Why you should be using Twitter for B2B marketing in 2022

Twitter can help you communicate with your audience, grow your brand and even generate leads.

We don’t need to tell you how powerful social media is for your business. It’s 2022 after all and companies have been finding new leads, developing their brand and reaching a new audience on Twitter for over a decade. You might be thinking, “But Twitter is just for B2C models.”

Wrong! While Twitter is most often used by B2C brands, it can also be a valuable platform for B2B companies looking to develop relationships and generate more work. In this short blog, we’re going to give you the low down on how you can make use of Twitter to deliver a measurable improvement to your marketing.

Define your goals

At the onset of any social media campaign, it’s important to understand what you’re trying to achieve. For one, you’ll want to keep those goals in mind and track your progress towards reaching them (more on that later). For two, you’ll want to ensure your goals align with the strengths of the medium. Because you don’t want to be in a situation where you’re trying to force a square peg into a round hole.

For example, if you want to use Twitter to sell something every tweet, you’ll need to temper your expectations. Twitter is all about laying the foundations for prosperous business relationships. It isn’t an e-commerce platform.

Instead, it’s best to think about the kind of engagement you want and from who. This is a trackable metric, all the way from the first point of contact to client onboarding.

Twitter for B2B? Shouldn’t we just use LinkedIn instead?

Here’s the deal. You absolutely should be using LinkedIn as a B2B company. The platform is purpose-built for business and you’ll find many qualified leads and people hungry for your services. But it isn’t a binary choice between LinkedIn and Twitter. You should be making use of both.

While Twitter has a broader audience than LinkedIn, you’ll also find much of the same audience there that you would on the latter. The question is how do you find and connect with them?

Connecting with your audience

Social media is all about connection and engagement. It’s part of the reason why it’s become such an absorbing and game-changing step-change in global communication. It brings with it untold freedom, enabling you to send messages to a billion-strong pool of recipients from all corners of the globe.

But just like pre-Internet advertising, you have to define your audience and appropriately target them if you’re going to be successful.

So how do you do that? It’s really simple. Start using the search function on Twitter to find your target market. Let’s say you’re an architect who works predominantly with developers. You’re going to want to connect with the following kinds of people:

Developers who are your ideal clients
Other industry voices working in your area that will also be important to your target market
Some of the other people your developers are currently following

Twitter for B2B and using the Twitter search function

By using the search function to find these people, you can drop them a follow and look at their follow list to see who else you should listen in on. They’re not guaranteed to follow you back when you click follow but many of them will.

Even if your targets don’t follow you back, you can start conversations with them by engaging with the content they post or by tagging them to start conversations.

Don’t give your audience the hard sell

Trust me, you really don’t want to be the business on Twitter that gives it the hard sell to their followers. All you’ll do is annoy people and get yourself blocked.

Understand this: Twitter for B2B is a marathon, not a sprint.

The way forward is forging conversations, relationships and trust. Once you’ve done that, most of the hard work is done. Not only will your target market come to you, but they’ll also be more receptive when you do have an offer to make.

Engaging with other people’s posts

So if you aren’t giving it the hard sell, what are you doing? This is where a bit of research and a bit of elbow grease comes in. Ultimately, you want to start building a relationship with your followers.

To do that, you simply need to take an interest in the things your target market is talking about. Doing that is as simple as engaging thoughtfully with their posts. Are they posting a new project they’ve completed? Throw a compliment their way. Are they asking a question? If you have the expertise, chime in and throw some knowledge on them.

You can even retweet or quote tweet someone if you want to really get their attention.

Twitter for B2B and engaging with your audience

Be constantly on the lookout for a natural way to start a conversation. Don’t try too hard though. If you come off like a business stalker, you’ll turn people away.

What you should be posting

So now the big question. What should you be posting? We’ve already established that you shouldn’t be trying to directly sell your services every tweet, so what should you be doing instead?

When posting on Twitter, what you want is engagement. To that end, you should be posting about things that are likely to be of interest to your target audience. What’s more, if you post about things your audience wants to talk about, you’re on to a winner.

Here are the kind of things to post about:

Links to your own blogs and thought pieces

If you’ve gone to the trouble of writing engaging content, get it out there and share it with your audience. If you’ve done it well enough, it’ll start a conversation.

