This is the first in a mini series on Twitter for B2B.

A B2B Twitter Presence Should Balance Experimentation with Discipline

A Twitter presence can be a valuable asset for a b2b firm – or a monumental waste of time. Too often, firms go into Twitter with the attitude, Let’s give it a try and see what happens. I’m all for experimentation, but for Twitter and other social media platforms, two things are likely to happen with this approach. You’ll wind up with months of aimless conversation and nothing to show for it, or worse, undercutting your brand by communicating in ways that are off putting to social media participants.

First Question – Are We Using Twitter to Engage or Inform?

In my mind, this is the starting point for b2b activity on Twitter. Is your purpose to push content to your target audience, or do you want to have conversations with your audience and try to build relationships? Either strategy is executable, and both can succeed. Each takes a completely different approach.

The Informational Twitter Strategy

Twitter for B2B Can Look Like This

Tweeting blog posts, press releases, opinions, industry relevant articles, sales promotions, Twitter-only discounts, trade show and news reporting – all this may be of genuine interest to customers and prospects. People follow companies on Twitter all the time to educate themselves, stay current with industry trend, and get the jump on special offers.

In terms of resource allocation, the good news is, an informational Twitter strategy can be outsourced. You don’t need a staffer sitting in front of a monitor all day playing around on social media sites (for some execs, the ultimate nightmare scenario). I’m doing this type of twittering for companies, and it works well. I can pinpoint the audience and make connections. I can broadcast tweets with optimized content and get people to find and retweet them.

The bad news for an informational Twitter strategy – you need valuable, meaningful content to tweet about! You need real news, real sales promotions, real insights, and attention getting angles. In stark contrast to conventional wisdom, social media is not Seinfeld. Twitter is not a show about nothing. Tweets have to be about something, or people will pass you by in a heartbeat. There’s too much noise in interactive media for empty tweets to garner even a sliver of an audience. Think of this strategy as being the condensed version of The Wall Street Journal.

Metrics. How will you judge your success? For starters, track Twitter referrals to your websites, and monitor how often your tweets are retweeted – and by whom. You should also set up a Twitter landing page for your main site, and use it to direct visitors along the relationship path you want them to take. Ultimately, you want your Twitter community to do something – request information, arrange a sales meeting, order a product, etc. Your web presence must be shaped accordingly.

The Conversational Twitter Strategy

Two women enjoying conversation over coffee

Twitter for B2B Can Look Like This

A conversational approach to Twitter is fully in the spirit of social media. The purpose here is to do some of what we talked about earlier, along with one-on-one and group discussions with both your core and peripheral Twitter followers. This strategy tends to humanize your firm and makes people more interested in retweeting you, evangelizing for you, writing about you, and most important – doing business with you. In short, a strategy of engagement offers the biggest potential rewards in terms of sales, branding, relationship building, and SEO (because you’re going to get more sites linking back to you).

Resource allocation. To make a conversational Twitter strategy succeed, your firm needs internal support. Your Twitter identity must have a personal face, because people want to talk with a someone, not a company name. When they come to your Twitter profile page, they want to see a human being, not a corporate logo. Conversations are most effective when held in real time, so the company’s Twitter representative should be available for engagement pretty much all the time, and actively tweeting at regular, specific times. This type of tweeting can be outsourced, but doing so requires a close relationship with the agency doing the work.

With a conversational strategy, it’s useful to combine those serious business-focus tweets with observations about the weather and what was cooked for dinner last night. And while this gives many execs heartburn, it shouldn’t. Relationships with million dollar customers often begin at a cocktail party over stuffed mushrooms and a conversation about yesterday’s baseball game. Twitter is no different. People build relationships in social media just as they do everywhere else.

Metrics for conversational tweeting follow the same guidelines as informational tweeting, but with a little more depth. I’d want to pay close attention to new inbound links, and determine if they are connected to Twitter relationships. Brand monitoring – looking for mentions of your firm or products on the web – becomes more important, since more effort is going into your Twitter program. It may also be useful to add Twitter to your lead tracking on contact forms.

Remember that Twitter is not a magic bullet. It takes time for a Twitter presence to take hold, and trends are more important than raw numbers for the first several months. Don’t be concerned if you don’t have a single brand evangelist after a few weeks. If someone jumps on your bandwagon that quickly, it’s probably not the kind of evangelist you want anyway.

In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about a checklist for getting started with a b2b Twitter program.
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