Introduction – 6 Pro Ways to use Twitter for B2B Marketing

As a marketer, you know the importance of channelling your marketing throughout different social media networks in order to lead people to your website and through your marketing funnel down the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to social networks, B2B businesses tend to focus on LinkedIn and overlook Twitter. Yet Twitter is one handy tool that needs to be taken into consideration for your B2B purposes.

Although Twitter is widely used for personal accounts, it can have enormous advantages when it comes to B2B marketing. FollowingTwitter’s latest update, you can now tweet longer messages, add useful content images and engage in richer conversations with your targeted audience and therefore build your brand and generate leads. Take advantage of it.

Twitter is an extremely powerful tool for every CMO in the B2B field, it offers a wide range of advantages, such as real-time communication with your customers, providing customer service, connecting with other businesses and industry leaders (and learning from them!), positioning your brand as an industry expert and strengthening your offsite SEO.

This post will teach you 6 pro ways to use Twitter for B2B.

1. Find and interact with the right people

As a business, as awesome as he may be, it wouldn’t be very helpful if you followed Shia LaBeouf.

For B2B marketing, the focus lies on interacting with your target audience.

There are around 300 Million+ Twitter accounts globally, and thousands, if not millions of people out there are actively tweeting and posting. As a marketer, it’s important be proactive and reach out to those people who potentially want the product or service your company offers.

So, who should you follow?

• People and businesses in your industry, particularly those who are considered as leaders or experts in their fields.
• Your competitors, peers and partners.
• your own clients and prospects

The first steps are the hardest. But don’t forget, even Rome wasn’t built in one day. So be patient. If you want people to follow you back, it is of great importance that you engage with them. In any social platform communication is the key – and that applies to Twitter just as any. Tweet at your targeted audience, retweet their tweets and content, and you have a high chance of getting on their radar and for them to return the favour. It’s always worth a try, and you might be surprised who will follow you back at the end of the day.

2. Post during relevant hours

According to an analysis conducted by CoSchedule, the perfect time to schedule your tweets is during business hours. The best times to tweet are during lunch hours where prospects have spare time to check their social accounts. You can also schedule your tweets after 5 or 6 pm when people leave work and have time to check out their Twitter feed.

3. Don’t just tweet – post rich and engaging content

No one wants to hear what the weather’s outside your office – that’s boring. Understand your buyer personas and communicate in their language. Always keep in mind that even though you use Twitter as a B2B marketing channel, there’s always a human sitting behind the desk reading and writing tweets.

The most important aspect of (re-)tweeting of rich and engaging contents is that you know your target audience by heart. Look out for what they are tweeting, what they are looking for and what they need. Your targeted audience might be posting about their needs – be on the lookout.

Things to consider:

• If your company offers eBooks, white papers, cheat sheets, etc., make sure to promote them on Twitter and always point out what your potential customers can gain from looking at your content.
• Links to your website and/or your blog – links aren’t counted towards the restriction of the 140 characters
• Links to interesting articles about your industry, business or anything that might interest your targeted audience
• Visuals – a picture is worth a thousand words and that’s way more than 140 characters. Look how SAP made a semi dull tweet come to life with an image: