Very interesting development came out of Twitter HQ last week. In a blog post, Twitter Product Manager Mitali Pattnaik introduced the Lead Generation Card as one solution amongst the Twitter Cards suite.
With the Lead Generation Card introduction, it marks one of Twitter's initial forays into social lead generation as a part of their product roadmap. To date, Twitter's featureset has been heavily focused on their end user and satisfying the desires of the most popular brands that are often on the B2C side.
The Lead Generation Card allows companies to acquire email addresses from their fans in a highly frictionless manner. As Michael Learmonth of AdAge explained, Twitter basically just removed the unnecessary layer of complexity we call a landing page. What took multiple clicks and multiple inputs before has now been boiled down to just one click. Props to the Twitter team for making it as easy as possible.
To date, brands have had a difficult time determining the commonalities between their email database and their twitter fanbase. This is one step in the right direction.
More than anything, it's great to see Twitter acknowledge their platform as an excellent source for social lead gen. At this stage in 2013, not enough B2B marketers have invested heavily in the platform, but that's about to change.
As Matt McGee of Marketing Land noted a couple months back, Twitter is promoting the impact tweets can have on B2B tech audiences. Twitter released a number of B2B-friendly statistics:
- 59 percent of Twitter users visited a B2B tech site during the study period, compared to 40 percent of average Internet users
- 30 percent of Twitter users search for B2B tech brands, compared to 12 percent of average Internet users
If Twitter continues to make improvements like this one and social lead gen software solutions like Insightpool continue to emerge, B2B marketers will start to dedicate more time to the platform sooner than later.