Now the only thing between you and successful use of Twitter, is practice!
This is the third and final post in our series of how to effectively use Twitter in your B2B campaigns. The first introduced you to Twitter and its buzzwords. The second post began our Formal Process description of How to Run a B2B Twitter Campaign, and focused on the Think and Plan portions of the process, and this post completes it by covering the Do, Measure and Repeat phases.
We’ve taken some time to reach the stage where you actually send out a tweet, so lets get to it right now.
Do
The doing part has 5 steps:
1) Take care of business first
2) Monitor the news sources, looking for something to tweet about
3) Analyze the story, looking for your stance/angle
4) Compose your tweet
5) Listen to other tweets and retweet and or direct message.
Business tweets are the ones you submit promoting company business (client related news, perhaps, upcoming webinars, promoting your latest post, etc.). With the business stuff attended to, scan your news sources for the latest items. Zip through the headlines until something you believe has value to your followers catches your eye. Read it and analyze it, thinking about what you can tell your followers about this news fact or story. Remember it’s your opinion that counts – not just the facts: this is not journalism – it’s You or Your Twiiter Brand. Composing tweets is an art – 140 characters is not much – two short sentences and a compressed link is about all you can squeeze in. But watch your followers, listen to others and spend some time composing to make it good. THINK TWICE and hit submit. Finally, remember to participate in the exchange – tweeting is not a one-way street – the new social milieu is based on interaction – to be one way is passé.
Sometimes a story you come across has something you wish to endorse, condemn, rant or rave about, and you’d like to do so in more than 140 characters. Write a blog and tweet about it, and there’s no harm in announcing that it’s coming in the first tweet and that it’s posted now on your site in a second, later tweet.
Measure
What you measure depends on the objectives you set for your Twitter campaign during the Thinking process. And also on what you can measure, accurately enough to inform your thinking. Try to ignore all the complexity and just keep asking yourself what metric will best indicate the major goal’s actual value now, and best illustrate its trend. And when you have it defined, think of the variables you can adjust which will influence the goal. Then design their metrics. Then implement the whole sub-system of measuring, recording and reporting. And then try it – and as you’ll see below in Repeat, there are no mistakes in the first few loops around the cycle.
For example: Say you establish the goal of doubling your website traffic in the next 12 months. Your first step is to precisely define what your objective means. The word traffic in terms of website visitors can mean: absolute, unique, or active, and once they have identified themselves, leads, prospects or clients. Pick the one you want to double, provided you can measure it accurately, and one that you know enough about to know the factors you can manipulate during the next Do phase. Attracting traffic to one’s website, in our example and using the Inbound Marketing way, uses SEO, SMM and PPC. Each one of these is within your ability to manipulate and measure appropriately. So you can vary the mix and the individual proportions and then Do, and then measure the actual change in the desired traffic metric.
A word about reports. A meaningful report is a single page dashboard which plots your actual performance against your objectives or goals. Ideally it should be readable in a glance.
Repeat
The beauty of the philosophy behind Continuous Process Improvements lies in the Repeat part. The old adage of if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. This removes the pressure of getting it Right the first time. Or even the second or third. It gives you a way to approximate your solution and iterate your way to perfection, one loop around the cycle at a time.
You think about the problem the first time much as I described it above. But the second and subsequent times, you look at your dashboard and the trend should be clear. If its in the right direction, try to confirm your understanding of why it is better by adjusting your variables in a way you believe should magnify the trend and repeat. If its in the wrong direction, reset the values to where they were before and think of something else to try.
When you have an idea you are going to try, document all the reasons why you think its going to get better. This process helps to clarify why you are about to do something and helps during the thinking stage (and to reset things, if needed), as the cycle can take a long time between repeats.
Good luck with it all.
Bit-by-Bit # 28 from Eric.
Tags: b2b marketing, Twitter
Axel 
Eric 
