In our previous post, Setting Up Twitter, we began our next series, all about Twitter, and talk about the benefits of using Twitter as well as how to set up an account. By the way, we go into much more detail about our Infinite Pipeline Relationship Development process in our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for B2B Sales Success – Sales Person Edition. See the bottom of this post for more info.
In this post, we continue the new series, and talk about why to use Twitter, with examples of success stories.
Why Use Twitter?
Why should an enterprise use Twitter? For one thing, it’s a very direct and immediate way to stay connected with stakeholders. Here are some other ideas:
- Establish connections with clients and prospects
- Establish your brand online
- Establish your credibility and expertise
Take a poll of your stakeholders — perhaps through your regular newsletter — and ask how many of them use Twitter. You may be surprised at the response. Twitter is used all over the world as an organizing tool for social movements. Its use by the Obama campaign in the 2008 presidential election is a great example of Twitter’s ability to mobilize, energize, and spur people to action.
You can use Twitter to help establish your online brand by making it a reliable source of the latest news pertaining to your products and your business. You may have other methods of keeping your community informed, but nothing beats the timeliness and immediacy of Twitter.
By becoming a trusted voice on Twitter, you can build your credibility and demonstrate your expertise to a larger audience than you are currently reaching. We discuss the demographics of Twitter in more depth in the next section, but there are more than 200 million Twitter accounts,[1] growing at a little less than 10 percent a month. Active Twitters who tweet at least once a month comprise 17 percent of the total, encompassing 10 million to 15 million active tweeters.[2] That represents a large potential audience to which you can spread your message.
Many enterprises have successfully used Twitter to advance their business. But few have realized the extraordinary ROI that Cisco did with its Aggregated Services Router (ASR) product launch.[3] The company went entirely virtual for the launch, shaving six figures off launch expenses delivering the following results:
- 9,000 people attended the social media product launch event – 90 times more attendees than in the past
- Saved 42,000 gallons of gas
- Nearly three times as many press articles as with traditional outreach methods
- More than 1,000 blog posts and 40 million online impressions
Twitter was a key piece of the launch, featuring 108 Cisco feeds with 2 million total followers.
“It was classified as one of the top five launches in company history,” said LaSandra Brill, senior manager, global social media. “It was the crossing the chasm point for us in the adoption phase of social media and helped us get over the hump of internal acceptance.”
These few ideas should get you thinking, throughout the rest of this chapter, about other ways to use this real-time, urgent messaging system.
Next up: Who’s Using Twitter?
Why Use Twitter is the 101st in a series of excerpts from our book, Be a Person: the Social Operating Manual for Enterprises (itself part of a series for different audiences). We’re just past page 289. At this rate it’ll be a long time before we get through all 430 pages, but luckily, if you’re impatient, the book is available in paper form at bit.ly/OrderBeAPerson and you can save $5 using Coupon Code 6WXG8ABP2
Get our new book, The Infinite Pipeline: How to Master Social Media for Business-to-Business Sales Success online here. You can save $5 using Coupon Code 62YTRFCV
What Others Are Saying
“Infinite Pipeline offers practical advice for using social media to extend relationship selling online. It’s a great way to get crazy-busy prospects to pay attention.”
—Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies
“Sales is all about relationships and trust. Infinite Pipeline is the ‘how to’ guide for maximizing social networks to find and build relationships, and generate trust in our digital age.”
—Sam Richter, best-selling author, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling (2012 Sales book of the year)
“Infinite Pipeline will be the authority on building lasting relationships through online social that result in bottom line business.”
—Lori Ruff, The LinkedIn Diva, Speaker/Author and CEO of Integrated Alliances
[1] Just like with our numbers for LinkedIn, this number will likely have changed by the time you read this. Here’s where we got the numbers: bit.ly/hqStPu
[2] Computerworld: bit.ly/aIcJMR
[3] Social Media Examiner’s Social Media Launch Saves Cisco $100,000+: bit.ly/pRRv6F
