If you are reading this, there is a good chance you are involved in B2B marketing. You have products or services to sell with limited time and resources to create social media content, which is both human and helpful. Many marketers-in an effort to expand their reach and influence to a mass audience-make the mistake of over-automating their social media, robotically blasting out promotional spam without building any customer relationships or listening to their marketplace. In other words, they unintentionally post like spambots in order to give their inbound marketing content a wider audience via social media, such as Twitter.With over 300 million Tweeters, Twitter is a powerful and influential social network. Like any popular social media site, online marketers look for a way to maximize their inbound marketing strategies through Twitter. At our agency, we strive to be as human and helpful as possible in creating content, but we do use some automated tools. We post content each day on multiple platforms and track leads from people who visit our site through those channels. In addition to our own content, we curate and share original content from other experts in the marketing industry.
Our customers don't want or need more sales messaging from us. They seek solutions and want information. To be the best B2B Tweeters, we should all ask ourselves the following questions:
- Have I let my Twitter account become obnoxious by blasting out one-way messages?
- Am I listening or even following back?
- Do I follow other influencers in my industry?
- Do I engage with them and share their content with my network?
- Am I an eager listener and learner who engages followers and responds to tweets?
- How does your Twitter account look to the rest of the world?
TwitCleaner
An interesting way to find out, and also to occasionally filter your feed, is TwitCleaner-a tool that evaluates anyone you follow and alerts you of red flags, such as:
- Relatively Unpopular: Less than 30% of people follow them back
- Not So Interesting/Self Obsessed: More than 50% of their tweets are about themselves
- High Percentage of Quotes: More than 50% quotes
- Little Original Content: 70% re-tweets or more
- All Talk, All The Time: Averaging more than 24 public tweets a day
- Hardly Follow Anyone: People that follow back fewer than 10% of those who follow them
- Bots: More than 90% pumped out from a RSS feed
- Don't Interact With Anyone: Never interacts with any of their followers
- Not Much Interaction: Fewer than 10 tweets
- No Activity in Over A Month: No tweets in a very long time
If you really want an eye-opener, use TwitCleaner to see how your Twitter account looks to the rest of the world. So, how do you look? Check yourself before you wreck yourself and invest the time to customize your Twitter content and engagement.
Other Ways to Improve B2B Tweeting
- Join or host a Tweet chat.
- Use hashtags to start a community conversation about a specific topic.
- Actually converse with people, instead of only broadcasting your content.
- Ask questions and take polls to stimulate conversation.
- Share relevant local news and events.
Being an effective B2B Tweeter is like being a good friend. No one likes the guy who only talks about himself and doesn't listen to others. Twitter is a social network, so your marketing activities on the site should be social too. Share interesting content, but also get involved and engaged with your fellow Tweeters in order to enjoy an increased ROI from your inbound marketing.
The B2B Twitterer of The Year Awards recognize professionals each year who set great examples. The winners for 2011 have just been announced, so I encourage you to check them out as shining examples of best practices.
Feeling a surge of confidence? Ready to go further? For more information about how to succeed on Twitter, check out 5 Tools That Will Make You A Hashtag Master and Do Your Twitter Followers Know Whether You Can Fog A Mirror?.