The Importance and Value of Social Media to Your B2B Company

With more than 900 million active users of Facebook, 140 million active Twitter users, and 160 million LinkedIn members, there’s no denying the prevalence of social media in the lives of an increasingly significant portion of the world’s population.

What about for your B2B business? Does it make sense to leverage social channels? And if so, how? Clearly, there is a lot of potential upside; following are just a few of the objectives you can realize:

• Generate leads that convert to sales more frequently and at a faster rate
• Establish your people as trusted experts in your markets
• Build market awareness for your company and its offerings
• Establish and enhance communications with customers and prospects
• Stay on top of market trends and status

On the other hand, engaging in social media can present challenges and isn’t right for every organization:

• It takes time. There is no getting around this. You will have to be able to allocate time on a regular basis to create and curate content, and manage your social profiles.
• It takes money. While it can be relatively cheap compared to other marketing endeavors, social media is not free. You need to staff this effort, may want to pay to create content, and possibly promote your efforts through paid products.
• You need to be open to continually learn. This is a very fast-moving field and knowledge and understanding will give you and edge over your competition.
• While one person may be able to manage the social profiles, B2B social media is a team sport and team leaders will likely rely on others to both create content and use personal accounts to support the proliferation of messages and content.
• Do you have a culture that would embrace, appreciate, and support this effort? Social media makes it easy for people to advocate in your behalf. Your employees should voluntarily and enthusiastically be your strongest advocates.

Over the next few weeks I will be writing about how B2B companies should think about and approach social media. Stay tuned.