The short version

Twitter’s immediate benefit to B2B companies is in creating sales leads. Also, your follower count doesn’t matter. Read on to learn how and why, respectively.

Know your goals

Your first goal on Twitter is to generate sales leads more efficiently than you could by hitting the pavement.

But Twitter may not be right for your business. Remember that there’s always an opportunity cost. As a rule of thumb, Twitter is worthwhile if your customers are on Twitter and use it conversationally instead of just as a unidirectional broadcast platform.

With that in mind, you’ve got three main tactics to help reach your goal of generating sales leads:

1) Follow and listen to 100-500 key influencers and potential customers
2) Reach out to customers who are talking about the problem you solve
3) Meet the key influencers who will re-tweet and reference you

Who you follow is more important than who follows you (for now)

If zero people follow you, Twitter is still a pretty effective way to generate sales leads. Learn how to get started with Tweetdeck, create columns that track discussions of the pain points you solve, and then watch your customers talk to your competitors and their customers.

You’re now swimming in 100% free and honest market research. That’s pretty amazing.

Look for the words “I wish” or “I hate” followed by the problem you solve. Congratulations, you’ve just found the most qualified lead imaginable. It’s on their mind, and they’re actively feeling your product’s absence from their life. Send them an @reply saying you run a company that is trying to fix this very problem. You’re now talking person-to-person instead of business-to-stranger.

Of course, you should also jump in with non-promotional commentary when you have something to contribute. It’s reassuring for your audience to know you have thoughts about the industry and this is the type of content that is most likely to get re-tweeted.

(as an aside: don’t worry about having long @reply conversations – your other followers won’t see them by default)

Not all customers are created equal (on Twitter)

I recommend initially following between 100 and 500 people in your space. That feels like the sweet spot for being able to pay attention to what’s going on and maintain some sort of mental map of who’s who. It’s also a small enough group that you’ll end up replying to the same people several times and can hopefully build up their recognition and trust of you.

If you’re following a potential customer who never engages in 2-way conversation, then Twitter is not going help you reach them. Un-follow them and focus your energies on people with whom you can build relationships.

Follower count is a false idol

The corollary of Lord Kelvin’s science/management advice (if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it) is that one tends to endeavour to improve that which is most easily measured. Follower count is pretty much the only metric Twitter gives you. It’s a bad metric. Once you grow larger, tools like Radian6 and SocialMention will start providing meaningful measures of how much people respect and reference your business, but for now you’re stuck. And follower count is particularly devious in that it is tied so strongly to our sense of vanity and personal self worth. You’re going to be really, really tempted to optimize for it.

The fruitlessness of amassing followers is addressed well elsewhere. But remember it’s an easy trap to fall into when that’s the only number you’ve got.

Eventually, followers are good and you want them. I’m not saying they’re dangerous or are going to rob you. After all, the key influencers are “key” because they have lots of relevant followers. But growing a large, quality audience is slow work. It’s also “hard” work, in that you need to be active and involved. But you can’t work harder to reach your goal faster. The x-axis of your growth chart is time, not effort. Once get there, you become a key influencer yourself. That means you’ve cut out the middle man and have a more reliable way to spread your message.

The slow-growth of our own networks is why we love key influencers. They’ve already spent time gaining the ears of everyone we want to talk to. And as a bonus, their Twitter identities are based around distributing the most interesting tidbits they run across. This means they want to help you by sharing your message as long as you’re saying something of value to their audience. Are you saying something of value? You ought to!

A convenient summary

To get started in social media as a B2B business, remember:

1) Twitter is a tool to generate sales leads
2) Twitter can provide an immediate benefit
3) Raising your follower count is not the goal and is unimportant for now
4) To benefit from the networks of key influencers, offer them value
5) The all-important doorway is to listen to customers

Sysomos’ Inside Twitter report has sparked some good discussion regarding tweeting robots and the disproportionate output of the top five percent of users. But tucked at the bottom is a bit of great (and arguably more interesting) data on how we’re currently marketing through Twitter.

Twitter is clearly important to us as a group — marketers are 50x more likely than the population at large to have passed the lofty mark of two thousand friends. However, while listening can help us catch bad PR and keep an eye on key influencers, we’re still falling short spreading positive brand sentiments beyond our [relatively] tiny groups of followers.

When a real, live customer gives our brand, product, or service an enthusiastic thumbs up, we are too often the only one paying attention. Most of our customers don’t hear a thing. We are leaving huge amounts of marketing value on the table by failing to properly leverage these quieter (but equally powerful) voices. A thoughtful Amazon review creates value for months while equally thoughtful tweets have an unfortunate tendency to fall where nobody is there to hear them.

If making better use of social highlights is something that’s been on your mind, we’d love if you would drop us a note or comment with your thoughts as we get ready to move Stream into beta.