Social Media for B2B: A Guide to Setting Up Twitter
We recently wrote about setting up your professional B2B LinkedIn Page where we discussed how social media as a marketing tool can often be overlooked in the B2B world.
A strategic Twitter presence can be equally as fruitful and can be used in different ways:
- Seeding your onsite content
- Plugging any digital PR from other digital sources
- Boosting brand messaging
- Gaining insight into your industry and that of your client base by setting up lists of accounts
- Commenting and showing opinion on breaking news relevant to your industry
- Creating and entering into conversations, gaining new links with other companies and clients as well as creating authority through the use hashtags
- Live posting from events and conferences as well as taking part in the conversation through event specific hashtags
With all of the above to think about, it’s well worth creating a Twitter account for your business. If you already have a business Twitter account click here for our Getting the Most Out of Your B2B Twitter Account blog post.
If you’ve been thinking about setting an account up, read on for instructions to create the perfect, professional profile.
The first thing you need to do is head over to twitter.com where you’ll be asked to fill in your details. We’d recommend creating your password in a third party password repository/generator like Enpass.
Enter your company’s name, your email address and password. At the next stage, you’ll be asked to add a phone number for a two-step authentication purpose, if you’d rather not supply one you can just press ‘Skip’ at the bottom of the page.
On the next page, you’ll be asked for your username, this is that @handle you will be known for and tagged with. Make sure to add your company name here. Some companies are drawn to add a description of their company here such as @PharmaceuticalStorage. Don’t fall into this trap as your company will be a lot harder to find on the platform.
Be aware you only have 14 characters to play with in your @handle. Try to avoid adding numbers if you’re looking to appear authoritative and legitimate.
Go through the following steps and ensure you add some of the industries that are relevant to you. Untick the box that highlights some accounts that Twitter wants you to automatically follow (unless big name celebrities are relevant to your business offering).
Next you need to add an avatar and your company banner. You can also pick your company colours from the settings menu.
The avatar should be your company logo, clear and on a plain background. Ensure you can see the whole logo with out the sides being cut off by the circle.
The perfect size for an avatar is 400x400px and the banner should be 1500x500px. The banner should also be clear, you want to avoid including text in your banner design as it will appear differently on different devices and you can never be sure where text will be cut off. Don’t forget, around 80% of users log in to Twitter on a mobile device.
Your new account is ready to use. It’s not hugely professional to tweet the preprepared tweets that Twitter offer you. It’s more prudent to jump straight into your content strategy. Again, there is more on this in our Getting the Most Out of Your B2B Twitter Account guide.
If you’d like any help on setting up your social media accounts, please get in touch, alternatively, we also offer social media master classes.