The Changing Landscape of Social Media
Estimated Read Time: 4 minutes
Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft Partners
Working with B2B technology/tech services companies for well over a decade, Maven Collective Marketing has learned and tested more than a few social media platforms. The social media landscape has quickly evolved since its birth in the mid-2000s. Having said that, the success and focus of B2B companies when it comes to B2B marketing on social media hasn’t changed much, even with all the newer entrants, such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, etc.
Where we have historically found success in B2B marketing with social media is where we still find consistent success today, in what is often known as the “professional social networks” – LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube – and let’s not forget Google My Business and Bing Places.
Platforms Beyond the Vanity Metrics
Beyond the vanity metrics of followers, likes, and hashtags on Twitter, it is a helpful platform to bring brand awareness as well as build relationships with notable industry professionals. If planned and executed intelligently, with the purpose of awareness and engagement as a social referral hub, Twitter can be a very powerful and important tool for B2B companies.
Of course, LinkedIn is known as the social network for professionals, a keystone to any good B2B social media marketing strategy. Since its acquisition by Microsoft, LinkedIn has doubled down on that stake, expanding the functionality of company pages, hashtags, post authoring, etc. This credibility and authority-building platform, within your trusted professional network, is an invaluable tool to B2B marketers and B2B sales teams. LinkedIn is also a great tool to target and connect with B2B buying stakeholders by easily targeting industry, department, and job roles through quick LinkedIn searches.
Finally, Google My Business and Bing Places fulfill an SEO marketer’s dream. Why? You have the ability to expand your search engine real estate in the knowledge panel at no extra cost. It’s much like a leprechaun might feel when he actually reaches that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – ‘thank me lucky charms’.
Align Success Metrics with the Right Social Channel
Depending upon your metric of success, each social media channel can yield results in different ways.
In our experience with B2B clients, Twitter has been a great medium to:
- Build brand awareness,
- Build connections with influential industry professionals,
- Drive website traffic.
- Generate early buying stage leads.
Once we have captured the contact information of the prospective buyer from these social media interactions, we continue to nurture and strengthen the connection with these individuals through nurture email marketing, ad remarketing, sales touches, and other touchpoints.
LinkedIn bears different fruit from Twitter, while being a highly personalized professional networking tool, which can:
- Establish credibility and authority through building a B2B LinkedIn Company Page full of evidence of expertise, industry awards and recognitions.
- Share expertise and thought leadership with LinkedIn Groups, answering questions and sharing ideas to intercept and educate prospective B2B buyers.
- Networking and prospecting, LinkedIn can be a profound tool for prospecting, beyond the basics of InMails to establish real business relationships.
A LinkedIn Success Story
Maven Collective Marketing has worked with many B2B clients to leverage the lead generation capabilities of LinkedIn.
Among these engagements, one client leveraged LinkedIn to find new projects aligned with their expertise. As corporations started hiring for key job roles that would be accountable for overseeing an internal project, the business development representative reached out to connect with the hiring manager and department head to start establishing the project requirements around solutions and services. Of course, when the time came to hire external resources to help the internal teams, our client was the first to call and sell in the solution/service offering. This tactic worked time and time again with LinkedIn networking, outreach, and tenacious follow-through.
LinkedIn helps businesses identify the industry sectors that you, as a B2B company, have had the most success in and who the typical ‘buyer’ or ‘stakeholders’ are at these companies. LinkedIn can be a powerful tool to find the exact ‘who’ it is inside each organization’s unique structure.
Our client has gone on to sign customer organizations of +75,000 employees to multi-million dollar contracts from their fruitful LinkedIn hunting.
Conquering the Google Real Estate
Finally, Google My Business is a no-brainer (also don’t forget to connect to Bing Places as an added bonus for expanding real estate in Bing). We all want more real estate on Google and that is why so many B2B companies pay to run Google Ads.
Maven Collective Marketing works with B2B clients on both Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing/Paid Advertising. In both forums, you want to expand your presence and reach, which Google My Business can do.
We have seen success using Google My Business for B2B clients to draw website traffic into different webpages, events, and blogs that aren’t always the first to display in the search results, but as part of the right-panel knowledge graph searches.
More clicks and more eyes on your website are the first metrics of success for B2B marketing. Continuing to intrigue and nurture that buyer happens far beyond the entry points of B2B social media.
Optimize Your B2B Social Media Channels
You too can make the most of social media platforms and get your B2B solutions and services in front of the right people. This is your chance to utilize these engaging tools to find your prospective customers where they are consuming new information daily.
Get in touch with the Mavens today to explore how your B2B organization can leverage social media channels for brand awareness: maven@mavencollectivemarketing.com.
