How B2B Marketers Use Social Media: New Research

By Phil Mershon

Do you primarily market to other businesses?
Are you wondering, “How does social media work differently for B2B businesses?”

In the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,Mike Stelzner asked marketers how they’re using social media.More than 1900 business-to-business (B2B) marketers shared their insights on what’s working with social media marketing and where they’d like to improve.

In this article I’m going to focus on those areas where B2B marketers have significantly different experiences than their consumer-focused counterparts.

Let’s dig in.

B2B Marketers Show Confidence in Social Media

Of the B2B marketers who took this year’s survey, over 93% use social media to market their businesses. While that’s slightly below their consumer-focused brethren (95.2%), there’s been a significant increase since the 2010 survey when only 88% of B2B marketers responded affirmatively.

Just over 93% of B2B marketers are using social media for marketing purposes (slightly behind B2C marketers).

B2B Marketers Have More Experience

Based on the results of this survey, marketers from B2B brands are more likely to have 3 or more years’ experience than their B2C counterparts (18% of B2B vs. 14% of B2C).

B2B marketers bring more long-term experience to social media marketing than B2C, but lag behind slightly in the 1- to 3-year category.

Social Media Is Getting Results

When asked about the benefits of social media marketing, B2B marketers noted the following:

• Over 56% of B2B marketers acquired new business partnerships through social media (compared to 45% of B2C marketers)
• Nearly 60% of B2B marketers saw improved search rankings from their social efforts (compared to 50% of B2C marketers)
• B2B marketers are more able to gather marketplace insights from their social efforts (nearly 69% vs. 60% of B2C marketers)
• The one area where B2B marketers significantly lag behind their B2C counterparts is in developing a loyal fan base. 63% of B2C marketers found social media helped them develop loyal fans, compared to only 53% of B2B marketers.

What Tools Do B2B Marketers Use?

While almost all B2C marketers (over 96%) use Facebook as a marketing tool, a significantly fewer 87% of B2B brands do the same according to this study. This barely surpasses the adoption of LinkedIn (86.6%) and Twitter (84%).

B2B marketers are also more likely to use blogs (65% vs. 57%) and Google+ (44% vs. 36%).

B2B marketers use Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs and Google+ more than B2C marketers.

Where Will B2B Marketers Invest More Time?

There is little difference in how B2B and B2C marketers will increase their time investment except when it comes to Facebook, LinkedIn and blogging.

In 2012, B2B marketers are far more likely to increase their use of LinkedIn. In fact, over 76% of B2B marketers will increase their use, compared to only 55% of B2C marketers. These are both increases from 2011 (71% of B2B and 51% of B2C).

71% of B2B marketers plan to invest more time in blogging (compared to 65% of B2C marketers).

A significant majority of marketers will increase their use of Facebook this year, but B2B marketers (68%) lag behind B2C companies (76%).

What Do B2B Marketers Want to Learn?

If you offer educational products or consulting for B2B marketers, you’ll be interested to know that B2B marketers want to learn about Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter, in that order. Only in the case of LinkedIn does their interest surpass that of B2C marketers (56% of B2B vs. 50% of B2C).The top topics B2B marketers want to learn about (compared to B2C) are:

• Measuring effectiveness of social media (77% vs. 78%)
• Converting activities to sales (72% vs. 69%)
• Discovering best social media tactics (69% vs. 74%)Only in the case of converting activities to sales do B2B marketers exceed B2C marketers in their desire to learn.

Other Forms of B2B Marketing

It has been properly noted that many other marketing tools (like event marketing) are very social. Social media didn’t suddenly make marketers social. Nor does it replace such valuable tools as email and search engine optimization.

Heidi Cohen quips that we couldn’t have social media without email; how else would you log in to all of these platforms?

That understood, B2B marketers have a somewhat different experience marketing outside of social media. Only in the areas of email and press releases do they invest similarly.

B2B marketers are significantly more likely to use search engine optimization (67% vs. 62% of B2C), event marketing (68% vs. 60%) and webinars (28% vs. 12%).

