Creative, less-than-obvious ideas to promote your whitepaper on Twitter

By Ritika Puri
Best practices

Twitter is more than a source of bite-sized news. It's where people come to communicate and share information in real time. Business leaders rely on Twitter to stay up-to-date with industry news and make informed judgment calls. In fact, 43% of business decision-makers use Twitter to discover new products and solutions*.

The challenge that comes with promoting your whitepaper is that some ideas and stories simply don’t fit in short copy. But here’s the thing. Distilling your content and leveraging an open, authentic, and momentary discourse is what supports the beauty of one of the most timeless forms of storytelling — long-form writing.

How can your business get the word out and generate more leads from your whitepapers? Here’s what your B2B marketing, customer success, and sales team needs to do. All it takes is a simple checklist. 

Harness the strengths of Twitter to your advantage

Whitepapers can be lengthy, dense pieces of content. Twitter is where micro-interactions take place. So what you need to do, before you even think about developing a whitepaper promotion strategy on Twitter, is understand how your audience is likely to engage with your company. Read this study on micro-moments from Think with Google to guide you. And then take a look at this study from Think with Google, which introduces its studies with a teaser.

Strike an educational and aspirational tone

Audiences crave learning and engagement experiences. With 43% of business decision-makers using Twitter to learn about new technologies there is an appetite for educational content.* Here’s an example from a B2B company, @Hologram, that takes an educational rather advertorial approach to reaching audiences.

Capture attention with catchy, in-the-moment engaging elements

In addition to ensuring that every Tweet is visually engaging, includes energizing copy, communicates in a conversational style, and aims to educate, find subtle ways to encourage a dialogue. Here are some ideas:

  • Ask questions

  • Encourage Retweets

  • Tweet more than once per day, sharing different focal points in your whitepaper to build allure and interest

  • Distill key findings, especially data, into bite-sized digestible insights

Remember that Twitter is a discussion starter. Distill your whitepapers to create moments of inspiration that inspire a deeper dive into your company’s narrative.

Want to learn more? Check out Twitter’s B2B Best Practices ebook, which will walk you through a clear, digestible strategy that you can make your own.


*Twitter B2B Behavioral Impact Study 2015

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