Twitter Etiquette for Business

When it comes to being relatable, pitching your company to other businesses is hard enough. But social marketing is a whole other level of hurt. Making your B2B business relatable on social media is an obstacle that only the most marketing-savvy have managed to overcome.

SURVEYING THE LANDSCAPE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Quora are all channels used by B2B, but only to a limited extent. This article will focus on Twitter, because it’s become the main channel of choice.

First, you need to understand the landscape of Twitter and who’s likely to be viewing your posts. In many cases, it’s people who market for your competitors.

Social Media managers working in the B2B world use dashboards that follow multiple streams, all day long, related to whatever business they’re responsible for marketing to the world. As someone who’s done this for a lot of B2B clients, I’m pretty seasoned and somewhat cynical after reading so many different streams from similar businesses on Twitter. Often it feels like we’re mainly tweeting at each other in the same hashtag groups, while hoping to catch the fleeting attention of the stray business owners or managers we‘re actually aiming for.

THE SPECIAL CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL MARKETING FOR B2B

B2B marketing via social media has always been a challenge. First — will anyone really see it? In the context of their demanding job as a decison maker about business products and services, who has time to sit around reading Twitter streams all day? This is why, compared to social marketing for consumer-facing businesses, it’s been slow to catch on as a strategy with B2B executives, especially Boomers and GenX-ers.

The second challenge with B2B marketing on Twitter is finding enough interesting things to share. If you have an established blog and a deep library of content assets this is less of a problem, but if you’re a relatively new company, you’re scrambling. How do you keep up a steady stream of relevant posts when your reference and news sources can be pretty thin? This is especially a problem for niche businesses, where relevant new developments can be few and far between.

Many B2B businesses start up Facebook pages and then quickly abandon them when they realize how few followers they actually attract. Facebook just has the wrong personality for B2B. However, there are by now enough younger managers and executives with a frequent Twitter habit who prefer to use it as their primary source of industry news. And this is why Twitter affords more opportunity to reach the right targets. But you have to observe smart etiquette if you want to keep their attention.

Here, then, are some Do’s and Don’ts to guide you.

DOS AND DON’TS for TWITTER

DO SHARE COOL STUFF, WHETHER OR NOT IT ‘SELLS’ YOUR COMPANY.

If you want loyal followers, be interesting.

To get real engagement, your stream has to mimic that of a real person someone actually might want to talk to. You must have interesting things to say, news they wouldn’t see elsewhere, or insights on issues that they care about.

Think of your time on Twitter as time spent at a cocktail party. You can tell people a little about yourself, but show an interest in things that interest them, and then you’ve really got an audience. People will gather around. Sprinkle into your scheduled posts plenty of fascinating little facts and links related to your industry. Stories with cool or dazzling imagery get attention even faster. If you’re consistently interesting enough, people will add you to their Follows.

DON’T BE A BLOWHARD.

If you want to turn people off or cause them to stop following you, tweet only about your company, its daily activities, and how terrific it is in every way.

I see this so often, it’s really dismaying how many people don’t realize the fundamental mistake in approach. It’s not like B2B social marketing is anything new. So why haven’t people gotten a clue yet that this is absolutely the WORST kind of social media messaging?

Sure, fine, toot your own horn a little now and then. But if you’re blowing it all day long every day and talking about nothing else, you’ll be about as endearing as the classic narcissist guy on the blind date.This must be where the term “Blowhard” comes from: people who can’t stop blowing their own horn.

If you still insist on trumpeting your successes every day, try doing it in the form of stories about how your customers’ business lives were improved. Make it about them, not about you.

Try this exercise: avoid using the term “we” in any of your posts.

DO GIVE @MENTIONS AND CREDITS TO NEWS & FEATURE SOURCES.

The sources for news about your industry will always appreciate having their @credit included in a mention, and it also tells them you’re helping to expand their own reach. This is especially felicitous for industry journalists. The more you credit them, the likelier it is they will follow your stream. And if you have a good mix of interesting posts, they might even want to write about your company at some point.

DON’T FORGET TO INCLUDE LINKS WHEN TALKING ABOUT NEWS STORIES OR FEATURES.

Every day I see people comment on a news story that’s relevant to their community, add lots of hashtags, and then forget to include the link to it. Huh?

DO LIMIT YOUR HASHTAGS

Posts that are filled with hashtags — more than 3 or 4, are too obviously all about marketing. It calls their relevance to the main community into question. Keep them truly relevant to whatever your post is about.

DON’T OVER-SHARE

B2B hashtag communities tend to be relatively narrow, because the subject matter tends to be only relevant to a small segment of each market. Over-sharing with dozens of daily posts on any hashtag means others in the community will see your posts completely dominating their streams — and not in a good way. This is another no-no. You want to stand out, but not like this. Quality over quantity!

Following these etiquette rules will help ensure that you’re not the boor in the room, but rather, if you’re shrewd about it, the life of the party.