sent from an advertising agency to managers of local radio stations. It’s too lengthy for re-typing here, but Carnegie goes through the letter (which talked in a very self absorbed fashion about what they wanted and how they were so great) and describes in no uncertain terms what his reaction would be if he was a radio station manager. Suffice it to say, he was most uncomplimentary.
When writing a corporate letter, your recipient is not so interested in what matters to you, but rather what matters to them. It’s the same with SEO – B2B clients and partners need to hear about case studies which show how other clients have benefited from your services (and how they could, too).
Your target audience are busy and do not have time to obsess with what matters to you – they need to know about what matters to them and how they can benefit from your services.
Andrew, A few people I know had their lives transformed by taking the Dale Carnegie course. In a way, he was ahead of his time, but his ideas demonstrate that the art of business communication hasn’t changed all that much because of the social web. New media doesn’t mean new message.
Exactly right, Brad.
I am amazed about how some seem to think that core basic common-sense should be thrown out the window simply because new mediums of communication have arrived.
Lessons from books like Dale Carnegie’s are timeless because they are based around basic core principles of human behavior. Whilst specific methods will need to refinement and to evolve with the times, the basic core principles of human needs, motivations and behavior have not changed and will probably be just as relevant in 100 years as they are today.
Any businessperson who disregards Carnegie’s teaching does so at his or her peril.