6 tips for a successful B2B Twitter strategy

Twitter is an important platform for many, especially businesses within the professional services industry. I’m sharing 6 tips you can implement into your strategy to result in increased brand awareness, more website traffic, and increasing conversions.

All of these tips come from our recent series of the Sharing Social podcast. We’ll link to the relevant episode as we go. 

Let’s get started!

1. Use a content framework to stay focused

Nada Alkutbi, Social Media Leader at IBM, talked us through the “four C’s”, her ingenious content framework. It’s simple to use, helps you stay focused on your objectives, and helps tailor your content to provide value to your audience.

You can use this concept to help you plan your content for Twitter, but you could easily use this across other platforms too. 

The four C’s consist of: 

1. Channels – Where is your focus? Where is your audience most engaged?
2. Champions – How does employee advocacy fit into your strategy?
3. Cadence – How often are you posting on social media? Are your posts providing your audience with value?
4. Content – How is your content tailored to the platform

Listen to the Nada talk about the four C’s. 

2. Run a Twitter chat or Space with an influencer

Have you ever hosted a Twitter chat or Space with an influencer? During the episode, Nada discusses how important she feels influencer marketing is for IBM:

Influencers have significant authority and credibility in the marketplace, and can help us reach new audiences that we simply can’t reach ourselves.

Nada Alkutbi, Social Media Leader at IBM

Twitter chats

A Twitter chat is a conversation that takes place on Twitter, where a selection of questions is asked over the space of an hour, building connections around one specific hashtag. They’re easy to organise and can be a low-risk, time-efficient way to collaborate with an influencer from your niche. 

Twitter Spaces

Twitter Spaces take a little more time investment. They allow a live audio conversation to take place between a host and a number of speakers. You can invite listeners up on the virtual stage to add their thoughts to the conversation. 

Twitter Spaces can be a great source of content, which can be repurposed into podcast episodes, blog posts, social media snippets, and more! 

Before going ahead with a Twitter chat or Space, it’s important to define the outcome you’re looking for. What are you hoping to achieve?

The next question to ask yourself is which industry influencer has a strong level of engagement with their Twitter audience? You want someone who has a strong connection with their network so you can harness this power in your event. 

You could always consider running a live audio event on another platform, for example, LinkedIn or Clubhouse. 

Twitter chats can be great for building engagement on your profile and can be a great way to collaborate with an influencer.

Listen to how IBM choose the right influencers for their online event. 

3. Streamline your presence

Social media changes all the time, new platforms come and go, and it can be tempting to feel like you have to produce content for every channel, regardless of whether your audience is there. 

You should streamline your presence on social media to ensure your content is directly tied towards your marketing goals and is providing value to your audience. 

Different strengths and expertise are required for different platforms, and video-heavy platforms like TikTok can require a lot of time and resources to work well. Generally, professional services firms tend to lead towards Twitter and LinkedIn as their primary channels. Once these are optimised and working well, then you can explore branching out to more channels. 

Listen to how IBM has adapted their strategy over the years as the social media industry has rapidly changed. 

4. Define your goals

When it comes to any social media campaign, you must define your goals and objectives to ensure that all of your content is helping you work towards achieving your goals. You should never be relying on guesswork. 

Some of the most common goals marketers work towards using social media include: 

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing website traffic
• Building your audience

When we spoke to Reckitt about their goals, they were heavily centred around how the right type of content could be created for their three major audiences: the media, NGOs, and investors. 

We’ve got a cheat sheet to help you define goals for your next campaign, taking into account location, audience demographics, type of content, and channel. 

Listen to our episode on building a corporate reputation through social media. 

5. Adapt to the channel

There can be a crossover in types of content creation between each social media channel, like the Stories feature. You’ll see that on Instagram, Facebook, and soon TikTok. But it’s important to lean into the unique features of each platform where possible. 

Twitter, for example, is primarily text-based. It’s fast-paced and updates in real-time. Lots of the trending topics and content are driven by current news stories and situations happening at the moment. 

That’s why Twitter is such a powerful platform for the Met Office. When we interviewed Ross Middleham on the podcast, he told us how Twitter was the Met Office’s biggest platform with over 800,000 followers:

Twitter is our biggest audience. That’s the one that we’ve been on longest, no surprise to people. And we’ve got over 800,000 followers there. We use that as a kind of rolling news channel, much like most people use, but that fits perfectly with the weather and the ever-changing nature of the weather to keep people updated.

Ross Middleham, Content & Social Lead at the Met Office

The frequent updates on Twitter suit the ever-changing nature of the weather perfectly. 

Listen to our interview with Ross here. 

6. Measure your performance

Finally, no matter which platform you’re focusing on for your campaign, it’s imperative that you’re measuring your performance. This will help you identify which types of content is resonating with your audience and bringing the most results. 

The Met Office found that people were engaging with graphics on Twitter. These tweets were getting more engagement than other types, and this prompted the content team to start producing more graphics optimised for the platform. 

However, on YouTube, for example, visitors resonated much more with a presented weather forecast. If you looked at content on TikTok, it would be different again. 

Listen to our interview with the Met Office to learn more about how they alter content for each channel.

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Related articles

• How to build a Twitter follower campaign
• Top 10 most engaging social post ideas
• The rise of audio-first social media
• 5 things you should NEVER do when running a Twitter account

Have any queries about your Twitter strategy? Or, would you like some extra support in creating one for your business? Email me at [email protected].