Today I received an email from a guy who said he was doing an article on whether social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn deliver value in a business context, and if so, in what ways.

One of the perils of our networked world is that anyone can call themselves a 'reporter' and anyone with a blog can refer to their 'online publication' to give them credibility. And plenty of legit media channels have terrible websites, so an amateur-hour site doesn't necessarily mean the reporter isn't credible.

In other words: It's entirely possible that the email I received today was just a well-done generic broadcast email phishing expedition and next week I'll start receiving calls and emails from their hyper-aggressive sales team, trying to sell me A Social Media Solution Customized For Your Business.

However, as I've discussed before, I'm all about getting the Head2Head and Retired Worker brands in front of new audiences, whether it's an audience of 1 or 1 million. Even if this email was just a ruse, a response from me would put Head2Head in front of one set of eyeballs, at least.

My response ended up being a sort of 'case study' for B2B communications on Twitter. Since all of us are looking to answer the immortal question: "Is social media really good for business, or do we just tell ourselves that to justify all the time we spend farting around on it?", these insights into our Twitter experience may be helpful to you, too.

This is what I told this guy:

Does social networking deliver results?
Social networking only delivers results for business if you go into it with a clear idea of what you'd like to get out of it - but accepting that it's highly likely that you'll end up getting something completely different out of it.

For example, we started Twittering under the @RecruitingH2H name thinking that we'd use it to post 'hot jobs', and we'd get followed by job-seekers. So at first our tweets were just links to new job postings.

That was fine, but I realized that (a) no one wanted to follow me because the tweets seemed too boring; (b) as a small company, we didn't have 10+ new jobs to talk about every day (and you really do need to tweet 10+ times a day in order to build followers); (c) while I wanted job-seekers to follow ME, I didn't really want to follow THEM, because reading the tweets of unemployed people was neither interesting nor educational.

Head2Head's core competency is 'recruiting recruiters' (we place more contract recruiters, on- or off-site with clients, than anyone else in North America), so I decided it might make sense to build a network of recruiters, who tend to be early adopters of social media tools.

Being 'interesting' is more important than being 'relevant'
At the same time, I realized that the best way to build followers is to be interesting - which means including personal, funny and interesting tweets that have nothing whatsoever to do with 'business'. People whose tweets are 100% work-related, with no personal comments whatsoever, simply aren't popular, because the great thing about microblogging is feeling that there's a real person on the other end.

Delivering the authentic Head2Head brand experience
Anyone who's familiar with the Head2Head brand knows that it's not boring, corporate, or all business, all the time. In fact, the reason people like us is because we tend to be quirky, have a keen appreciation for an off-colour joke, and are quite happy to have a Friday-afternoon barbeque in the park behind our office.

Our Twitter posts needed to reflect that.

So I stopped posting so many job opps, started following other recruiters who looked interesting, tried to inject some humour into my tweets and profile (my Twitter bio includes "Fond of non-sequiturs. Newt fancier." - which makes it clear to potential followers that I'm not just some boring B2B person who wants to promote Head2Head 24 hours a day).

THE RESULTS
Our follower base is growing by about 25% per week
...and it's stable (it's my opinion that you get a more stable follower base if you make sure that the number of people you follow is always LESS than the number of people following you. Sure, if you follow 1500 people, a few hundred of them will follow you back - but when other people see that you're following 1823 people and only 432 are following you, they assume that you must be boring or desperate).

Our Twitter presence is already starting to build the Head2Head brand:
This week alone, Head2Head staffers have reported 10+ instances of meeting a new client or candidate and hearing, "I've been hearing about you and seeing you everywhere lately - I didn't realize you Head2Head was such a big player in the Canadian recruiting marketplace."

Twitter has driven a huge increase in our website traffic
Today, after only a couple of months of tweeting, Twitter is the #3 referrer (i.e. the link a visitor has clicked to get to the site), second only to our ATS and Google. Traffic directly to the blog has increased by more than 300% in the same time period - and we know those visitors are coming through social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

Twitter increased responses to our recent online survey
- by more than 25% within 48 hours.

We're learning a whole lot
I'm now following 350+ recruiters and recruiting professionals, which means my Twitter feed is always jam-packed with interesting ideas, articles, links - it's an amazing resource. And it's not only me getting smarter: a lot of this knowledge is then disseminated within Head2Head.

Bottom line?
On the one hand, Twitter didn't really deliver against what I thought it would when I started.

But on the other hand, it's delivering a whole lot of benefits that I never anticipated.

Will we ever be able to draw a straight line from 'Twitter' to '$$'? Probably not. But the same is true for most marketing and advertising: It's virtually impossible to draw a straight line from, say, a billboard or tv commercial to specific revenue - but we all know that if you put up a bunch of billboards and run tv commercials, your sales will increase.

The only difference between billboards and Twitter? About $10,000.