How should B2B Companies View Social Media, and What is the Right Way to Use It?

 

Why do you think social media changed everything? Because it created a new way of thinking…

First of all, B2B marketers need to actually think what they need social media for and not just mindlessly post their latest tweet or upload a fresh new Facebook status without knowing their direction. Velocity partners (2014) put it like this: Don’t get me wrong, we love social media as a listening post, a community builder and vector for content. But the key word in the term ‘social media’ is ‘media’. It’s a medium for something. And that thing is ideas. If you have a good idea, social and other media will help spread it like wildfire. And on the flip side, if you don’t have an idea at all, social media can expose this. B2B marketing is a profession of ideas.
When it comes to social media, business to business (B2B) companies work in a different way to your regular business that sell products and services to consumers (B2C). According to Power, R (2014) there are three key elements that B2B’s achieve using social networks, and these are as follows:

• 1. It offers an opportunity to boost customer acquisition by expanding a brand’s reach, add scale to campaigns and enhance conversion through recommendations.
• 2. It can help form deeper relationships and advocacy through improving customer service, brand reputation and even product and service quality.
• 3. It also provides the opportunity to access a huge market to test, trial and crowd source new ideas about your products and services.

These all need to be deeply considered when producing a strategy surrounding social media marketing. The size of the industry a firm works within will be the determinant of the size of market which it has access to. A business needs to efficiently target their consumers by selecting the right social network for their business and business structure. Why is there emphasis on selecting the correct social network? Edwards, V. (2015) suggests that “The decision regarding which social media channels to adopt … is as important as any other marketing initiative”. Social media should be used in a way that supports digital marketing efforts with regards to PPC, content marketing and SEO. As a platform, Social media gives businesses access to immediate community interaction of those purchasing and using their product or services delivering what can be described as real time qualitative data (Kietzmann, J. et al. 2011). However, for a small B2B business focusing around telecoms adoption and implementation this data can be relatively low and perhaps ineffective. So what can we suggest they do? And which social media network should they adopt?

A small B2B company that focuses on services needs to seek out online communities that are interested in the same thing as they are selling due to the need to target a niche audience of technological minded people who deal with communications systems in their place of work. Why? Simple, a large social media campaign on a medium such as twitter, attempting to acquire new customers could see a lot of leakage in media spend. Although you may be able to target individuals who like pages like Avaya and Cisco, you cannot assume how they would need/use the services you provide. For more specialist individuals, in firms around the world who would be more efficient to target, communication system forums and Linked In would likely be more effective platforms. Ying, W and Weizhen, L. (2015) state “since the advent of social media websites that allow the sharing of user-generated content (UGC), virtual communities have developed in exciting new directions. As a result, rich, high-quality content has become essential for firms seeking to maintain a competitive edge in this environment.” It is the individuals creating and looking at this content in these virtual communities that are the people to target.

Think content strategy before social strategy as community is a new B2B staple and content promoted over social media is indeed a great way to foster it. The graph above shows the social platforms that content marketing is shared across, demonstrating the most used channels. Community and community interaction are key. We should all be building communities.

 

 

References

Edwards, V. (2015). Determining the right social media networks for your business. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. 3 (3), p217-22.

Kietzmann, J. et al. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons. 54 (3), p241–251.

Power, R. (2014). Creating a social media strategy for B2B audiences, products and services. B2B Social Media Marketing.

Velocity Partners (2014). B2B Marketing Manifesto. Richmond: Digital pdf. 3-6.

Ying, W; Weizhen, L. (2015). How does sense of virtual community impact users’ content production in the social media context?. Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing. 2 (4), p366-381.