While LinkedIn is clearly the frontrunner social media channel for data center colocation services, Twitter for most is a close second and heavily utilized by most mid-market and enterprise colocation firms.
With that in mind, which are the five C’s of data center colocation services that should you be following on Twitter?
C7 Data Centers
C7 Data Centers @C7DataCenters – Headquartered in Bluffdale, Utah, C7 Data Center, Cloud & IT Services Tweets about the value of their Utah location, why Utah may be the next Silicon Valley, C7 career opportunities, and why you should combine a visit to tour C7 with great Utah tourist attractions.
It’s great how C7 humanizes its Tweets rather than just talking about cooling, DCIM, virtualization and other geekier issues.
Clearview International
Clearview Intl @Clearviewdata – Based in Dallas with other colocation facilities in Texas, although Clearview International is definitely doing Inbound marketing on its website with HubSpot, its Twitter profile doesn’t seem to be much of a priority. It’s been over six months since its last Tweet (August 20, 2015) announcing expansion of its Waco Data Center with a kick-off party.
The Twitter link in its top navigation (upper right hand corner) also goes to a non-existent Twitter profile (@ClearviewIntl) – which is a shame because there seems to be some blogging effort being made, as well as home page buyer personas – but definitely only a partially rolled out Inbound marketing implementation.
Continuum Data Centers
Continuum Colocation @ContinuumColo – From its Chicago location, Continuum Data Centers publishes Tweets on a regular, albeit a light, schedule. Although it took a little poking around on search to locate its Twitter profile, its Twitter strategy is a mix of curated content – including articles from Data Center Journal, Data Center Knowledge, and Federal Times, some retweets about its partnership with Comcast Business, and a number of purely salesy Tweets that are very unlikely to see much engagement.
Over time, Continuum Data Centers could make its Twitter profile more follow-worthy by publishing more of its own thought leadership content that aims to educate those seeking colocation and data center services in Chicago.
CoreSite
CoreSite @CoreSite – Denver-based CoreSite is fairly active on Twitter, but does so in bursts of activity – where sometimes a few weeks go by without a single Tweet. Most recently, the data center, colocation, and interconnection solution provider posted a series of Twitter status updates about #PTC15 – the annual conference for the Pacific Telecommunications Council in Honolulu.
In a similar manner, CoreSite had some tweets about its booth about #GartnerDC – the Gartner Data Center Summit in Las Vegas – as well as about its booth for #AWSreInvent – the Amazon Web Services reinvent conference.
So it appears that most of CoreSite’s Twitter messaging focuses on promoting its appearance and national data center-related conferences, with little attention given to sharing thought leadership content – which makes sense given that there doesn’t seem to even be a blog on the main CoreSite website.
CyrusOne
CyrusOne @CyrusOne – With its 25 enterprise data centers across the USA plus London and Singapore, CyrusOne is very active on Twitter, but may have let a “Pinned Tweet” on “Four North Dallas Cities Will Combine 911 Emergency Services in Dallas Colocation Data Center” sit in the pinned position a little too long. Why?
My first impression at a glance was that CyrusOne hadn’t updated its Twitter profile in over six months, which wasn’t the case at fall. There does however appear to be a problem with Twitter status updates being repeated way too close to each other – which may be a problem with how it’s using the HubSpot Social Publishing tool.
Once you look beyond some of these cosmetic issues, there is some really valuable blog content being shared from CyrusOne CMO Scott Brueggeman as well as curated content from Data Center Knowledge.
Largely Untapped Twitter Opportunities for Data Center Colocation Services
From this quick roundup of five data center colocation services that are anywhere from somewhat to moderately active on Twitter, these companies have more in common than just their company names starting with the letter “C”. Overall, the level of Twitter participation merits at best a letter grade of “C” -- in other words, average.
That said, just as the bell curve in school taught us, and search engines and social media reinforce, you don’t necessarily need to be doing everything perfectly on Twitter and with your digital marketing. Your data center colocation service just needs to be executing better than the handful of other companies that you compete directly with.
If you’re all getting chased by a bear on a camping trip, do you really have to run a six minute mile? Not really, just faster than the next guy.
However here’s the problem with that complacency. With 57% to 90% of the buyer’s journey now over before potential clients are ready to talk with your sales team, nearly all of the purchase decision is being made without your colocation service in the conversation.
Many of the ideal buyer personas in enterprise and mid-market IT that data centers target are in fact using Twitter as their second favorite social media channel. So this lackluster performance across the board should be a wake-up call to go back and revisit buyer personas, and get more involved with building reach and engagement on Twitter to leapfrog the competition.
How is your firm utilizing Twitter to grow its data center revenue? What efforts do you use on social media to attract strangers and convert them into website visitors? Are you using Twitter to generate leads? Nurture warm leads into sales opportunities? Delight clients? Let us know your take in the Comments below.
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