B2B Social Media Success – Don’t copy B2C

Social Media has rightly created the biggest buzz in the marketing world in recent years and this shows no sign of abating as social networks continue to grow in importance in peoples’ lives and the social marketing activities of companies has become more accepted. But the buzz is overwhelmingly about consumer marketing, while B2B has so far been the poor cousin.

In an interview last month on Sky Business News, Tom Skotidas, ADMA’s B2B Social Media Marketing tutor, was asked why this was the case and what B2B marketers could do to make social media more relevant to their marketing mix. The basic problem, says Tom, is that B2B marketers try to apply strategies and tactics from the B2C world only to be disappointed when the results don’t meet expectations.

Ultimately both consumer marketers and B2B marketers want the same things – a strong brand and impressive sales figures – but whereas consumer brands typically use social media to drive greater brand recognition and engagement (which of course leads to sales), B2B needs to employ strategies and tactics which focus more on more tangible outcomes like lead generation. Consumer marketers on Facebook will be looking at measures of engagement such as numbers of fans, likes, shares, comments; On Twitter they will be looking at numbers of followers, tweets, re-tweets and mentions. B2B marketers should be looking more at numbers of connections, enquiries, meetings generated, proposals delivered and sales closed – basically the same metrics they use in their traditional marketing.

“A lot of B2B organisations are having conversations without knowing how to take them to the next stage” says Tom “The basic problem seems to be copying consumer marketers by entering the social media world with a corporate presence and then trying to communicate with a corporate voice to the entire target market”. What is needed is for these organisations to invest in building up the profiles and connections of key individuals in the organisation, then because the target audience is typically smaller and well-defined, to focus on person-to-person communications. The company page still has a role to play but it’s not going to drive leads as much as the person-to-person approach.

This two-pronged approach works whichever of the 3 main platforms you use – LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Skotidas points out that in the last couple of weeks LinkedIn has introduced a status update function for company pages – which matches the function already available in Facebook. This approach gives a company far more communication scope. The company page can focus on over-arching brand messages while key individuals concentrate on their specific areas of responsibility, e.g. markets or products. The person-to-person communications can be modified to reflect the company voice.

To hear the entire interview go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLQHxG9jq8U

Tom runs ADMA’s 2-day B2B Social Media Marketing course in Sydney and Melbourne. The next course runs in Melbourne on Oct 20-21.