Yes, Twitter can be a very effective B2B online marketing tool

Once again I encountered a marketing person whose company does online marketing yet doesn’t have a Twitter component.

 The marketing person said, “I’ve read about Twitter and have yet to see anyone say that Twitter can be effective for corporations.”

 I don’t know what articles or blog posts he’s reading, but he should definitely expand his reading range.

 I’ve already written in this column about the importance of monitoring your company/corporation on Twitter to ensure you can quickly respond to negative comments. And, of course, responding to positive comments can be equally beneficial.

 But what about a corporation using Twitter effectively for B2B promotion?

 Let’s take a hypothetical example – we’ll imagine that your company is about to bring out a new, improved inventory control software program in a crowded marketplace of inventory control software programs.

 We’ll call the new software “Magic Inventory Control.” And the company could tweet about some of the new features that Magic Inventory Control will offer.

 Of course, only every few company tweets will mention this software because the company doesn’t want to appear as only pushing its product on Twitter. Other tweets, for example, might share links to blog posts by inventory control experts or blog posts about software development, including what glitches to be on the alert for in new software.

 Yet enough of the tweets mention Magic Inventory Control that the product name starts to become recognizable on Twitter.

 Then the company runs a contest on Twitter for a free copy of this software. Anyone who tweets about the contest gets entered into the random drawing (using random.org to choose the winner).

 Now excitement about this new product is building on Twitter and is poised to overflow into product blog posts and other social media (especially if the company uses an application that sends tweets automatically into Facebook).

 At a very low marketing cost (whatever the opportunity cost is of employees taking a few minutes from their work each day to tweet based on a company Twitter strategic plan) the company has reached an influential online community without producing a single print, tv or radio ad for this product introduction.

 The conclusion? The B2B marketing/promotion opportunities of Twitter are limited only by your company’s creativity IQ.

 For help forming an effective Twitter promotion strategy for your company, see www.TeachMetoTweetNow.com.

 (c) 2009 Miller Mosaic, LLC

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