Is Social Media Right for B2B Marketers?

Is Social Media Right for B2B Marketers?

Is Social Media Right for B2B Marketers?

Social media has proven to become a great way to not only distribute great content to others, but also a remarkable way to produce good results for businesses who want to support their users and even attract prospects to their website. However, many B2B marketers don't know how to do it correctly and often fail in the process, making social media much more of a challenge.

B2B social media can be done right; it only takes patience. There are a handful of honest, tested and true tactics and strategies that work to not only inspire others, but to also drive results for a small business or anyone who operates in the B2B segment.

-- Research where how your prospects use social media. This is important because without have the proper insight on your prospect's activity online, you won't really have any idea where to focus. Consider checking out a few free services to get an idea about your demographic and how they interact on the web like Quantcast and the Forrester Technographic Research Tool.

-- Establish a consistent presence that your business can call home' on the web. This is more than a website, but includes tightening up your branding and to claim your online presence across many popular social media websites. This is important from both a search engine accessibility standpoint as well as it will aid later when you publish relevant content that is from your B2B business on those sites.

-- Be personable and accessible through social media , as a person. This is one of the most meaningful suggestions to B2B marketers when they engage in social media. Social media is meant for social interactions, not business pitches. This means to welcome others and take an active interest in their activities and they will often reciprocate back towards you. You are "you" on social media, not your business.

-- Publish interesting content that matters. Nothing is more of a turn-off to a B2B marketer who publishes annoying or even spammy tweets. You are sure to upset your friends and will lose them over time if you publish self-promotional updates throughout social media. Balance the usefulness and informative value of your content to ensure it meets your audience's needs.

-- Be consistent and publish frequently. You don't need to publish hourly Twitter and Facebook updates to be good at social media; you just need to be consistent. A good recommendation is to engage in social media for at least 30 minutes a day to both listen, discover and publish content that is valuable to your audience. Develop a plan to schedule about an hour a week to plan out short, simple goals to publish content on a handful of topics. Do this routinely and make it fun to share funny, interesting and even passionate tales about your business and people will stick.

-- Capture and follow-up with social media leads. The leads you get from social media will often be richer with value and interest towards your brand's services than outside of social media. Because of this, it's important you follow up with their interest in your business adequately. A service like Flowtown allows one to categorize people into their online reputation and reach so you know even more about your leads than just their name and email address. A service like Infusionsoft is superb at following up with leads with their marketing automation software that enables a marketer to follow-up with a prospect's interest at the right time automatically across multiple channels.

Using social media in a B2B environment is not a risky move. It takes a bit more than the human need to hear yourself to be good at social media marketing. To be great at B2B social media, marketers need to be great at listening to their audience and reviewing their web analytics to determine audience needs. Effective social media marketing is about producing a message that resonates well with others online and producing results for business.

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