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Twitter recently announced that it’s not letting users push their own advertisements and sponsored tweets through Twitter. While this is a rather specific act on Twitter’s part, it’s clear how any marketer may seem concerned. Could advertising be at the top of a slippery slope? If you’re worried … don’t. If anything, the Twitter prohibition on tweeted ads (except its own, of course), will help B2B marketers and others who use insights, expertise and experience as the meat in their communications with the market.

Twitter’s Big Change
For Twitter, marketing and advertising have evolved since its inception. What began with self-promotion turned into business promotion, ongoing marketing and then eh ale of space in your own tweet stream (i.e., advertising). For much of its existence, of course, Twitter had virtually no revenue and didn’t seem to have any prospects (or even interest) in changing that.

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For internet marketers, nothing compares in value to the house list. It’s gold. You know that you can blast an e-mail and count on a certain conversion rate, yielding a comfortable predictability to your revenue stream. Yet, there are limits to e-mail marketing. After a while, you have to limit your campaigns, for fear of winding up in a spam folder or seeing the unsubscribes tick up. You’re ability to interact with your most likely buyers, therefore, is inherently constrained. Social media platforms can cut the ties that bind, however, and bring new flexibility to your internet marketing efforts.

Doubtless, direct pitches to your fan base will eventually meet with the same malaise triggered by e-mail saturation. So, keep your blasts to a minimum. Instead, use other methods to attract the attention of your fans or followers — which is effectively your social media “house list” — and you can stimulate buying activity much more often.

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Let’s not mess around with the thinking, here’s the data: companies with between 100 and 500 followers on Twitter generated 146 percent more median monthly leads than those with 21 to 100 followers. So, whip out your Blackberry and pump out those 140-character insights!

Well, it’s not as simple as that, as I’m sure you know. But, the link between Twitter and lead generation is certainly worth a closer look.

The latest research from eMarketer reports that developing a rich Twitter following – in conjunction with a “regularly updated stream of content on a blog” – helps trigger engagement, leads to search engine optimization advantages and ultimately brings more opportunities in the door.

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The purpose of a corporate blog or other social media presence isn’t merely to add to the endless electrons that are produced every day. And, it isn’t merely to provide a free service to the world. You’re looking to advance your business. While this may entail providing a free service consisting of informative and useful content, the net result has to be a lead stream for you to exploit. To turn your social media communities and traffic into business opportunities, you need hooks.

It’s easy to go overboard. In pursuit of leads, many companies tend to use their social media environments as advertisements, promoting at the expense of informing. Do this, and you run this risk of losing your audience — as well as your investment in the social media marketing initiative. When you create content and interact with your community, play it straight: deliver information that your readers can use — but don’t be afraid to make it easy for them to enter the sales cycle. This is where your “hooks” become useful.

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Does having a Facebook fan page, a LinkedIn group and a blog mean you have to content — regularly — for three different platforms? It’s a scary thought, probably enough to turn even the most zealous social media advocate away from the space. Well, here’s the good news: write content correctly, and you can carve it up for use across your entire integrated social media environment. There is no bad news.

Start with the blog post — it’s going to be your anchor. The material you publish on your blog will tend to be longer and more complex than what you put on Facebook, LinkedIn or certainly Twitter. Everything else you write and post should be pulled from this source. Not only do you only write once, with the exception of small modifications, but you ensure consistency across your entire social media environment.

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Facebook has attained incredible reach, and Twitter’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. LinkedIn has demonstrated strong and steady growth. But, the history of the social media space is littered with the corpses of former flavors of the month, and the likes of MySpace and Friendster represent sunk costs for companies that believed these environments were around for the long haul. Choosing right platform, it would seem, is crucial.

To think that, however, would be to miss the point entirely.

Instead of working diligently to select the most appropriate social media platform, it’s better to realize that you’ll assume a certain amount of obsolescence risk with any platform you choose. Under these conditions, protecting your social media marketing investment is actually much easier than you’d expect. All you need to do is ensure that your content is easily portable.

Specific social media tools may come in and out of fashion, but well-planned content will stick around for a while.

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The dialogue on Twitter is fast-paced and has close to 60 million participants. So, it’s at once high-value and highly frustrating. How can you make your voice heard above so many others? Rather than delve into the “focused community” spiel that you’ve probably read hundreds of times on Mashable, here are five tips to help you with the basic blocking and tackling of marketing your IT product or service on Twitter:

1. Leave room at the end
You have 140 characters at your disposal … just like everyone else. So, if someone wants to retweet you, you’ll need to leave enough room for RT @[your name]. Some users may be willing to edit your tweet to make room for the additional characters entailed by retweeting, but you may miss opportunities when someone isn’t in the mood to work a little harder to help you out.

Note: With the retweet button on Twitter.com, you can’t edit when retweeting, so you’d have to expect someone to manually copy and paste your tweet before editing and retweeting. That’s a lot to expect from a perfect stranger!

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What social media marketing metrics are you using?

The latest research from MarketingSherpa indicates that businesses using social media to promote their products and services — and fill their lead streams — are employing a variety of measures to gauge the effectiveness of their initiatives. Of course, the metrics you’d expect have been most widely adopted, but there are some important stats being watched by a small group of companies that signal where social media marketing is headed.

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Fifty-eight million people can’t be wrong. There are plenty of people who see the value in this social media platform, and they are casting votes with their personal and professional time. As a result, Twitter has become a robust marketing environment. Long seen as a consumer brand sector play, the potential of Twitter for promoting business solutions – including IT equipment, software and consulting – is quickly being realized.

The hard part, of course, is in figuring out how to harness it. As with corporate marketing blogging, the biggest mistake may be to wait for the perfect plan, but you don’t want to enter Twitter without marketing objectives or an idea of how to achieve them.

To help you plan your entry into this corner of the social media market, here are five reasons to start marketing via Twitter.

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“Retweeting” isn’t new to Twitter. Users have been prefacing tweets with “RT” for a while now, indicating that they are broadcasting someone else’s 140-character-or-less sentiment. Part of the power of this practice is in the commentary that a Twitter user includes along with the retweet. The new retweet feature in Twitter makes it more efficient to RT, but deprives you of the chance to add some color.

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