Nearly every company is knee-deep in social media marketing these days, but how many of them know how to best use these popular social tools to increase traffic and sales? When you are working within the B2B market, tools like Twitter will need to be used differently than they would if you were marketing to general consumers. To make sure that your Twitter marketing campaign is successful, it's important to establish some solid goals, allow time for your campaign to flourish and become successful and then to determine your ROI (return on investment) on your efforts.
Tip #1 - The More the Merrier
When you set up your Twitter account make sure to give access and delegate posting to more than one employee. Make sure to choose employees that will help you to professionally represent your brand. By having multiple users on one account you can be sure that your posts will be updated regularly and frequently, giving you more opportunities to reach B2B clients than if just one employee were trying to take it all on by himself. Multiple users also mean multiple points of view, communication styles and ideas - all of which can be key in gaining more followers and increased readership.
Tip #2 - Timing is Important
Knowing when to post your tweets can be just as important as what you are tweeting. Knowing when your company's message will be read by your B2B clients - and shared with other companies - is important. You can track this through analytics available through your Twitter account that will show if your readers view your tweets early in the day or later in the afternoon, during the week or on the weekend. You can then gear your tweets to meet the needs of your users.
Tip #3 - Content is King
What you tweet is also very important. Make sure that you are sending out valuable information to your B2B clients and not just a lot of opinion and chatter. Use your Twitter account as a means of sharing important information with your client base in a quick and easy manner. Think about it as connecting with your business community. The better the content you are sharing, the more likely it will be re-tweeted and shared with others outside your circle as well.
Tip #4 - Using Hashtags
It is important to research current hashtags and then create new hashtags to promote the updates you make on your Twitter account. A lot of B2B businesses will start out in their usage of Twitter searching the top-used hashtags. Hashtags help people to find content and share information with a large audience beyond your list of followers. Interact with hashtags whenever possible, such as at an industry event or conference, where your employees can tweet and re-tweet about their experiences at the live event to increase your visibility on the network.
Tip #5 - Keyword Optimization
You can search Twitter to find out more about a topic or keyword and how often it is mentioned or searched at twitter.com. This tool will help you to evaluate the market and formulate your Twitter strategy to choose your own relevant top-10 keywords. If you treat your Twitter account and tweets as you would a blog post or SEO optimization for a website, you will find that it becomes very easy to create search optimized content that is relevant to your industry.
Tip #6 - Using URL Shorteners
Using URL shortener programs is key to being able to fit everything you need within the 140 character maximum Twitter post form. You can use free programs such as bit.ly and give yourself more room for promotion and other supporting text for your tweets.
Tip #7 - Think Outside the Box
This well-worn expression still maintains relevance; look for new tools and methods to use for promoting your website, business and products on Twitter. There are a myriad of very powerful B2B marketing tools that can be used, such as search tools, client tools, Twitter analytics programs and Twitter directories. Make certain to use everything you can to get the edge on your competition and to provide useful and relevant information to your followers.
Get Busy ;-D
