It’s an opportunity to influence thinking and bring new ideas and solutions to market, which is why a social media presence has become just as an important, or in some cases more important, in a B2B marketing plan as networking, tradeshows and email marketing.

You can utilise Twitter as part of your marketing strategies, but it is important to crack the social media code correctly and effectively, so we’ve broken down the formula to give you the core ingredients that make up a successful Twitter campaign recipe.

It’s not a Popularity Contest

Although you may not believe it, in a B2B environment you don’t need thousands of followers, it’s more about qualitative relationship building where the main bulk of your followers should be customers, prospects and influencers whom you can target based on similar interests and common ground. Anyone can follow you for a freebie or giveaway but that approach won’t work for B2B prospects, especially for long sales cycles! The main focus is developing relationships and warming up leads for your sales team to go after.

It’s not who you know, It’s WHAT you know

In the world of Twitter, the content you tweet needs to be engaging and helpful, so best practice advice, blogs, free trials and webinars or any upcoming events are all compelling content that will benefit the follower. These calls to action should evoke prospects into providing you with their data (which are all conversion actions that result in another qualified lead in your CRM) and Retweet to increase positive brand awareness. According to Twitter, tweets that contain links receive a massive 86% higher Retweet rates than Tweets with no links and Tweets with image links double the engagement rate!

Track Metrics, Trends, and Follow Up

Following this advice is all well and good, especially if you see your follow count rising, but it means nothing if you aren’t tracking the engagement and following up those clicks. With a Web Analytics tool such as ProspectWOW, the Twitter Integration function allows you to tweet directly from the dashboard with an embedded tracking code. This gives you full visibility over past and current tweets and displays all companies that have had that interaction through a timeline display. This integration feature allows you to measure accurate ROI from your social media marketing which you would not get from traditional web analytics. With an effective social media plan that offers valuable content and engages your audience, mixed with the ability to track those that have interacted gives you a huge advantage into pursuing those valuable leads.

A crucial aspect to warming up a lead from cold to hot is building strong relationships and trust which is exactly what Twitter helps you to do. By combining this with web analytics you can see where else a follower goes on your website, meaning you can build a better profile of what they are interested in and Tweet even more relevant and interesting messages.

If your social media campaigns are taking off the next step is definitely to track your tweets. Sign up for a free trial of ProspectWOW today to get started.