Link to curated content (other people’s blogs or news articles)

There are always hot topics in any industry. If someone puts out a thoughtful post or if there’s something in the media about it, give it a share and ask a question. This is all about educating, informing and starting a conversation.

Twitter for B2B and sharing curated content

Have a bit of fun

Ok, we get it. B2B is very serious and you need to appear professional. The problem is, there’s a very fine line between being professional and being a complete snooze fest. Whether you’re B2C or B2B, people are still human and all humans are susceptible to a bit of humour. Don’t be afraid to crack a joke or two or to make light of something. The more human you are, the more approachable you’ll be.

Remember, social media is about building connections and getting engagement, not fitting as much business jargon into a tweet as possible.

Show off your successes

If you’ve just delivered a brand spanking new project for a client, get a case study and link to it on your social media. Nominated for or won an award? This is a great way to demonstrate your expertise and social proof.

Twitter for B2B and showing off your successes

However, never start a post with, “We’re delighted to announce” or “We’re excited to x”. It’s just plain boring and no one cares. Instead, think of a way to put your clients and audience first or inject a bit of humour into the equation. Like this:

“Great news for ale aficionados in Congleton. ABC construction has just delivered a game-changing new pub for McFredericks and Sons, one of the nation’s favourite brewers and pub retailers. Check out the glitzy new venue here!”

Mix it up and keep it varied

It’s important to do all of these things, not just one of them. If you only ever tweet after you post a new blog, no one is going to want to read it, let alone comment on it.

Keep it fresh and keep it varied. Your followers will thank you for it.

Use videos, images and infographics

Twitter gives you the opportunity to share more than just text and links. Using videos, images and infographics is a great way to drive engagement and really capture the attention of your target audience. This is particularly true if your work has a visual element.

Running a construction company? Show off your completed projects using photos and video and show your audience the fruits of your labour.

Providing a SaaS offering? Deliver a colourful infographic on how your product can improve your clients’ productivity.

Poll your audience

Polls are a great way to get your audience engaged in your post. People like to see how their answers compare to the rest of the world. If you can come up with a great question that your audience cares about, they’ll not only vote on the poll but will continue the conversation in the comments.

The poll can be a light hearted bit of fun or could even be about something in the industry that’s of the moment and generating lots of opinions. If you want to use a bit of psychological engagement magic, you can even have one of the poll options read, “Other (tell us below)”.

Every once and a while, make an offer!

Ok, you might be thinking, “but you said not to make it about selling!”. Well, that’s still true but it doesn’t mean you can’t make an offer every now and again. It’s just that it shouldn’t be the main kind of content you put out. As a rule, try to stick with the idea that Twitter is there to build relationships. Every blue moon, when you have good reason to, throw an offer at your audience.

Let your brand shine through

Your social media channels are great mediums to let your brand characteristics shine. The most successful brands speak in a voice and behave in a way that is authentically them, especially on Twitter.

If you have a brand guidelines document, your tone of voice, values and mission will already be defined and ready to go. You need only apply this formula to your Twitter feed.

If you haven’t got this information ironed out, you can check out our article on the 12 brand archetypes to see which one you are.

measure your impact

If you’re going to continue refining your strategy, you want to keep a close eye on your impact. There are many different kinds of impacts to track. Here are a few you should be aware of and actively measuring.

Engagement

You can check out how your posts and comments are doing using Twitter analytics. Everything from likes, comments, and follows can be tracked from here and should give you a good idea of where you’re having success and where there’s room for improvement.

Click-throughs

Where you link through to your blogs and to your website, you’ll want to track how many people are clicking on the links. If you use a social media hub platform like hootsuite, you’ll be able to track how many people click the links you use.

Client conversions

Obviously, money isn’t going to change hands on Twitter for a B2B company, but it can be the place where new relationships start. When onboarding your new clients, it’s a good idea to find out how they first heard about you. When you start to get feedback like, “We found your content through Twitter and knew you were just what we were looking for”, you know you’re using a winning strategy.

The bottom line

Twitter can be a potent weapon in your marketing arsenal. Like anything, it requires a bit of effort and attention to get the results you want, but when used appropriately, it can deliver a wider audience, better conversations with your target market and ultimately more revenue.

-

If you’re looking for a marketing agency to help you develop a winning social media strategy, contact Luma Marketing today for a no-obligation consultation. Our social media experts will deliver the tools you need to take your online presence to the next level.