As the number of social media platforms available to marketers increases, it feels like the resources to fully utilise them are being stretched further. My clients feel that too.
So I reassure them.
“You don’t need to be on every social media site.”
It’s true. The fact is that without a great amount of resources you couldn’t run successful campaigns on every site anyway. So why bother.
It’s better to be engaging and successful on one site rather than less effective on a few.
When smarterpillar.com started, we didn’t use any social media sites as we knew we had to focus on creating great content. Once we were happy with that, we looked at social media.
So Which Social Media Platforms are Best for B2B Companies?
The big 3 as far as I’m concerned are LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
Once you’ve finished spitting out your coffee, I’ll explain why Facebook isn’t in the list.
This is my top 3 social media sites for a B2B marketing strategy. Facebook tends to be more suitable for B2C businesses. If I was to list my top 4, then Facebook would probably be there.
However, here we are focusing on getting the most out of your valuable resources for B2B marketing.
I imagine most people would expect LinkedIn and Twitter to top the list but Google+ being in 3rd place might surprise some. Google+ has a unique quality which I’ll explain later.
If you only have the resources to focus on one social media platform, LinkedIn should be it.
The chances are you already have a LinkedIn profile for yourself and your company. You are probably connected to some people you know and a lot you don’t know personally, but ask yourself this :
“Am I ACTIVELY using LinkedIn to generate leads?”
If you update your profile occasionally or connect to people on a regular basis, then your answer should be ‘no.’
So what do I mean by ‘actively using LinkedIn?’
I mean:
- connecting with the decision makers of potential customers
- direct messaging to introduce your company
- sharing your articles to drive traffic to your site
- contributing valuable information to LinkedIn Groups
- researching prospects before your first meeting
There is also an extremely powerful advertising network in LinkedIn which allows you to target your ads to the level of industry, location, job title etc.
When you post articles or previews of articles which link back to your site, they then appear in users email updates. It’s another piece of exposure for your website.
LinkedIn Groups allows you to increase your profile by contributing to discussions and showing others you are knowledgeable within your industry.
In short, the more you contribute to LinkedIn, the more places you and your brand will appear.
Twitter has become a news feed for companies. It’s the quickest way to get your news out there and for others to share it.
From a B2B perspective, it has been proven to drive site traffic, increase the number of searches for a brand and improve conversion. (source : twitter.com)
That study was for a B2B tech brand but I think the trend can apply to any industry using Twitter in the right way.
I hope by now that you are tweeting every time you update your website or create a blog post, however, there are other ways to use Twitter for your B2B marketing.
The majority of my clients never think to message their customers through Twitter but the platform lends itself to quick back-and-forth interactions.
For example, a tweet like “Hi @smarterpillar, I found this [link] which you might find useful’ works on a couple of levels. It helps out your customer or potential customer and it shows others that you think about your customers.
Creating a hashtag with each marketing campaign and encouraging your followers to use it helps to spread the word about your brand. This works really well with competitions or quizzes also. You don’t need every hashtag you create to go ‘viral’ for it to be successful. The more you create, the more chance you have of something catching on.
You can easily find mentions of your brand or hashtags on Twitter and then respond quickly in an appropriate way. Saving positive tweets about your company is good practice too.
Twitter Lists are another valuable research tool. You can create a list of customers who are important to you so you can browse all their tweets in one place. You might find an issue you can help with or be able to offer some advice.
Equally, creating a list of potential customers and reading their tweets might give you an insight into what challenges they are currently facing. Finding a solution for these issues might convert them to a customer or at the very least start a discussion.
Google Plus
Most people think that Google Plus is a minor social media platform but the 540 million active users would probably disagree with you (that’s Google’s own figure). For reference purposes, LinkedIn has approx 260 million users and Twitter 500 million users.
What’s interesting about these users is 42% interact with brands on Google plus (source : socialmediatoday.com) and according to Forrester Research, Google Plus generates twice as much brand engagement as Twitter. (source :forrester.com)
SEO experts would also take issue with the thinking that Google+ is unimportant. That’s because recent studies have shown Google+ to have the greatest impact on organic search engine rankings out of all social media sites. (source : moz.com – since this article was written, Google have announced they are removing authorship appearing in search results.)
It would also seem logical that Google’s own social media platform have a larger bearing on their results than their competitors (if I was in charge of Google, it would!)
These are the two main reasons I prefer Google Plus to Facebook for B2B marketing. It impacts on organic search results and has high brand engagement.
Google+ has business pages which you can integrate with Google Maps and Places. These link in with reviews which appear in the local listings. This is particularly useful if you are targeting businesses in a specific region. This aspect is beneficial to both B2B and B2C businesses.
Conclusion
I am not saying these are the only social networks you should be working with. If you already have a successful Facebook or Pinterest page for example, continue to use it.
I think these are the most valuable social media sites when you are starting a B2B digital marketing strategy and for my clients who don’t know where to start, this is what we work on.
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