Four Ways to Make Social Media Work for Your B2B Company
Whether you are considering a new social media program or evaluating and continuing an existing program, it’s always a good time to think about new ways to achieve our business and communications objectives.
While most people think of social media as being for consumer or retail companies only, you may be overlooking easy ways to incorporate social media into your marketing communications mix if you are an industrial, manufacturing, technology professional services or other type of B2B company.
Here are four simple ways to make social media work for your B2B communications programs:
Thought Leadership:
- Create a blog or develop content to be shared on your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other channels. Have your technical experts share nuggets of information that are truly helpful to customers (current and prospective) while showing the world that you have knowledge and a competitive edge over others in your space.
Product & Training Videos or Podcasts:
- Create videos or podcasts, upload them and share them across your social media platforms. With almost a billion daily unique visitors per day, YouTube is an excellent channel to communicate and share videos with your audiences. Whether these videos detail features and benefits of your products and services, introduce a new product, explain how to more efficiently specify your product, or show how to actually install or use it, video is a powerful tool to quickly share detailed technical information in an interesting way. Social media posts that include videos have also been proven to have higher sharing and engagement rates than posts that are text-only or simply include photos.
Customer Service/Reputation Management:
- Monitor your website and social media as well as others in your industry to see what people are saying about your company and your products. Evaluate the share of conversation and tone—what percentage is positive, neutral or negative. Develop a strategy for when and how to respond to negative or disparaging remarks. Don’t engage in online arguments; take the conversation offline and make it a personalized exchange as quickly as possible. Also, if you notice trends of complaints, alert management and investigate to see if you have a potential product failure or recall issue that you can get in front of.
Highlight Successful Customer Engagements and Promote your Brand
- Highlight case studies where you solved problems for customers and use social media to link to print pieces or videos highlighting the customer need, your solution and the positive results you provided to the customer. Also, use video, photos, charts, graphs, infographics and other visuals that tell your story while providing points of interest that people are likely to share within their social media networks.
Remember, social media can be effective for every type of company and not just consumer-facing ones. Please contact us if you want to learn how we can help you at .
