B2B Social Media: Are you an authoritative voice within your industry?

Are your customers other businesses rather than consumers? The social media promotional approach for B2B differs to that of B2C? How?

For B2C audiences, you deal directly with the “decision-maker”; the person who ultimately decides whether or not to buy your products or services. With B2B, there may be more people involved which means the sales cycle that lasts a lot longer.

B2B Lead generation 

As a B2B business, see your social media marketing as a lead generator. Ask yourself, do my accounts bring in more leads? And do they convert - this will help you channel your activity. 

Your social media accounts should represent you as an authoritative voice within the industry - a business that knows the industry inside-out. This can mean sharing industry-related topics and blogs, providing useful advice, running webinars, sharing case studies and white papers, the list goes on...

Really think about your ‘voice’. While it’s become common for industries that target B2C to use informal language and common slang, this might not work for your audience or target market. Take the lead from others in your field. The language doesn’t need to be stuffy, but you might want to avoid cringe-worthy attempts to sound like your 'down with the kids'. 

B2B Social media platforms

What channels you use also plays a part. The most obvious place for a business is LinkedIn, and you should use that platform for lead generation and regularly sharing well-written, professional content. Then there are LinkedIn groups - a great place to meet others in your field and share thoughts.

But Twitter’s very important for businesses too, as many use it for customer services and that includes business customers. 

And lets not forget Google+. Why should you create a Google+ business profile? Well that's easy... it is owned and operated by Google of course. And as a generalisation, like YouTube and Google Places for Business, Google+ profiles do have some perks in getting ranked/indexed by Google. You increase the odds of getting highly targeted visitors from Google’s organic search results if you have a Google Plus account.

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Well curated information and regularly updated feeds will allow your social media channels to do the hard work for you. Need help? Contact us on stagsocialmedia@gmail.com