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5 Tips for Optimizing B2B Social Media
August 11th, 2011
Like it or not, social media is here to stay. Once utilized primarily by Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies, social media has now broken into the Business-to-Business (B2B) world, too—and in a big way. According to Forrester, B2B companies will spend $54 million on their social media marketing campaign in 2014, up from $11 million in 2009. It is now vital for B2B companies to focus on their social media marketing campaigns to keep up with the competition.
Here are five social media tips for any B2B company:
1. Know your audience. In order to promote meaningful content, you need to know your target market. You might already know who you want your audience to be, but you should also know who your audience actually is. There are programs that can do the legwork for you, like Radian6, a social media consultancy that provides meaningful analytic reports and helps monitor content and trends.
2. Remember the 3 C’s: content, coverage, and creativity. Your business should devise a social media content plan. How do you want to present your company to the social media world? Your audience will largely determine this. Incorporate polls and ask questions about what your followers want to read. Try asking questions with Twtpoll, and create future content based on the results of your poll. Your business will need to find the right balance of topics that are covered. For B2B social media, many updates will be internal. Be creative, and mix up your content with occasional photos, giveaways, or other fun ways that will intrigue your followers. B2B social media is often not as straightforward as B2C social media; trial and error is the best way to determine your company’s needs.
3. Tweet. Sleep. Repeat. Making your company accessible via social media platforms is great, but it’s not enough to compete in the fast-paced B2B environment. These platforms need new content multiple times each business day. Create value by offering insight into your expertise and values as a company by posting interesting corporate blog posts. Post links to your blogs on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If the amount of content and time needed for social media marketing seems daunting, try scheduling your tweets with clients such as Taweet or Twuffer. These tools allow you to compose a list of future tweets and updates to be sent at specified times. Dedicate an hour or two once a week to creating content for the week. This alleviates the pressure of coming up with real-time content, but allows your followers to get these updates regularly.
4. Study your competition. It’s important to know what your competitors are doing so you can do it better. Subscribing to your competition’s RSS feed will allow you to track what your main competitors are doing. Platforms like Social Mention (similar to Google Alerts) are designed specifically for tracking social media.
5. Monitor and track. Not only will you want to know how you measure up to your competition, you will also want to know how well your content is being received. Luckily, there are several great tools available to help you track these things, including HootSuite and TweetDeck. There are free and paid versions of these programs, depending on your company’s needs. Both have mobile apps, so the monitoring can happen virtually anywhere.
Just remember that social media—whether it’s B2C or B2B—takes time and nurturing. There’s no silver bullet for the perfect social media marketing tactic, but always try to utilize social media in a way that builds positive awareness about your brand and company.
Laura Witowsky
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Tags: Marketing, social media
