3 Ways B2B Businesses Can Benefit from Twitter

Given the increased importance of Twitter to businesses in recent years, it has quickly become a mainstay in the social media arsenal of the modern B2B marketer. With this in mind, it’s important for these companies to find ways to effectively leverage the platform to expand the reach of key messages, engage with their audiences and, ultimately, achieve key business goals.

Here are three ways that B2B businesses can incorporate Twitter as part of their marketing strategy:

1. Create Twitter Lists to Segment Your Feed

Twitter lists allow you to categorize your followers and segment your feed so you only view tweets produced by specific followers on your list. Additionally, you can control who views your lists, by making them private or public.

Monitoring is an essential aspect of Twitter lists, allowing you to monitor competitors in your industry or even future customers. For instance, prospects can be organized in a private list, where they can be regularly monitored to see if they tweet any questions regarding your area of expertise. You can then engage with these prospects by providing answers to their questions.

Other ways that Twitter lists can be used include engaging with your customer base, keeping tabs on emerging industry trends and tracking employee engagement. The goal of Twitter lists is to increase your engagement on the platform.

2. Promote Your Upcoming Events

Twitter can also be used to spread awareness about your upcoming events. If your business is hosting the event, be sure to create a specific hashtag that can be used anytime you are promoting the event—both online and offline. This includes your website, social media channels and any printed event materials, such as event flyers and programs.

When you’re creating the hashtag, it’s important to be creative, yet simple. The South by Southwest annual film and music festival does an excellent job with its event hashtag, #SXSW. Not only is it short, but it’s easy to remember and followers can start conversations with one other about the event. You only have 140 characters per tweet to work with—so less is often more. Event hashtags will help you gain publicity and buzz for your event.

In addition, you can tweet about your event at the times when you know you’ll receive the most traffic. When you see people tweeting about your event, engage with them and start conversations. This tactic can influence your followers’ decisions about attending the event. Remember, you’re not only promoting your event, but your company and, ultimately, your brand as well.

3. Manage Potential Crises

Monitoring online conversations is an important part of marketing, especially before a crisis erupts. Social media channels—particularly Twitter—come in handy when you want to respond to comments quickly to help mitigate an emerging company crisis.

Even if the comments are negative, responding to them is a best practice that can work in your favor. By doing so, your followers will see that you’re promptly addressing and providing a solution for the problem at hand.

Case in point: Red Cross. In 2011, an employee of the organization accidently posted a rogue tweet on the company’s Twitter account about getting drunk. After the social media director received calls about the tweet, it was deleted. However, despite negative feedback, Red Cross decided to use the tweet to its advantage and engaged with the public on social media.

The subject of the tweet, Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, encouraged followers to donate to the Red Cross. Thus, one of the most important aspects about handling a crisis on Twitter is to listen to what the public has to say before you respond.

Likewise, when an AirAsia airplane crashed in 2014 during its trip from Indonesia to Singapore due to a malfunctioning auxiliary power unit, AirAsia’s CEO Tony Fernandes became active on Twitter to console families of the passengers, as well as communicate with his crew, passengers and investors. He also went as far as traveling to Indonesia to recover the body of a flight attendant.

AirAsia’s CEO took the proper steps to handle the situation by acknowledging the issue behind the crash and consistently showing his support to his staff and the victims’ families. This is a strategic example of how a company’s CEO should approach a crisis, particularly on Twitter.

These are just a few examples of how Twitter’s impact on B2B companies continues to grow. By leveraging Twitter as part of your business’s marketing strategy, you can in turn improve your business and better reach your goals.