B2B marketers are much less likely to use direct mail (37% vs. 45%), online ads (33% vs. 43%), sponsorships (25% vs. 31%), television ads (4% vs. 17%), radio ads (8% vs. 25%), and print display ads (25% vs. 47%).

B2B marketers have very different marketing strategies outside of social media.

In terms of future plans for these platforms, B2B marketers plan to increase their use of search engine optimization (69%), event marketing (62%) and email (61%). These are similar to B2C marketers’ responses, except that event marketing is far less important for B2C (51%).

Businesses Are Social Too

In studying history, one can see countless mistakes made by governments and businesses when they forget to view citizens and employees as human beings. In social media marketing it’s important to remember that other businesses are comprised of real people who behave socially (online and offline).

As demonstrated by this year’s industry report, many B2B marketers have found ways to connect with their audiences. How is it going for you?

Article source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/b2b-social-media-marketing-research/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter 

Letter to a Client: How to Successfully Outsource Your Social Media

By Liz Alton

I recently received a request from a friend who was hiring his first full-time, in-house social media talent. “How can I best set her up for success? She really knows social media, but knows very little about my business or industry,” he asked.

I developed the following as a set of guidelines for him and have since used it effectively with my own clients. If you provide social media services, it may be useful for you to share with new clients. If you’re interviewing for a full-time social media job, it can give you a basis of questions to ask employers during the interview and on your first day.

Dear Entrepreneur,

You’ve partnered with someone – either hiring an agency or social VA, or recruiting an in house social media manager. Before you sit down with your new social guru, here are 5 steps you can take to make sure that your effort will be a success.

Outsourcing social media management can be a scary step for an entrepreneur to take. But business owners hold the power to create the conditions for social success by focusing on five key areas.

Define your target audience. Social media is most effective when it connects you to the right people. So who should your accounts target? When your social media is driven by an outsourced company or new hire, it’s important to create a clear profile of who you’re trying to reach.

Sometimes this will be broad (“males, 18 – 24” or “moms, in their 20s and 30s”); often, you can get much more specific. Take time to discuss your business, your products, and your typical customer with your social media person. If you’ve developed in-depth customer archetypes for other marketing efforts, share those. If you haven’t, now is a great time to do that.

Explain your business goals. What do you really want to achieve with social media? All too often, businesses hop on social media because they know they “should be on there” but don’t have a clear agenda. Your social media goals are an extension of your business goals. They may get more specific, in the same way you might delineate a more specific PR strategy, technical strategy, or sales process to articulate individual elements of your business’ broader vision. But your social media efforts should always tie back to what your primary objective is with your business.

Are you trying to reach new customers? Build a sense of community among existing users? Provide real time customer service? Generally increase brand awareness? Reach a few influencers to increase the perception that you’re a thought leader in your space? Whatever you’re trying to achieve, make sure you articulate that to your social media person – it will affect everything from channel selection to content generation and tone.

Unpack your ecosystem. Every business operates in a specific ecosystem, all of which the owner and managers understand because it’s the sum total of thousands of individual inputs over time. Specific pieces of information to consider documenting or discussing with your social media person include:
Who are the big name players in your space that should be immediately flagged for your personal attention if they interact over social media?
What are the big blogs, publications, sites, etc. that bring increased value (and perhaps increased scrutiny) if they interact with you? IE Who are “high value targets” for interaction?
Are there any terms, subjects, or discussions that are taboo and should be avoided at all costs? Are there any points of interaction that should be immediately escalated to your attention if they occur? (e.g. a dissatisfied customer sounding off, a media request for an interview, etc.)
Who are your key competitors? Who are your key partners? What about your advisors, board of directors, etc.? What kind of a tone would you want all of these individuals handled with?
Do you need to put together or refer the social media person to a glossary of common industry terms? Decoding the language of an industry can help them much more easily hit the right “voice.”

