As a B2B marketer, you should be creating content for Twitter, but maybe you’ve been sitting on the sideline watching and learning from others. It’s time to build a plan to use Twitter to generate leads and promote your solutions. An initial step is creating content for Twitter. Content marketing strategies have been well documented and we’ve written several blogs on content marketing for B2B lead generation, so I won’t get into too much detail on that.
The first thing you must realize is that Twitter is massive. There are approximately 500 million tweets sent every day. Getting yours noticed will take work. Your content should not only be interesting, it must also be visible to the people who are going to be interested in it. Unless you are Taylor Swift and have a built in audience of 66 million Twitter followers, effort is required to capture the awareness of your target audience. This is why using keywords and phrases marked with the Hashtag symbol are so important.
Similar to how SEO works with websites, keywords help people find the content of interest to them on Twitter. Additionally, using pictures can make your tweets stand out. According to HubSpot, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets. And this works for more than cat memes. Charts and graphs are easy to make, intelligible even in small sizes, and incredibly popular tool for communicating value. This makes them a great tool for improving your B2B lead generation efforts using Twitter.
Another good way to use Twitter is by engaging your audience in a conversation by asking questions or giving them the opportunity to provide feedback. This is particularly useful at events and conferences where large groups of individuals with similar interests interact. It also allows people who were not able to attend to participate remotely. Putting up a live Twitter feed can be risky but it’s also a great way to show real-time interaction and open transparency of the conversation. I was recently at a conference where the moderator took questions from the audience in this way.
The conversational nature of Twitter also enables you to leverage conversations started by others to interject your own opinions and voice. In the prior post, I talked about monitoring your competition and specific keywords. By listening to these conversations, you can find interested groups of users that are already engaged in a topic related to your business. You can then contribute related, often prepared information to the conversation thereby further spreading your message and capitalize on the grass roots evolution of conversations on Twitter.
They important thing to remember with whatever strategy you take, is that you must be careful not to be aggressive. Make sure your content is not all about you i.e self promoting. If it to much of a sales messages or too persistent it will get ignored when. Creating content for twitter is an open forum for communications and just like in the real world; people don’t like “trolls.” or people that “talk too much”. That’s why you need to be prepared to offer high quality, meaningful content only when the situation presents itself.
But creating content is only half the story. Just like traditional advertising, the customer journey doesn’t end with seeing your tweet. You need your audience to take an action and as with other forms of digital marketing, Twitter users have several options including:
- Sharing your content with others either by forwarding or favoriting it.
- Clicking on a link to learn more about details about your topic.
- Commenting on your Tweet by using a hashtag or your Twitter ID.
- Direct messaging you through Twitter the same way you would send an email.
In most B2B organizations that are just starting with Twitter, the action you want your audience to take is clicking on a link back to your website for more information. This is typically preferred because it puts you in control of the customer journey and allows you to better track their interest and behavior on your website. It’s also easier to manage than 100s or 1000s of individual conversations or comments. Most website tracking software gives you the ability to measure the traffic from individual tweets as well as cookie users to see how often they interact with your company online. If not, you can set up dedicated landing pages to simplify this process.
When your creating content for twitter make sure that they are designed to generate engagement and conversation, you must have the mechanisms in place, either people or processes, to measure and respond accordingly. Additionally, you need to be able to convert these interactions into opportunities. This requires reviewing interactions and being able to answer questions quickly or taking the time to follow up with participants one-on-one later. In each case, you need to be prepared to offer additional content and provide the information each user needs to answer their questions, build awareness, and ultimately generate enough interest for them to begin the sales process.
Ultimately your success when creating content for twitter is measured by generating leads. Twitter is the same as generating leads with any other marketing tool; converting interest into actionable opportunities. This takes time and patience. People don’t typically buy products because they see a single tweet. It takes multiple touches and multiple marketing channels working in concert to build a cohesive message to your customer. Twitter can be the conduit for finding new customers. As of November 2015, there were over 307 million Twitter users. Your job when creating content for Twitter is to write a message that will stand out from the other 500 million tweets sent that day and inspire the reader take action to learn more about your company or product. And you need to do it in 140 characters or less.
