How to approach B2B social media marketing.

Part four - making a B2B success of Facebook and Twitter.

If your customers and prospects are getting into social media you should be too.

Facebook is rapidly becoming very business friendly and real advantages can be gained if you adopt the right philosophy and approach. After all, Facebook and Twitter can provide very effective forms of business networking - just without the fried breakfast.

What you need to do to get on the path to success is create quality content; this is what you promote to get the ball rolling and to keep it rolling. The information, the stats, the facts, the news, the updates etc. - creating the stuff that will appeal to the people you want to get to know. Producing relevant and timely blogs, white papers, opinion pieces, thought leadership articles, product reviews, demonstration videos, tips and tricks etc. – are all excellent ways to start the process. They become the substance that you use to attract the people you want to attract. They are the basis of a process called friend seeding.

You need to remember it is the immediacy of both Facebook and Twitter and their functionality of streaming questions, comments, opinions and answers quickly and easily that makes them different. It sets them apart from a website or a blog. So don’t turn on the tap if you are not prepared to keep it turned on.

Once you’ve got your content development plan underway, you need to get your corporate Facebook and Twitter accounts sorted. Twitter is simple enough; you just need to design your page in your corporate style and you’re ready to go. Facebook is a little more involved. It is now possible to do whatever can be done with a website, with a Facebook page. What is more, you can show different content depending on whether people have liked your page or not. These developments give rise to some excellent opportunities for innovative marketing techniques. Many companies are now successfully promoting quality content through the Facebook ‘web’ page using the ‘like us’ button as the access point.

To get the friend seeding underway, your content has to be promoted to your target audience via PR releases to relevant trade journals (both printed and digital), and specialist sections in the online newswires – ensuring that the online releases are written for Search Engine Optimisation using your required keywords. This is to ensure that your story can be found via organic search in the main search engines. You should also email your customers and prospects with the details and the link back to your Facebook and Twitter pages. Your trade advertising can carry the social media links as should your web and blog pages.

It is important that you keep your engagement on the networks regular and focused, by promoting your content on Facebook via Twitter as necessary. It’s also imperative that you get involved in all relevant discussions/comments through your Facebook Wall and Twitter pages. You should seek out and join groups on Facebook that are applicable to your business. Use your knowledge and experience, wherever possible, to promote yourself and your business to your audience

You can also search for industry news on the web and add links and comments about it to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, engaging with your followers (customers/prospects included) as much as possible.

If you are very successful with these social media channels you can even form your own group on Facebook to which you can invite the followers you want to join. This group could be used for researching ideas, focus testing products or for more specialised areas of your business.

You should have a schedule for your Facebook and Twitter engagements, make them regular and often and keep the comments, tweets etc. focused, relevant and interesting. That way you’ll keep your followers and fans.

Always look upon your fans and followers as both prospective customers and friends and in this way you’ll have a great chance of turning some of them into loyal customers too.

Next time: making the most of LinkedIn.

Part three - building the distribution network continued: article marketing.