5 steps to improve your b2b social media marketing

Following on from our ebook on the top 50 b2b social media case studies, I wanted to lay out 5 tips that can help you improve your b2b marketing efforts in social media. This is still one of the most unknown areas in social media and many marketers are unsure of how to utilise social platforms for b2b efforts. Sure, you might open up a profile on LinkedIn and answer some Q+As, but the results of this will be negligible unless there is a full strategy behind this. It can often seem like a LinkedIn profile  is your only tool for b2b marketing online, but the truth is far from it. The fact is the people you’re trying to target are all out there using social tools, just maybe not under the guise you expect to find them in. So here’s a few of our tips that you can implement to supercharge your b2b marketing.

Advanced targeting on Facebook

With Facebook’s new advertising tool – broad category targeting – you can target different types of business categories that weren’t previously available in the self service ad center before. This is an option available to all advertisers on Facebook, and you should take advantage of this targeting option to use Facebook in a different way to reach out to a business audience. You can use this option by setting up your ad, then selecting ‘business/technology’ in the broad category options. Here you can target your ads by small business owners, science/technology, real estate, personal finance and science programming :

This really is an excellent new tool for b2b marketers to use, as it means that Facebook is using the information contained within a user’s profile to determine which category they fit into. You still have the option as well to target specifically by a workplace with your ads, but this doesn’t guarantee the type of person your ad will be shown to within that organisation. Here you have an ideal way to get in front of small business owners and you should think carefully also about where your ad is clicking through to. It might be the case that taking them through to your general company Page isn’t applicable to convert them, so think about setting up a specific landing tab purely for b2b that is designed to encourage a conversion.

Hire a b2b community manager

Within your organisation you could have a social media team, and a business development team, but the two might not necessarily be talking to each other. While it might fall to your social media rep to be the consumer face of your brand, or deal with customer service, the same principles that they’re applying to talk to customers, should also be rolled out to your business development team. Online relationships work the same as offline, you need to have someone there that is dedicated to creating and maintaining the relationship, and while you can hope to create a b2b social strategy, this will only really work if you have a community manager behind it. The most successful uses of b2b for social media often come from small business owners, because they’re the ones that are active in LinkedIn groups or forums, genuinely sharing their expertise. Your community manager on your biz dev team should become a recognised face of the company and a go-to resource when potential business leads want to find out more information, or just want a bit of help or advice. You will have to give a certain amount of this away for free, just like you would if you were on the phone to an important lead. Take the skills you already have, and adapt them to fit on social media.

Smart Twitter search

If you’re really dedicated to using social media to source business leads and relationships, then you should develop a smart Twitter strategy to find those people in real-time and discover potential new contacts you probably would have missed. You should train your biz dev team in using Tweetdeck to run searches that can provide you with relevant information that can be utilised for business purposes, provided it’s done correctly. Think about everything an effective sales person needs, to do their job correctly. They need to identify the right people to talk to, establish a relationship with them, know the competition, know the lead’s industry inside and out, and provide them with something early on in the relationship that shows them what they can expect by investing in you. By using your Tweetdeck effectively you can do all of these and more, much quicker than you can do through traditional tools. Firstly, check out this video below that shows you how to use Tweetdeck to effectively follow thousands of people (it’s fairly long but I really recommend taking 8 minutes out of your day to watch it) :

If you’re running the right searches on Twitter, you can find out in real time the people that are tweeting for help with general questions that you can assist with, direct service requests as well as identifying and following the right people in organisations that you want to reach. But you should also use this to keep yourself informed of the latest industry-specific news that you should keep an eye on and be reactive to. Make sure you follow news accounts as well as individuals so you can be the first to know when something happens that you should be aware of, and most importantly you’re the first one tweeting about it.

Follow companies on LinkedIn

This is a feature that not many people actually take advantage of, but it can be incredibly useful not only for keeping up to date with the latest news at the organisations you want to connect with, but also for making those organisations aware that you’re there. Every company, no matter what industry they’re in, is interested in who’s following them online and believe me there will be someone pouring over the analytics across different social profiles to see who’s engaging with them. This is another chance to get on someone’s radar through a simple feature in LinkedIn. To follow a company, simply search for their profile, then click on the Follow button, as shown below :

When you follow a company on LinkedIn, anyone can click to see the list of followers, which means you have a direct link to someone at the organisation, who is just a click away from your LinkedIn profile. You can also keep up with the latest developments in the company as this information will show up in your notifications. When you follow a company for the first time, be sure to keep an eye on your new connections, as these could be from people within that organisation, so you want to stay reactive when there’s a possible interest from someone you’re trying to target.

Find who’s following you

In the same way that your sales team will be following certain individuals and companies online to build relationships, you could find that the people you want to reach out to are already doing that to you. If you’ve set up company profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora etc.. then someone from your biz dev team should be going through these in detail each day, to find if the people they’re trying to reach are already following them, or identifying new leads. if someone is following you online then there is already a level of interest there. You can begin to maximise this without being too intrusive, by sending them a tweet or message to get the relationship going. They’ll appreciate the fact that you’re active on your social profiles and you could end up saving yourself a lot of time by trying to reach out to a particular person in a company, by finding that they, or someone else from that company is already following you and done half the work in making the initial contact. This information is there for you to access and you should use it to your benefit, for free.