Pushing content simply does not work. Twitter and social media are built to be social, it’s in the title. Engagement is key due to all the success stories of brands engaging and getting great responses from their customers.

I would never in a million years simply push content. It is not what the platform is intended for.

Regards
.-= Dan Whitehouse’s last blog ..Top 10 Sci-fi chicks =-.

Also (I didn’t get into this in this post), there is the situation where a manufacturer of consumer products is using Twitter for brand awareness rather than to generate direct sales. A company such as Procter & Gamble, that has a relatively small customer list, nonetheless wishes to reach a massive audience of consumers. Manufacturers of industrial products can benefit immensely from brand awareness just as well.

So I think for b2b either approach is viable. Create a sound program, test for a sufficient amount of time, and evaluate the results. That’s the only surefire way I know to determine with certainty what a medium like Twitter will do for a firm.

My guess is that there may be a tendency for organisations to underestimate what’s required to deliver on both of these approaches – especially approach two. Even more so given that the results may take some time to manifest.

Best to you, Robin

I would be guessing that in the case of B2B:

(a) target audiences is likely to revolve around purchasing managers, operational staff (or whichever personnel actually use the product or service in question, and anyone with sufficient seniority to influence purchasing decision; and

(b) companies would tend to be chasing fewer, bigger business relationships and transactions than would be the case for organisations which deal with a wider mass-market consumer audience.

Because of this, I would have thought that Twitter strategies would tend to lean more toward the conversational in nature.

For companies, aiming at a wider audience where the value of individual accounts is not large, I would have thought that the viability of trying to establish intimate relationships with individual companies would be open to question, and that for these companies, Twitter would be more useful as a platform to broadcasts news and information to a large audience in an efficient and effective manner.

In contrast, for B2B companies, with a clientele aiming at fewer, larger accounts, I would have thought that individual business relationships become more important and that Twitter would hold immense power as a platform to establish new relationships (and strengthen existing ones) as well as a platform for providing news, info and updates.

For this reason, I would have thought that twitter strategies for B2B might tend to focus more upon relationship building (with some informational broadcasting) whereas those focusing on consumer markets would tend to revolve more around the informational broadcasting approach.

Is this generally correct?

The interactions before that had been kind of conversational for the most part – They are part of my Chicago three – @superdawg and @loumalnaties being the other two. It’s kind of fun to shout out a craving once and a while – and to hear your food talk back.