Dumping the blue bird feels liberating somehow…. Is anyone using Twitter for B2B tech anymore?

I read lots about 10 great reasons you should be using Twitter in B2B. All I want is one good reason to be using Twitter in B2B!

After 15 years of tracking it, advising clients to put the badge on their websites as a channel, and, to my regret, occasionally losing a couple of hours doom scrolling through it, once or twice getting an answer off a brand’s account when customer service have signally failed me… I have concluded I can no longer genuinely see any value in Twitter in our industry.

I say this as a one-time convinced member of the Twitter PR cult. We used to obsess over Twitter mentions and hashtags and trending at events and conferences; now we don’t.?We used to endlessly follow influencers on Twitter; that’s shrunk to very few, and they are more accessible elsewhere anyway.

The main reason is that I simply do not believe the B2B audiences engage with this form of social media. Maybe, maybe, as consumers, or depressed citizens or fans of some of the Knuckle Bump farm, outrageous confessions or cute animals accounts.

But not as buyers—certainly not as buyers of B2B products or services. Which begs the question, why would Sarum clients invest time in it?

To be fair, very few do.

Am I being rash? By the way, my gut feel tells me that most of those positive blogs about the great value of being on Twitter are from marketing agencies, er… selling their Twitter services.

No matter how compelling they may seem, not one of them has ever given me convincing, take-it-to-the-bank evidence that enterprise buyers are actually influenced in any way by Twitter.

If Twitter ever was relevant, I feel it has its time, if indeed if ever had a time for this sector.

I see the stats… 330m monthly active users, 186m daily active users, 53% of users are “willing to try new products on Twitter”… etc.

Not to come over all Elon Musk here, but they’re all news junkies: 70%-plus of users visit Twitter multiple times a day to stay simply to be updated on the latest news—or, let’s be honest, to have their fears and political biases stroked (and I put my hands up to this—see my doom scrolling confession above).

And calling a square a square, in my opinion what you say in 140 chars is either trivial or abridged--so better either not to say it at all or give it the space it deserves.

I’m putting my B2B PR effort into the space where business goes to do business—LinkedIn. Yes, this will hardly be new news to anyone who knows Sarum at all—but this is a platform designed and positioned specifically (and very expertly) to find and establish professional and business relations.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the blogs and the stats are right. Maybe I’m missing a trick by dumping the little blue bird.

But it’s not about stats. It’s about what my gut tells me is right—about what is working right now, and about where our B2B software and services clients build brand, awareness, and sales funnel.

I’d love to hear from B2B tech software and services practitioners that disagree with me, but I am for now saying:

I’m done.

That’s it. That’s the Tweet.