Best practices for Twitter B2B lead Generation

One of our client companies has just launched an aggressive Twitter campaign on behalf of the product with a focus on securing B2B clients.

What best practices do you recommend for leveraging Twitter in the B2B space? Additional Information (as per request):

• The market space is high quality
  custom made furniture
• The strategic
  growth intiative (sgi) for the
  company is to expand from a "job
  shop" to a "custom shop" The previous strategy was sales through the web supported by PPC advertising direct to consumer
• The new strategy is (in a nutshell) to enter the "custom build" space with both B2B and B2C sales
• Pricing, branding, marketing, production, and fufillment processes are all going through changes.
• A new VP of Sales/Marketing was brought in as a member of our team.

Agreed with Genadinik. And...good tweets - commercial or not - give something of real value away for free, whether it is a moment's chuckle or a great coupon or important news. That seems to be an unofficial rule for attracting Twitter subscribers organically. This is only becoming more critical as the Internet becomes crowded with the equivalent of door-to-door salesmen competing for the same nickel. In such a noisy place, only a sincere message will get anyone's attention.

I “inherited” a corporate twitter account (@kampyle) and - after 2 months not investing too much time - I still try to figure out how to do that right for B2B.
I see the numbers of followers growing very nicely and getting the hashtags right they are more and more from our field of business.

The results so far, mainly twittering about new content (blog posts of ours, [Kampyle blog][1]) see: , is some increased traffic from twitter and one news story about our company, after I got into contact with a journalist on Twitter. So that is fine, but not the kind of outreach I would like to see.

I will go on – main trying to start building list, so to have a better structure and overview. And yes, I remove followers from early times, that simply do not look relevant.

I keep my expectations low, hoping for a positive surprise. I refrain from social messages and tone (like the “quote” twitters – on inspirational quote a day-), I don’t think this is suitable for a corporate twitter account. This suits if you have a personal account that refers to your company, there you as person can do whatever you want. A corporate account cannot – that is my take.v

Wishing you all the best,

Ursula

At the risk of getting down-voted, I am going to try to make a firm stand and say that the best thing to do is NOT to try to get B2B lead gen from Twitter.

B2B lead gen is hardly the culture there. You will be broadcasting stuff to people who are looking to read interesting content and it is generally a commercial-free zone.

For lead-gen, in my experience, the best thing to do is set up strong channels for people to come to you. Something like SEO if you are a small business. But SEO is by far not the only game in town.

The only thing to do as a business is discuss insightful issues and topics in your niche, and do whatever you can do to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

But that takes so much effort that you are better off investing that time into just creating a great business, or SEO. Once you truly are an authority in your niche, the lead-gen will become much easier on Twitter or elsewhere.