When you first start on Twitter, using Twitter for business to business may not seem as obvious as using Twitter for business to consumer or follower to follower.
Let’s examine this concept more closely:
Imagine you are a middle-level manager at a company that creates new software programs. And you’ve been trying to convince Corporation X that your new software would be an excellent add-on to the software being bundled in these personal computers.
To date you have gotten nowhere with your attempts to reach the appropriate person at Corporation X through the traditional methods of email and phone calls. So you decide to do a social media search for her.
You find her on LinkedIn, but you don’t have a direct connection to her and aren’t sure that anyone you can ask on LinkedIn for a referral will actually refer you.
You find her on Facebook, but her profile has strong privacy controls. You could message her through Facebook, but she might ignore your Facebook message as she has ignored your emails.
Then you find her on Twitter. Voila! On Twitter you can follow her without asking her permission. You can watch her tweets for your opportunity to engage in Twitter conversation with her.
Warning: Now I don’t mean that you immediately engage in a sales pitch to her. I mean that you engage in conversation on a topic of interest to her – perhaps something that she’s shared with her followers. (Remember, you will be able to go to her profile and see her tweets.)
Perhaps she’ll follow you back. Perhaps not. But if you start a tweet with @herusername, she should see it in her @ box. And if your tweet is of value on a topic of interest to her, you have a good chance she’ll reply.
Now you do NOT stalk her and you do engage with others on Twitter so as not to appear single-focused. But every couple of days you could take the opportunity to engage with her.
With luck she’ll follow you back and perhaps see your occasional tweet about your new software. Or after several exchanges of replies, you can tweet her info about your new software (again without pitching her) or include a link with information on the software.
If you use the strategy effectively, there should come a point where you can talk to her off Twitter about your software perhaps being a good fit with her company’s computers. By now she should be comfortable enough with you to give you a few minutes. The rest is up to you.
Does this seem like a great deal of work? In truth it is only a few minutes every day. And if this account materialized, you could have a very profitable return for the work of a few minutes a day.
In conclusion, if your company has a social media networking plan, employees could be assigned specific marketing targets with whom to engage on Twitter. And by coordinating your company’s efforts, you should be able to tweet about your great new software and provide helpful information without resorting to heavy-handed sales pitches.
About the Author: Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose power marketing website is https://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com . If you liked this article, you’ll love her free report on “How to Become a Twitter Marketing Expert” – download the report now from https://www.millermosaicllc.com/free-twitter-report