How Do You Like Your B2B Twitter Content? Artificially-Processed or Custom-Crafted?
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re also in B2B marketing. You have things to sell, and limited time and resources to create social media content that is both human and helpful.
But many marketers, in an effort to expand their reach and influence to a mass audience, make the mistake of over-automating their social media, robotically blasting out promotional spam without building any customer relationships or listening to their marketplace.
Until recently, I was possibly the least automated B2B marketing professional on Twitter. Over the past few years I’ve tried various apps to better organize my social media efforts, but most of the time i’ts just me manually tweeting and learning from those I follow.
At our agency we try to be as human and helpful as possible when creating content, but we do use automation tools. We post content each day on multiple platforms, and track any leads from people who visit our site as a result. And in addition to our own content we try to curate and share original content from other experts in our industry.
Our customers and your’s don’t need more sales messaging from us. They need help and they want information. To be the best B2B Twitterers, we should all ask ourselves these questions:
- Have I let my Twitter account become obnoxious by blasting out one-way messages?
- Am I listening or even following back?
- Do I follow other influencers in my industry?
- Do I engage with them and share their content with my network?
- Am I a curious listener and learner that responds and engages?
- How does your Twitter account look to the rest of the world?
An interesting way to find out, and to also occasionally filter your feed, is TwitCleaner a tool that evaluates anyone you follow and alerts you of red flags such as:
- Relatively Unpopular- Less than 30% of people follow them back
- Not So Interesting- Self Obsessed- More than 50% of their tweets are about themselves
- High Percentage Quotes- More than 50% quotes
- Little Original Content- 70% retweets or more
- All Talk, All The Time- Averaging more than 24 public tweets a day
- Hardly Follow Anyone- People that follow back fewer than 10% of those who follow them
- Bots- More than 90% pumped out from an RSS feed
- Dont Interact With Anyone- never interacts with any of their followers
- Not Much Interaction- Fewer than 10 tweets
- No Activity in Over A Month- No tweets in a very long time
And if you really want an eye-opener, use TwitCleaner to see how your Twitter account looks to the rest of the world. So, how do you look? Check yourself before you wreck yourself and invest the time to custom-craft your Twitter content and engagement.
The B2B Twitterer Of The Year Awards recognize professionals each year who set great examples. The winners for 2011 have just been announced, so I encourage you to check them out as shining examples for best practices.
