Having been asked so many times recently about where to start, I thought I would share a few thoughts on how B2B businesses can kick off their social media strategy.
The key to this is “listening before you speak”. I would advise that a business spends the first few months building up a knowledge of what is being said. To help them understand the size of the opportunity within Social Media (as nearly all marketers have to balance this against all the other tasks they have to complete) and to help prepare the right kind of proposal for your business on how you will harness social media in the long term.
1. Protect your brand – register your Twitter account
Simple. Even if you are not sure yet if you will ever use Twitter for your business, make sure your protect your brand and register an account for your business now. Not only does it protect from competitors/similar named companies using it, it is also hard work to move a brand squatter from your twitter name once they are on there – we have been trying at Cyance for nearly 12 months with no success!
2. Listen to what is being said about you.
This is always the place to start, and every business can do this today. There are a plethora of excellent (free) tools to start you off.
Use tools like whostalkin.com, blogpulse.com and Twilert to start to understand what is being said about you, your brand, your competitors and the wider market. For certain b2b businesses it may be that little or no conversation is out there, which is a very useful thing to know before you try and spend time and money on all singing and dancing social media programme – for some it may simply be not worth the effort, when compared to other channels.
3. Find and scale your market
As well as listening to what people say about you, it’s well worth monitoring phrases, terms and words that are about your market – for example if you are email marketing company, phrases like “email marketing” and “deliverability” are phrases that you may want to know the author for.
If you target particular markets or job titles, then using the Linkedin people search is a great way of finding your existing customers as well as trying to size the market that is out there. For example, if Finance Directors are your target audience, then search for that title on LinkdIn and you’ll be faced by a list of all matching LinkedIn profiles. Now it’s too early to start to try and target them, but it gives you a good idea of who and how many are out there and if some of those are your customers, you can start to listen or connect to them straight away.
4. Monitor trends (and fads)
With the news this week that Google is about to pull it’s much trumpeted product Google Wave, it’s a timely reminder that not every new kid on the social media block will be the next Facebook or Twitter. In fact, for a lot of B2B businesses neither of these sites will be relevant to them at all. But social media is much wider than just those superstar sites. Again, niche markets can benefit from easily identifying bloggers or forums where your customers do spend their time.
It is not yet the time to jump in on those forums and talk, but it is very easy to monitor what gets said, to start to build up a view of who is in your market and what the current trends, issues and thoughts are. Once again blogpulse.com is a good place to start to find these bloggers, as boardtracker.com is excellent for forums.
5. Do It Yourself
The easiest way to really understand Social Media and how it can be utilised for your business, is to start by using it for yourself. Ensure you have a full LinkedIn profile, register a twitter account in your name and start to follow people of interest ; be these work people, or based on your hobbies/interests. Once you have got a better feel for the nuances of how it works and how you can make it work for you, it is a lot easier to do for your business, allowing you sell the idea internally more eloquently also.
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