Another email lands in my inbox from B2B Marketing promising to show me How to use Twitter to generate and nurture leads.

At last, I think, rubbing my hands, someone's finally cracked it and can show me how to actually generate real leads from Twitter.

Unfortunately, it's much more of a list of "best practice" which really only means "what everyone else is doing".

What really made me laugh was point 9) "Make a Sale", which says:

At this stage, hopefully your target has followed you back, accessed lots of valuable information via your Tweets, answered a few questions in return and as a result built up an ongoing relationship with your brand. They are now better informed and in regular contact with you – when you pass on their details to the sales team they should be in a great position to buy.

Call me a salty old sales cynic but as soon as I read "hopefully" I knew we were in trouble.

To me, that one word "hopefully" sums up the strategy of using twitter for lead generation.

Of course, I tweet myself occasionally, and have implemented most of the points covered in the article. And I'd agree that there's a large slice of "hopefully" in my strategy for doing so.

Does it take much of my time? No.

Could it potentially generate some leads? Hopefully, some day.

Would I forget about other tried and tested (but less sexy) lead generation tactics? No way!

Twitter is still new and, sure, people are still trying to work out what it's good for in terms of the B2B marketing mix. Unfortunately, I think that there are a lot of people who are making money out of telling people how to generate leads from Twitter when they really don't know themselves.

Earlier today I was chatting with a marketing consultant who was telling me that she tweeted on behalf of clients and helped them set up and manage their Twitter accounts. She was telling me how long it took to do it all and, sure, it sounded like a nice little earner.

But, when I asked her how much business it has generated for her clients it all went very quiet.

Labels: b2b lead generation, social media