When Twitter was first taking off, it was believed to be a tool mostly for consumers. Today, however, business executives are becoming more and more aware of Twitter as a tool to build business-to-business (B2B) sales. Twitter isn’t just important for interacting with consumers. It’s also crucial for interacting with brands, potential clients and competitors.
Here are a few big ways Twitter can impact your B2B sales.
Actively Projecting Your Brand
Your brand doesn’t have to be a passive thing. Twitter is perhaps the only avenue where blasting out your brand regularly is not only accepted, but encouraged. You can’t email your potential clients every day without repercussions, but you can tweet every day, keeping your brand in front of potential clients, while actually building rather than burning goodwill.
Networking Your Way to New Contacts
If there is someone in your space that you want to meet, Twitter can be a great way to get around the red tape. It can be very hard to meet someone in a crowded seminar or to get through their secretary, but if you have their Twitter handle, you can start to build a connection on the social network that can then develop into an offline connection.
Start by following them. Retweet their tweets and @reply to any requests from them with helpful resources. Get on their radar and eventually, when an opportunity arises to introduce yourself, do so and they will likely know who you are.
Find Their Pain Points
Twitter can be a powerful way of keeping track of exactly what is going on in an industry. You can use it to figure out what your clients are up to, what your competitors are up to and what your clients’ competitors are up to.
Let’s say a competitor of a big potential client launches a new product. It stands a good chance of taking a big chunk out of your client’s business. That could be a stellar opportunity for you to come in and offer to help. It may or may not result in immediate business, but that offer for help will definitely turn into goodwill that can later turn into business.
Use Twitter to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and identify the pain points of potential clients.
Tapping into B2B Events
B2B events will often have their own Twitter feeds, which can be a very powerful way to participate with your ideal target market. For example, let’s say Convention A is having all their participants tweet to #conventionachat.
By participating actively on #conventionachat, you can build up a brand for yourself among potential leads at an event. Start doing this a few weeks before the event. By the time the actual event rolls around, a lot of people there will already know who you are.
These are a few ways that Twitter can affect your B2B sales. Twitter isn’t just a tool for consumers, but can be a powerful tool for building goodwill and gathering intelligence for making B2B sales.
