How to Use Twitter for B2B Marketing

With roughly 328 million active monthly users, Twitter is one of the world's most popular social media networks. Granted, it pales in comparison to Facebook, but it excels in its simple, micro-message format. For this reason, many users actually prefer Twitter. So, if you operate a business-to-business (B2B) company, consider the following Twitter tips to connect with your sales leads, customers and even members of the press.

Know Your Audience

You can't expect to use Twitter effectively for B2B marketing without first understanding your target audience. In other words, to whom are you trying to reach? Hopefully, you already have historic sales data, in which case you can use this information in your Twitter marketing campaigns to define your audience.

Include #Hashtags

While optional, including #hashtags in your tweets can help you attract more followers and brand visibility. A hashtag is essentially one or more words (without spaces) that's prefixed with the # sign. When added to a tweet, it helps "curate" the message so that users can find it more easily. If someone searches for the hashtag, for instance, they'll find your tweet. Feel free to promote your Twitter hashtags elsewhere, including other marketing platforms and material for maximum exposure.

Use Images

Regardless of what your company sells -- construction equipment, heavy machinery, services, etc. -- including tweets in your images can help you connect with prospects and ultimately boost your sales. In fact, one study found that tweets with images receive 18% more click-through's than tweets without images.

Twitter Chats

Another way to use Twitter for B2B marketing involves Twitter chats. Basically, this means having a discussion with your followers through the platform, typically at a specific time while using a universal hashtag. Prospects and other users can ask questions about your company and its products or services, to which you can respond with an answer.

Sharing is Caring

Contrary to what some marketers believe, the content you publish on Twitter doesn't have to be yours. You can also share content from other users, which is particularly useful because it offers a fresh perspective. So, try to publish both your own unique content as well as the content from other users on Twitter. You can easily share other users' content by "retweeting it" from within your account.

Shorten URLs

As you may already know, tweets are limited to 140 characters or less (including spaces). And because URLs are often link, you may need to use a URL shortener when sharing links. Basically, this gives you a new, shorter URL that redirects to your target URL. You can still share it on Twitter, and it will still take users to the same page.

Twitter is another avenue to keep key information in front of your sales leads, customers and editors of publications. Look up key people that you want to receive your tweets and follow them. This way when you release information, you can be sure those leads you want to nurture has the latest information possible.