25 (Experience-based) B2B Social Media Tips You Can Start Using TODAY

Does B2B Social media need any convincing today? Not really.

When I ventured into marketing some 13 years ago, the whole world of B2B marketing was different. Companies relied heavily on brochures and such collateral, a lot of emphasis was given on website and SEO, and a lot of energies were spent in creating solid email marketing programs. Things slowly changed with the advent of social media and content marketing.

Today, the buyers don’t want to see your brochures. The buyer is more educated and well-informed. She is searching for information online and making her own decisions. Only after getting convinced, she approaches the vendors. Yes, social media and content marketing has changed the whole B2B sales scenario. No wonder companies are convinced that they not only have to be on social media but also do it well.

At Midas Touch, the B2B Specialist Social and Digital Marketing Agency, we help customers with their social media and content marketing efforts. Based on my experience of working with several B2B companies in various industry verticals such as technology, manufacturing, and engineering, here are a few tips which I would like to share to ensure that your social media marketing program is successful and delivers on its promise.

Putting these tips in simple lines below – if you need any clarification on any of these, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @radhagiri

1.     Start with a strong content marketing strategy – without a documented strategy; you are preparing yourself for failure.

2.     A good website is a must for deriving true value from social media marketing.

3.     Provide answers to the questions which your target audience might have rather than talking about your expertise and skills. Remember, helpful is new viral.  

4.     Focus on education rather than selling – nobody cares about your products and services. Your prospects are looking for solutions to their business problems. Provide those.

5.     Add variety to your content if you want traffic from diverse sources.

6.     Have a strong content promotion plan in place – Remember, “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants”.

7.     Don’t debate on quality vs quantity – the point really is how well you can leverage each piece of content which you create.

8.     Each type of content has a different objective and its use, therefore, is different. Don’t try to force fit.

9.     The world’s most popular social network may not be the best one for your business – identify the social networks which work best for you and your business.

10. Don’t hesitate to reuse the content – convert your whitepaper into a series of blogs, or a PPT for SlideShare or an infographic. It’s absolutely fine to represent the same content in different formats.

11. Webinars, podcasts, LinkedIn Groups are your secret weapons of marketing – don’t forget to use them well.

12. For B2B companies, the personal branding of the top executives plays a key role – after all, people connect with people, isn’t it?

13. If you are just starting with social media, don’t start with too much which you cannot sustain and at the same time, don’t do too little that it will not show any impact.

14. B2B content marketing requires some key skills and knowledge - don’t make the mistake of thinking that anybody can do it and don’t have it as a side project.

15. Have a strong collaboration between teams – marketing, sales, and product teams need to work together to make social media successful.

16. Don’t forget to leverage offline events on social platforms.

17. Email marketing works – but requires good planning, relevant message, and right targeting.

18. LinkedIn is a great professional networking platform – make judicious use of status updates, LinkedIn groups, and LinkedIn company page.

19. Whitepapers and eBooks are great choices to build an opt-in list and showcase your thought leadership and expertise.

20. Use your employee network – today, marketing is not a job of only the marketing teams. Encourage your employees to share and spread the word about the company content and events.

21. Identify and engage with influencers – share their content, ask them feedback and questions, and engage with them.

22. Constantly monitor the results – see how the efforts are delivering to the set objectives and make tweaks based on the results.

23. Do social listening – know what people are talking about, what do they care about, what are their problems. Use this information to tweak your social media strategy.

24. Don’t use social channels for only self promotions. Connect with others, provide value to them, share other people’s content, and genuinely engage with people.

25. Hire experts who understand social media as well as B2B marketing to handle your social media.

Fly Right with Your Social Media Strategy

For any business, small or large, social media can be a wonderful experience. It provides exciting opportunities for approaching, connecting and engaging with your target customers. It also offers tremendous potential for generating buzz through viral effect.  All this is possible only if the strategy is rock solid, the planning is perfect and execution is flawless.

Let us have a look at some of the aspects to ensure you have success with your social media initiatives:

#1 Define Objectives Clearly

Most of the social media plans fail because the objectives are not clearly defined. It is true that with any kind of marketing, businesses want to see results in terms of increased revenues. But with social media, businesses need to fine tune their expectations because it is different than traditional marketing. It offers great opportunities for you to connect and engage with your audience which otherwise was not possible. So when you start off with your social media efforts, define your social media objectives very clearly. What exactly are you looking for through social media: are you looking for connecting with your customer, are you looking to gather product or services feedback, do you want to offer technical support for your products or do you want to create a engaged community of your product users. You need to clearly define the objectives. Once the objectives are set, it becomes easier to match the results vis-à-vis the expectations.

#2 Pay Special Attention to the Content

Remember that there are different social media platforms with a purpose. You can’t get away by sharing the same kind of content on all the platforms and expect people to appreciate the same. I have seen many companies blindly linking their Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. That’s a fail strategy. People do not connect with you on different platforms to see you post same content everywhere. Understand the platform and the intricacies of the same. Then look at the kind of followers you have on each platform and then define the content strategy according to that.  Along with this, each platform also offers different benefits. Exploit those benefits. For example: You can have a visual impact in your post through picture album on Facebook. Or you can quickly share an important update with mass followers on Twitter. Understand the difference in each platform.

#3 Converse and Engage

I have seen that many companies think that social media platforms are like free advertising boards. They go all about promoting their products and services on social media. While occasional self promotion is alright, it’s certainly not advisable all the time. It is called spamming in the world of social media. You have advertising medias for that so stick to those. Utilize social media for its core purpose – conversation and engagement. Social media offers you wonderful opportunities to connect, converse and engage with your audience. Here you have an opportunity to understand their views, share knowledge, provide solutions and also learn in the process. This was otherwise not possible with traditional mediums. So utilize social media to the fullest for these.

#4 Don’t Go After Only Fans and Followers

Provide value and you will get fans and followers - it’s as simple as that. You can’t simply go crazy after fans and followers and forget about the other important aspects like conversation and engagement. Provide value to the audiences in terms of your attention, your knowledge, special tips, offers, value-added services and they will cherish the association. Remember: the key is engagement and not the numbers. You have other matrices to measure the effectiveness of your campaign which go beyond the fans and followers numbers.

#5 Measure the Results

Don’t believe if someone tells you that social media ROI cannot be measured. It’s just that the measurement matrices are different than the traditional media. Here, conversation is more important than conversion. Engagement is more important than numbers. Quality is more important than quantity. But this does not mean that measurement of ROI is not possible. For each platform, you have metrics to measure the effectiveness of the engagement you are having with the audience. For example: ‘Facebook Insights’ gives you various metrics which show how many people are engaged with your business page. On Twitter you can watch “replies”, “Retweets”, Klout score etc.  Do keep a watch on these factors vis-à-vis the goals and objectives you have set. Do the review from time to time so that you have an opportunity to fine tune your strategy.

Once you have the well planned strategy, defined execution plan and a great team to carry it out and Means to track the efforts, you are a winner! Don’t wait any further, start with Social Media NOW!


This article was first published on YourStory.in at http://yourstory.in/2012/01/5-steps-to-fly-right-with-your-social-media-strategy/