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One of our client companies has just launched an aggressive Twitter campaign on behalf of the product with a focus on securing B2B clients.

What best practices do you recommend for leveraging Twitter in the B2B space?

Additional Information (as per request):

  • The market space is high quality custom made furniture
  • The strategic growth intiative (sgi) for the company is to expand from a "job shop" to a "custom shop" The previous strategy was sales through the web supported by PPC advertising direct to consumer
  • The new strategy is (in a nutshell) to enter the "custom build" space with both B2B and B2C sales
  • Pricing, branding, marketing, production, and fufillment processes are all going through changes.
  • A new VP of Sales/Marketing was brought in as a member of our team.
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This is a great question Joseph. Can you edit it to be more specific and give us a little more information? What exactly is your competitor doing? What results are you wanting from Twitter marketing? etc. Asking for 'Best practices' is very general and hard to answer. After all, books have been written on this! – Susan Jones May 17 '11 at 4:50
@susan Jones -- thanks for the response. I will provide a detailed edit to give some more information. – Joseph Barisonzi May 17 '11 at 14:29
Thanks Joseph :-) – Susan Jones May 18 '11 at 13:03

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

Agreed with Genadinik. And...good tweets - commercial or not - give something of real value away for free, whether it is a moment's chuckle or a great coupon or important news. That seems to be an unofficial rule for attracting Twitter subscribers organically. This is only becoming more critical as the Internet becomes crowded with the equivalent of door-to-door salesmen competing for the same nickel. In such a noisy place, only a sincere message will get anyone's attention.

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+1 for pointing out the bankable value of sincerity. – Kenneth Vogt May 21 '11 at 16:30
up vote 1 down vote

I “inherited” a corporate twitter account (@kampyle) and - after 2 months not investing too much time - I still try to figure out how to do that right for B2B. I see the numbers of followers growing very nicely and getting the hashtags right they are more and more from our field of business.

The results so far, mainly twittering about new content (blog posts of ours, [Kampyle blog][1]) see: , is some increased traffic from twitter and one news story about our company, after I got into contact with a journalist on Twitter. So that is fine, but not the kind of outreach I would like to see.

I will go on – main trying to start building list, so to have a better structure and overview. And yes, I remove followers from early times, that simply do not look relevant.

I keep my expectations low, hoping for a positive surprise. I refrain from social messages and tone (like the “quote” twitters – on inspirational quote a day-), I don’t think this is suitable for a corporate twitter account. This suits if you have a personal account that refers to your company, there you as person can do whatever you want. A corporate account cannot – that is my take.v

Wishing you all the best,
Ursula

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+1 for some real life examples. – Kenneth Vogt May 23 '11 at 16:24
up vote 0 down vote

At the risk of getting down-voted, I am going to try to make a firm stand and say that the best thing to do is NOT to try to get B2B lead gen from Twitter.

B2B lead gen is hardly the culture there. You will be broadcasting stuff to people who are looking to read interesting content and it is generally a commercial-free zone.

For lead-gen, in my experience, the best thing to do is set up strong channels for people to come to you. Something like SEO if you are a small business. But SEO is by far not the only game in town.

The only thing to do as a business is discuss insightful issues and topics in your niche, and do whatever you can do to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

But that takes so much effort that you are better off investing that time into just creating a great business, or SEO. Once you truly are an authority in your niche, the lead-gen will become much easier on Twitter or elsewhere.

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+1 agreed. I've tried this and it just gets people's backs up. Use it as an extension to the businesses blogging and other content channels - to reinforce those channels. – edralph May 17 '11 at 16:44
Yes, last week I would have (and probably did) answer the same way you did. Since our new person came on and set up Twitteer she has secured four B2B referrals. Two of which have resulting in live opportunities which are being bid on. This is a pretty phenomenal conversion rate. And is causing me to reconsider the options -- which is why I asked for best practices from "true believers" – Joseph Barisonzi May 17 '11 at 16:54
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@Joseph What is she doing that is different? :) I'd like to learn :) – Genadinik May 17 '11 at 17:49
I told her to get her tail on here (but she is on commission, so she is out selling is what she told me) – Joseph Barisonzi May 17 '11 at 18:51
1  
-1 for taking a stand against using twitter for B2B but +1 for having the guts to take a stand! The twitter world is changing to a more commercial environment. While some will lament this deflowering, twitter itself is leading the way in this and at least trying to manage it. – Kenneth Vogt May 18 '11 at 0:59

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