Twitter: How to Break Through the Noise and Reach Your Audience | B2B Marketing

There are 500 million tweets sent each day. To break it down, that’s 6,000 tweets per second. A large number of those tweets are being created by businesses, with 65.8% of US companies with 100 plus employees on Twitter for marketing purposes. ­

That’s a lot of content, and for marketers and brands, that’s a lot of competition.

With Twitter costing 6 times more than Facebook for paid advertising, organic strategy should be considered a critical component of a brand’s strategy on Twitter. So, with more than half of US companies using Twitter for marketing and most tweeting out content for the sake of tweeting out content – how do you break through the noise?

You get creative. Let’s take a look at the five ways B2B companies and marketers can stand out and reach their audience on Twitter.

Have a Twitter Communication Plan.

You’ve heard it once and you’ll hear it again. It’s critical for brands and marketers to schedule out content in advance. Tools like Hootsuite allow for easy scheduling and monitoring of newsfeeds, making your week easier in the process. The mapping out of your editorial calendar, upcoming news and events for promotion, and industry topics is crucial in keeping your profile fresh and engaging.

So, say you take my advice, and you have your tweets scheduled out for the week, or, dare I say, the month. You’re done, right?

Wrong.

Scheduling posts is only one piece of the social media puzzle. Content must be distributed both on a scheduled and consistent basis, as well as posted in real-time. It’s critical that brands keep up with trending news, participate in industry events, and ensure they are fully present in the digital space along with competitors, targets, and industry influencers.

On the other side, simply posting to post and pushing out content at all hours of the day in fear of becoming irrelevant is a sure-fire way to scare off your target audience and decrease your engagement. Social media is becoming more about quality and less about quantity.

Make your tweets count and provide your target audience with the content they crave. Many times in B2B social media marketing, targets include executives at companies that could be considered a potential client. Give these busy professionals the information they need in the format they need it: short and sweet.

What are they talking about? What questions do they want answered in (now) 280 characters or less?

Now, I’m not going to tell you the exact number of times to post a day, because there isn’t one. However, keeping your schedule around 2-5 tweets a day is a good place to start as it allows you to push out your message while not oversaturating your feed. Finding your sweet spot requires trial and error, competitive analysis, and closely monitoring to see your levels of engagement and audience interaction. In fact, your sweet spot will often change and evolve, just as social media does.

Be Consistent with Twitter Communication.

The tried but true marketing Rule of Seven can be easily implemented on social media, particularly on Twitter where posting more than once a day is important to reach your audience and to continue to grow your following.

B2B marketers can and should use Twitter as a means of sharing content and messages more than once, hitting their audience and putting a new spin on existing content. Simply tweeting out a blog or byline once and praying to the Twitter gods is not enough.

Keeping your delivery and tweet schedule consistent doesn’t have to mean more content, it can mean pushing your content out in different ways in order to keep the conversation going. In fact, there are several creative ways to tweet out one blog post in a meaningful way – you just have to take the time to find them.

For example, this blog could be tweeted out in a variety of ways, from a more general post to something more specific – each linking to the blog and driving blog traffic.

Here are a couple ideas:

Join the Broader Conversation.

Another way to reach your audience and to find the audience that matters – is hashtags. Hashtag use on Twitter allows brands to be seen by users outside of their own following. By using trending hashtags, as well as hashtags that are relevant and specific to their industry, brands can engage with a new audience and be a part of a broader conversation.

Tools like Hashtagify help marketers to identify relevant hashtags based on popularity and find suggestions that are similar and being used by that specific audience.

Below is a query of the hashtag “hashtag” (keeping it original). The tool generates additional hashtags related to the hashtag being queried, allowing marketers to go even further with their tweets and content by inserting these hashtags into their tweets.

Once you’ve gone down the hashtag research rabbit hole and have landed in the conversation, the next step is sharing content that adds value. Drive participants and interested users to your content by replying to applicable tweets, scheduling out relevant content in advance, and thinking on your feet when an opportunity arises.

If your content would add value to your target audience, #whynottweetit?

Influence Twitter Influencers.

The term “influencers” is thrown around often in the digital marketing world. While there are many different ways to go about influencer marketing in B2B social media, there are strategies that are easy-to-implement, effective, and efficient.

What is your goal? Determining what you want these influencers to do and what specific ROI you see this providing your business is the first step. For example, if the goal is to have them organically share your content, that could require a bit more extensive process than if you simply want them to retweet or engage with the content you are creating.

With those goals in mind, tools like Followerwonk and SparkToro provide B2B marketers with the information and capabilities needed to build influencer lists that will help you reach your goals and simultaneously resonate with your audience. Using these tools, you are able to search Twitter bios for keywords and sort Twitter handles by popularity, followership, activity level, and more.

Adding these handles to actual Twitter lists on your brand’s profile allows for easy monitoring. Not only can you check in on your influencers, but you can grab their attention by adding them to a public list of industry influencers, interacting, and forming a relationship with them in order to reach your goals.

Just as you shouldn’t just post to post, you shouldn’t create influencer lists just to stare at them – make them work for you by choosing the right ones and interacting with them when it counts.

Grab Their Attention on Twitter.

According to a report conducted by Social Pilot, tweets with images receive 18 percent more clicks than tweets without images.

In the B2B space, providing your audience with stellar visuals can be a challenge. This is where infographics, customized graphics, and video comes in. While your brand might not be able to post photos from the top of Mount Rushmore, you can provide your audience with the information they need in an interesting and engaging way. For example, short video clips combining visuals and text snippets or branded infographics detailing the value of your service to your customers or potential customers could be just the ticket to engaging your audience around what matters most in the B2B space – your business value.

In the end, your tweets are only as good as the content behind them, and your posts will get lost within the Twitter-sphere without the proper components and strategy. A combination of sharing relevant and timely content, excellent visuals, and remaining a part of the broader conversation is the recipe, or at least, the key ingredients, to taking the spotlight in the eyes of your target audience.

So, let’s break through the noise and reach the people that matter most – your target clients, prospects, and loyal audience.