Understanding the Power of Promoted Tweets for B2B

Earlier today I was meeting with a successful entrepreneur talking about customer acquisition and more specifically the top and middle of the funnel. Late in the conversation he mentioned that he’d had success advertising on Twitter, so, naturally, I wanted to learn more since we hadn’t done that yet. One of the main ways to advertise (if you get a beta invite) is to do promoted tweets.

Promoted tweets show up as a tweet based on searches of keywords that the advertiser purchases. One niche, but powerful example is to do a promoted tweet with content related to a conference currently happening and then buy the hashtag of the conference as the keyword. More and more conferences have a hashtag (e.g. #Shotput2011) so that people tag their tweet with it and then other people can read all the tweets with the tag to see the collective conversation. Imagine paying for a promoted tweet that is associated with the keyword hashtag. Now, when people at the conference look to read other tweets at their event they’ll see your tweet as well. That’s strong contextual marketing.

Here are some possible promoted tweet ideas:

• A tweet from a happy client (social proof from a third-party)
• A tweet to download a white paper or do a free trial
• A tweet to join a meetup either in-person or via a webinar

This is a great example of where social media will be effective for B2B lead generation and a nice business model for Twitter.