Base station antenna tilt is a powerful tuning parameter in traditional cellular network optimization. With theintroduction of Self-Organizing Networks (SON), this parameter may now be used also in the context of self-optimization.One envisioned scenario is load balancing (LB), where the coverage shaping properties of the antenna radiation pattern canbe used to control the cell borders. In this paper, a generalized framework for antenna tilt LB is presented and discussed. Inorder to assess the performance of antenna tilt as a tool for load balancing, simulations are performed to determine theeffect of tilt angle, vertical beamwidth and handover offset. The results show that there is a direct relation between theseparameters and the number of users that can be shifted towards neighboring cells. In conclusion, it is found that usingantennas with narrow vertical beamwidths together with small hand over offsets is an efficient way of performing loadbalancing but results also in high SIR variations.