In our world of B-to-B and especially the world of manufacturing, Twitter, of all the social media tools, is probably the most misunderstood and therefore the most under utilized.

75 million people visited Twitter in January alone, over 23 million were from the US. According to Twitter, over 50 million tweets are sent daily.

Twitter is being talked about everywhere. People are drawn to it because of the buzz of its popularity, but the majority of people don’t understand its potential.

My primary objective for using Twitter has been to increase traffic to my blog. Twitter is now the leading traffic generator for Tradesmeninsights.

There are hundreds of tools that have been developed to enhance Twitter’s usefulness for marketing. The tool that is most helpful to me and the one I use most often to generate new business is called Social Oomph.

These are some of the Social Oomph features that I like and use:

• Manage multiple accounts from one dashboard (our agency’s as well as client’s Twitter accounts)
• Manage an unlimited number of blogs
• Upload your agency’s blog posts and URLs from an Excel spread sheet, in bulk, to Social Oomph
• Pre-set the date/time range for each post in minutes
• Automatically shorten post URLs through Bit.ly and track clicks
• Automate – follow those who follow you in Twitter
• Automate – unfollow those who don’t follow you in Twitter
• Purge and filter your Twitter account’s DM box
• Small monthly fee that is month-to-month, cancellable at any time (more than pays for itself for the time that it saves)
• Junior level people/interns can be easily trained to use this tool on behalf of the marketing departments
• You can also schedule your company’s blog posts to Facebook, just keep the repurpose level to only a few per day

For Twitter to have real value from a new business perspective for manufacturers, you must have a clear objective and follow a simple formula for use.

To reach my objective to my blog’s traffic and exposing it to a new but targeted audience, I’ve followed Angela Maiers 70-20-10 Twitter Engagement Formula.

70 to 80% of my “Twitter time” is spent sharing helpful information for manufacturers on how they can use social media as part of their overall marketing strategy… I do this in two ways:

First, I share lots of information from my online reading that I think will be of help to my audience. I’m able to use some tools such as TwitThis that I’ve placed in my browser bar. When I come across a good article that I think will be of help, all I have to do is click on TwitThis and automatically post the article title and tiny URL into my Twitter account.

Secondly, I also share the content from my Tradesmeninsights blog. I now have over 180 of my own blog posts regarding ways manufacturers can use social media. I’m able to use Social Oomph to expose these posts to new audiences.

I can easily schedule the date, time and recurrence of each post. With the volume of posts that I now have, I can publish a different post on Twitter every hour, seven days a week twenty-four hours a day without repetition. Older posts, that are still useful, have new life. The best posts are often re-tweeted and exposed to new networks of people.

Your Company’s Blog Posts: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that if you’ve written it, everybody has read it.

Twitter is more than a fad. It is a valuable marketing tool. Twitter tools such as Social Oomph make it priceless for generating traffic and new business leads.