Social Media for B2Bs: How to Start Building Effective Online Campaigns
6/18/2009
By Kathy Cabrera
As a communications professional, you’re probably noticing more people are using sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Wikipedia. And, while there’s an obvious fit for these social media tools in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space, you’re probably wondering how business-to-business (B2B) companies can replicate the same success.
Whereas major consumer brands like Coca-Cola have a natural fit to reach widespread online audiences, a B2B company’s target audience typically isn’t as vast -- requiring those marketers to have a much more focused approach to reach the right groups with highly relevant content.
Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Campaign
Running a social media campaign requires a commitment of time, effort and resources over the long haul. Even in the fast-paced world of the Internet, it takes time for companies to build their online brand and to attract and engage audiences. For this reason, companies should select social media activities that best align with their business and communications goals. At the onset of a campaign, companies must realistically assess:
- How much time and money can be invested?
- What are your goals?
- Which social media channels should you use?
- Who in the company should participate?
- Who will take a primary role in leading social media campaigns?
- How will you measure success?
Companies should have clearly stated goals for any social media endeavor. These goals can include:
- Better engaging prospects, customers and others.
- Finding additional avenues to market your views, products and culture.
- Establishing yourself or company executives as thought leaders on a subject.
The Targeted Approach: How Your B2B Can & Should Participate in Social Media
From an organizational perspective, the key to a B2B social media campaign that is both productive for employees and effective for the business is balance. An efficient campaign leverages social media tools without allowing them to become a distraction to the real business goals at hand. Your company should use social networking as one of several communications tools to enhance the way it does business, versus trying to shoehorn all communications through social media.
The first step to planning how your company should participate is to research and identify where your audience “lives” online, and only engage in activities directly related to those communities. Don’t be tempted to try the newest, shiniest social media tool if it’s not a place where your online audience lives.
One way to identify where to focus your social media efforts is to conduct competitive research. Take a look at how your top competitors use social media and how effective they are. For example:
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Are your competitors on Twitter? How large is their following? Also, to the best of your ability (since Twitter allows you to also see exactly “who” is following a particular profile) analyze the quality of followers. Do they appear to be internal or external to the company? Are they employees or friends and family? Or are they targeted prospects, journalists or industry influencers who follow the company for valuable information?
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Do your competitors have a blog? How often is it updated? Does that blog come up highly ranked on Technorati? Does it receive a lot of comments? Does it offer text-only posts, or multimedia content, such as videos and podcasts?
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Are competitors’ employees active on LinkedIn via industry groups or do they have their own LinkedIn Group with a large, relevant membership base?
Analyzing competitors’ campaigns can help reduce your learning curve when focusing the scope of your own social media campaign. Below are a few ideas on how to use the competitive analysis to your advantage:
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Have a Purpose: Just because you can create a Twitter page for your company doesn’t mean you should. If after reviewing competitors it’s apparent that the majority of them have not built a decent group of followers, that may be a clear indication that your market segment is just not into Twitter (yet), or they aren’t being fed interesting content. Being the first among your competitors to the Twitter party can be a distinct advantage if you see a return on the time invested within a few weeks. If you have a steadily increasing number of engaged, active followers, that’s an indication that you’re doing the right thing.
Obviously, if competitors appear to be effective on Twitter, that should be an indication that perhaps it is time for your company to get active in this medium.
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To Blog or Not to Blog: If your company has the resources to sustain its own blog with educational, non-promotional content on a regular basis, and it’s proven that your audience subscribes to industry information via that platform, you should invest in authoring a blog. As it relates to leveraging competitive information, look closely at your competitors’ blogs. Objectively ask yourself if you would you invest time out of your busy schedule to follow their blogs? Is the content objective and educational? Does it offer valuable information? Or, is 75% of the content purely promotional? What turns you off about the blog? What do you like about it from a visual and content perspective? Answer these questions from the perspective of a reader, and then plan your blog content accordingly.
If resources are tight, you can still participate in blogging by guest-posting content on other industry bloggers’ sites or making a concerted effort to post thought-provoking comments to others’ posts. Such blogs may be authored by industry analysts, the leading journalists in your market, or other thought leaders in your industry. When posting comments, always be sure to include your name, title and company URL to “stamp” your signature in the blogosphere.
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Be Brave: Look at what the competition isn’t doing in social media, and responsibly experiment with new avenues. For example, are all of your competitors’ Web sites purely Web 1.0 and text-based? Cater to the preferred route of how prospects like to receive information by offering multimedia content with videos and podcasts. Video specifically is a highly effective tool for online marketing. YouTube gets twice as many hits as Google; and posting videos to your websites also helps with search engine optimization. By posting videos online, you’re putting your message where people search for information; and improving your chances of a prospect finding your company.
Measuring Success
Measuring the value of social media is not an exact science. As social media marketing is fairly new, methods for assessing ROI are still evolving. Both qualitative and quantitative metrics can be used to measure the following:
- Did your company’s Web site see a boost in traffic from active commenting on industry blogs?
- Did the company receive more word-of-mouth referrals through social networks?
- Did your company increase its brand awareness?
- Has social media resulted in increased brand loyalty?
- Does your company have better/more relationships with key audiences?
- Are you moving from a running monologue to a meaningful dialogue with customers?
- Where are your online visitors coming from and how are they interacting with your site?
- What is the volume, tone and type of customer comments your social media campaigns are generating?
And Off You Go...
Once you have clearly defined your social media objectives and identified the right communications tools, consider these additional guidelines to ensure your company is on the right footing for social media success:
Gain internal support from the top-down. Social media must be embraced at all levels of your organization. This is important for approving an on-going budget and to ensure long-term sustainability of social media programs. In addition, executive participation is often a key requirement for many social media activities.
View social media participation as an extension of your brand. Many of the same considerations given to content on your company website should be extended to content you publish via social media channels. For instance, search engine optimization utilized on your main website copy should be similarly applied to your blog posts, executive bios on LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Also, remember that online content—regardless of its location—is representative of your company brand.
Become an active contributor. Social media engagement is based on user-generated content and regular communication with audiences. Establishing schedules for publishing or producing content can help you stay consistent.
Enlist assistance as needed. External help is available to support a range of social media initiatives, from strategic planning and consulting to professional content production. Many PR and marketing agencies offer social media expertise. Businesses new to social media may require the assistance of these resources to strategically plan and execute initiatives.
Create an honest, welcome dialog. Time and again, successful adopters use social media to establish a two-way exchange of information and perspectives. Avoid the temptation to use social media as an advertising channel, and work to ensure your communications are never considered spam. Social media must be thought of as a shift from autocratic thinking and one-to-many communications to a participatory environment. Social media is not about selling and talking at your audience. It is about sharing and engaging with them.
Social media is no longer “the future of B2B PR and marketing.” It’s here now. Have fun, be creative and participate!
Kathy Cabrera serves as Director of New Media for Carabiner Communications. Kathy leads the agency’s social media and video initiative to help clients build and integrate social media tools and content into their communications campaigns. She earned a bachelor of arts degree in communication studies from Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. She also holds a master of fine arts degree in screenwriting from the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television. To learn more about Carabiner’s social media offerings, please visit www.carabinerpr.com/socialmedia or contact Kathy at kcabrera@carabinerpr.com.