Reading and hearing a lot about Twitter of late and not sure what all the fuss is about? Sure, there are some sceptics out there – but I believe that all the hype about Twitter will settle down at some stage (remember the RSS hype a couple of years ago and how it was supposedly going to replace email?) and find its worthy position within the digital marketing mix in many companies.

However, understandably, many companies are still not sure how they can take advantage of Twitter especially in the B2B realm. To our rescue comes Chad Horenfeldt of Anything Goes Marketing. I've condensed his post below, but you can read the full post here.

10 Tips for Using Twitter And Email Marketing for B2B

1. Add a link to your company's Twitter account to all mass email communications. Consider adding a link in the email footer to items such as your event invitations or email newsletters.

Quick note here: I already assumed that your company created a Twitter account. You can find many other blog posts out there on that subject. Here is a great one that should scare you into getting one: Don’t get BrandJacked: Confirming Your Corporate Twitter Account

2. Link to a form landing page from your company Twitter account. For example if you have a Twitter post such as "New white paper on how to increase ROI". Upon clicking on the link to the white paper, direct "Tweeple" (twitter people) to a landing page where you request their email address to get access to the white paper if you don't already have it. In this way you're converting your twitter followers into opted-in email subscribers.

3. Use Twitter content in your email newsletters. For example, create a feature called "Twitter Q/A". In this section, address questions/comments that came up on Twitter and what the response was. This goes back to being an Eco-Marketer and reusing content that you have.

4. Post links from your email newsletter articles on Twitter. Instead of including one twit that says: "Check out the latest newsletter" and links back to your main newsletter page, consider seeding individual articles on Twitter over a period of time (say a week). You can use a tool like Brightkit to pre-schedule your twits in advance. Companies should make each twit count and make the content as interesting as possible.

5. Ensure that all email newsletter article authors have their Twitter account listed on the email. This allows recipients to continue the conversation after they read the article.

6. Provide instructions in your emails about how subscribers can follow conversations about your company on Twitter. For example, if you are promoting an event in your email, let subscribers know that they they can twit about the event using the hashtag character #. For example #myevent. You would replace "myevent" with the name of the event.

7. Ask email subscribers for their Twitter ID when they sign up. Experiment with an optional field on a few key web registration forms and see how this affects your conversion rate. I recommend mentioning that you will follow the person if they provide their Twitter ID.

8. On your email preference page, indicate to those who may want to unsubscribe that they can still follow you on Twitter. While you may have lost the person from your email list, you keep them in your community. This is the strength of Twitter and how it can be leveraged to enhance your existing marketing efforts.

9. Add a link in your emails and/or on your website that allows email subscribers and web visitors to easily tweet about an article, event or promotion. I learned this from Mr. Tweet. All you need to do is link to Twitter with the following URL: http://twitter.com/home?status= and add in a message under 140 characters after the "=" sign.

10. Conduct Twitter interviews and use this as content for your email marketing. This type of "Twitterview" could be with a customer, partner, company exec (or any other employee), or industry thought leader. What makes Twitter great is that these types of interviews are easy to do and you can use email to promote these as "live events" as well. Here is an interview that Ann Handley from MarketingProfs did which is a great example of how easy this is.

Read the full article here

Kath Pay, Ezemail