B2B marketing involves a recipe, planned and orchestrated across multiple channels in order to build credibility and generate an increase in leads. To gauge the effectiveness of your marketing plan or recipe, it’s important to regularly evaluate your marketing initiatives against the overall sales and business goals you are trying to achieve. You can then  calculate the  ROI of those marketing efforts.

When using Twitter as part of your B2B social media marketing plan, in order to ensure the greatest return, consider the following tips:

1. Have multiple employees as users – One way to ensure a steady flow of messages from your company Twitter account is to have many users represent your business and brand. This expands the amount of content, the style of that content, and the amount of conversations. This shows multiple people’s (employees) views and ideas rather than just one.

2. Understand the timing of your tweets – Review the analytics and get an understanding of the specific days and times your company’s messages are more likely to be read and shared.  If your followers retweet and share content more frequently at lunchtime or early in the week, be sure that your most compelling content hits during those times.

3. The information must have value to your existing or  potential customers –Twitter adds to your effective B2B marketing campaign because it is able to share your message with a large number of people in a short amount of time.  Instantly, your message can be shared with a community. And the more valuable the content, the more likely it is to get passed along.

4. Encourage your employees to tweet – Encourage your employees to create their own personal Twitter accounts and share news about the company, its goods and/or services, and its culture. Your companies Twitter strategy needs to incorporate the use of brand messaging, which gives personal value to prospects and existing customers.

Remember, and this is very important, B2B social media policies and training need to be in place before your employees begin to tweet personally about the company.

5. Optimize – At search.twitter.com it’s easy to find out who is tweeting about a particular topic and how frequently that topic is mentioned.    Here you can quickly size up the market and the level of interest for your top keywords, therefore this is a smart place to begin your B2B Twitter strategy.

You should use a similar keyword research strategy for Twitter as you would for creating web content. Obviously the keywords and phrases should be relevant to your industry; and you should target those keywords. Who are your biggest competitors and what are they doing? Who’s part of their conversation?

However, also use lay person terminology; include popular keywords or industry trends in your tweets.

6. Hashtags – The # sign is a hashtag and it is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. People use the hashtag symbol before relevant keywords in their Tweet to categorize those Tweets to show more easily in Twitter Search. These tags build a targeted search and they are powerful ways to find, and send out content to a wider audience, not just your own followers.

Research current hashtags in your industry or create a new hashtag to promote your updates. Many B2B consumers start with a simple hashtag search on Twitter.

Keep in mind, when your employees are at an industry event or trade show, they should participate in the hashtag stream, most every event has one.  They can tweet about the event, retweet other people’s experiences and, tweet links to your company’s blog posts, promotions and booth information.

7. Proper URL length – The maximum amount of characters you can have on a Twitter update is 140. So leave out non-essential information. For optimal social messaging with Twitter, there are web tools, such as bit.ly that are URL shorteners.

8. Become an information resource – Sharing content, information and news from sources and companies other than your own provides additional value to your followers, increases your credibility, and increases the chances that your tweets will be shared. One of the keys to an effective B2B social media program is sharing.

9. Use the right tools – There are many Twitter tools that can help your existing marketing strategy. Industry knowledge and a well thought out B2B social media strategy are essential elements to increasing your brand recognition and presence. Combined with the right tools, you can achieve optimal results and reach your projected business goals.

“Fun” and “run” have never belonged in the same sentence, as far as I’m concerned.  I just shake my head when I see a “Fun Run” advertised.  For me, running is daunting and that first mile can be brutal. But runners will tell you that if you gut it out and focus on technique, you will overcome the initial pain and find that it is actually replaced by pleasure.  I find this analogous to Social Media Marketing.  You may have attended a seminar in which you were told that you are missing out on a significant opportunity if you don’t jump on the Social Media bandwagon today.  But that first mile is overwhelming.  Where do I start?  What should I focus my time on?  How does all this socializing turn into business? Over 98% of every blog that’s been started has been abandoned for this very reason.  Facebook and Twitter pages suffer the same fate. Business owners need a social media running partner and that’s where WSI comes in.

Taking advantage of social media to maximize business results doesn’t necessarily mean you have to spend all day Tweeting or catching up on Facebook.  In fact, we find that 95% of our clients do not have the time to blog on a regular basis, much less spend time on Twitter or LinkedIn.  Over the last 2 years, we have developed a social media formula that places the onus on WSI, the social media experts, to do the heavy lifting while the business owner addresses social media from the 10,000-foot level.  One way we do this is through Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO involves using a network of social bookmarking and social news portals like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and others to post content and links about the business in an effort to drive people and search engines back to the business website.  We also use blogging to turn the company website into an information resource through a strategy we call Content Marketing. At least weekly, we write and post articles on the site blog and then immediately syndicate the content to approximately 100,000 potential visitors. Search engines pick up and index this information very quickly make it possible to be found in regular searches, driving in even more traffic.

The results have been staggering.  Many of our clients enjoy a dramatic lift in traffic to their sites.  Additionally, they see a linear increase in leads and sales from the site.  By gutting out the first mile of a consistent and calculated social media plan, businesses are able to outpace their competitors and enjoy the rewards of competing in the social media race.  With WSI as their running partner, it just might be a “Fun Run” after all.

Our long-time friends, Tidewater Custom Modular Homes of Carrollton Virginia, has just received an Internet facelift and a social media shot in the arm.  Last week WSI Pro Marketing relaunched http://tcmodularhomes.com on the WSI eFusion web business platform. The timing for new site couldn't have been better.

In the highly competitive Internet landscape, most businesses need a refreshed look and feel after about 2 years, along with a complete reassessment of how well business objectives are being met.  WSI launched TC Modular Homes' former site 2 years ago with its Business Edge platform, and while it performed extremely well, it was time to make some fundamental changes in conversion architecture and flow.  In essence, a redesign was necessary to make all the required changes.

Since eFusion is our preferred platform because of its power, marketing, and ease of use, it was a no-brainer upgrading our Modular Homes VA client to this technology.  In addition to a new look and feel, we implemented the following:

• Vastly improved Conversion Architecture
• Refreshed search engine optimization
• Enhanced lead marketing capabilities
• New blogging and social media optimization services
• Even the web analytics tracking code was updated with Google's new asynchronous script for an even clearer picture of web interaction

The client could be happier.  "I love it!" exclaimed TC Modular Homes VP Tammy Glover during the initial site review.  The changes have made an immediate impact.  Site traffic has already spiked and the Web leads have followed suit.

WSI Pro Marketing wishes our friends at TC Modular Homes continued success.

Cool service for those looking to grow their twitter following called twiends .  You can also match up your following and followers lists with this application.  You can batch process or select actions on followers one at a time.  The whole program is run on a credit basis.  Check it out at http://twiends.com?i=jcoupal.