5 Easy Steps for Creating B2B Twitter Strategy

Are you starting your own venture and need to build a twitter strategy? Or is your twitter strategy not so well-rounded? In either case, you can strategically build your twitter community and leverage it as your “owned” communication channel for inbound marketing efforts. You should also utilize its advertising products to achieve your goal-based conversions.

The first and foremost thing is to understand the size of your twitter followership. Naturally, if your twitter followers are relevant and large in number, the engagement rate (total number of clicks, retweets, likes, and replies divided by total number of impressions), your reach and exposure for organic tweets will be high.

Step 1: Build your audience

To build a strong twitter followership start sending tweets with genuine value with relevant hashtags. For example, if you are providing online marketing services, then your tweets would informational around topics related to online marketing. Check out the following tweet from HubSpot and notice the relevant hashtag #SEO:

Remember, hashtags are the new keywords. People looking for information on SEO will see your tweet, know you through your twitter profile and are highly likely to follow you.

This is an ongoing, consistent method of gaining followership through your organic tweets; and this will take a few months to show big time results.

Move on to twitter advertising tools. Here you need to spend some moolah….Yes, nothing comes for free, you see.

For every paid activity on twitter, you must very clearly define your micro goals. This will not only help you in optimizing your campaigns but also help you measure the right metrics to gauge the impact.

Since your objective here is to build relevant followership, use Promoted Accounts and build two sub-campaigns for better optimization and measurement. Build following two campaigns with “Audience Features” as:

1. Keywords targeting (+Add Keywords)
2. @Username targeting (+Add Followers)

Also don’t forget to add interests while setting up your two micro campaigns. You will find a lot of details here in this link from twitter for promoted accounts.

Let this campaign run for at least a month to get measurable results.

Step 2: Engage

While your Promoted Accounts campaign is working for you, you can start a parallel campaign for engaging your followers and prospective followers. For this campaign, build promoted tweets with “Tweet Engagement” or “Website clicks or conversions” as campaign objectives. The campaign objective will depend upon your business type and your business objectives.  For example, if you are into IoT for b2b, then you might consider attaching a video file for better engagement. (You could directly choose “Video views” as objective and build a video card to promote). Check out the following tweet from SocialBakers:

But if you are in services sector, use “Website clicks or conversions” as the objective and provide a landing page which is relevant, engaging, and valuable for the visitors. You could also select old promoted tweets format also, but the key to note is to set up your targeting parameters based on keywords, interests and geographies, and ensure to include a landing page that can collect the contact details of your prospects. After all, your end goal is to achieve lead generation!

Tip: Use relevant industry hashtags as your keywords.

Step 3: Nurture

Once your campaign for engaging users has ended, you must plan your nurture campaign by building up similar two campaigns with “Audience Features” as:

1. Keywords targeting (+Add Keywords)
2. @Username targeting (+Add Followers)

This time use “Website clicks or conversions” as the objective and bring your prospects to a landing page that offers educational content clearly showing how your organization can solve a business need. Jump to your content marketing strategy and use any of the following content type on your landing page with a strong call-to-action (CTA):

1. Invite prospects for a Webcast
2. Invite prospects for a Podcast
3. Analyst reports which speak about your strengths vis-à-vis your competition

I’d like to re-emphasise here that content marketing is very crucial for generating qualified leads from your social media advertising campaigns. You’ll find more about it here.

Step 4: Re-target/Convert

Let your “Nurture” stage campaign run for about 30 days, and then build another campaign for retargeting and converting your prospects.

At this stage, you could use the “Website clicks or conversions” as the objective to build a campaign using tailored audiences (+Add Tailored Audiences). You can use email ids and/or twitter handles of specific prospects that you have collected from various sources, such as a telephone enquiry, or a campaign from Facebook or LinkedIn.

Here too, bring prospects to a specific landing page, but this time the content should talk about following aspects:

1. Vendor comparison or product comparison
2. Successful case studies
3. Download option for a demo/product trial
4. Product literature/data sheet 
5. A 5 minute on-page tour of product features

Tip: With every CTA remember to ask the prospect to register.

The email/phone number database collected from this campaign must now be nurtured further through email marketing strategies before they are categorized as sales qualified leads.

Step 5: Measure

With every stage here, you must remember to measure the performance of your campaigns with the metrics that capture all your KPIs. For example, gauging conversion rate is critical in all the campaigns, but in Step 1 campaign, measure the rate of getting new followers and in Step 2 campaign measure your ER, reach, and exposure.

Similarly, in the Step 5 campaign, calculate your lead qualification rate based on all the prospective leads that were captured right from the beginning of this master Twitter campaign.

Over to you now!

Do you have any more tweaks to suggest that can make an awesome B2B Twitter Strategy?