Set clear boundaries and reporting structures. Take the time to think about what you need to be comfortable in order to hand over even partial control of your accounts. These usually center around two items – boundaries and reporting structures. Getting clear on these issues is critical to a social media outsource relationship working because it forces you to define the limits of control you need, and gives you a chance to clearly articulate those to your team.
Boundaries: Do you access your social media accounts regularly and just want the social media person to post pre-approved content and do routine functions like delete spam? Can they retweet? Should a list of questions be prepared for your review before responses are sent (and at what intervals)? Or should they plan to use judgment and take full ownership of the accounts? Are they speaking as your voice, or as the company’s voice?

Reporting: What kinds of information do you need to see, and how frequently? In the beginning, opt for more rather than less, but remember that time spent reporting takes away from content creation and engagement. What metrics are useful for you to look at? Growth in numbers of followers and engagement metrics? A summary of the content that was posted for the day? A list of high priority items that only you can respond to? Touching base twice weekly is often about the right interval.

Establish metrics for success – together. Take an honest look at where your social media efforts are today, and then set 3, 6, and 12 month targets. Look beyond numbers for numbers sake, but instead look for metrics that encompass both a broad growth (e.g. increased followers, more likes, infiltrating new platforms) as well as a deepening of engagement (e.g. are people commenting more? Do they visit your site more often, like your posts on Facebook, send more emails? Etc.). Then review these metrics with the social media provider and other trusted colleagues to make sure that the goals are achievable (at one end of the spectrum) and that you’re thinking big enough (the other end of the spectrum).

With this information, our partnership will amazing and I can be sure to help you achieve your business goals through our social media efforts!

Article source: http://socialmediatoday.com/lizalton/493829/letter-client-how-successfully-outsource-your-social-media

The Value of Being on LinkedIn [Infographic]

Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/28972/The-Top-10-Marketing-Infographics-of-2011.aspx

B2B Marketing - LinkedIn vs. Facebook [Infographic]

Source: http://dailyinfographic.com/whos-best-at-b2b-marketing-facebook-vs-linkedin

Content Marketing in 6 Steps

By Steven Van Belleghem

Most marketers have realised by now that they have to swap from the classic communication approach of sending & advertising to an approach based on content. But for most people the exact meaning of that is rather intangible. In order to help, we have composed a pragmatic step-by-step plan for companies to start content planning. The step-by-step plan is based on several surveys we realised in the past year. In this article we will present to you the 6 crucial steps to take in order to end up with a good content strategy.

Step 1: Topic selection

The first must is to check which domains your company can offer unique content in. This content needs to be in line with the company culture & vision, obviously. As far as this choice is concerned it is sensible to check one’s own expertise on the one hand and on the other to see how unique one is in the market. Secondly you investigate the market’s needs. Find out what the topics are that your target group is looking for. A ‘netnographic’ survey or an extensive online search can help you discover these domains. Example: if you are working in a company which organises home care, you want to offer content about ailments your company has a lot of knowledge on, for which there is a lack of information, and that many people are looking for. This is the way to reach an interested audience. Combining the internal (level of uniqueness) and external (what people are looking for) dimensions will result in four categories:

• Avoid: making content your company is not unique in and there is not much demand for, is wasting time and money. 0% of your content should fall in this category.
• Competitive: making content the market is asking for, but your company is not unique in, is necessary once in a while. Given the major need of the market, you regularly respond to that. Do take into account that competitors will also write about these domains: therefore you limit your efforts. 25% of your content is in this category.
• Niche: not many people are interested in this content but it does differentiate your company in the market. Invest 15% of the content in this category.
• Focus: this content will help your company make the difference. The market is looking for it, but competitors are not offering satisfactory solutions. 60% of your content is focused on this category.

Step 2: Content conversion strategy

One of the content marketing targets is generating extra revenues. Hence the importance of creating a good plan in advance, which specifies how content can lead to conversion. The main question is to decide at which point conversion will happen. Then the art is to bring the reader to the content conversion point via the various “content places”.

Here’s a familiar example: Rabobank edited a content conversion plan in their content planning for starter-starter-entrepreneurs. In order to offer advice to this target group, they created the content site http://www.ikgastarten.nl (www.imastarter.nl). Anyone impressed by the information on the site would end up on the Rabobank.nl website where the conversion takes place. Basically a conversion plan had best be compared with composing a football team. The ultimate target is to score, which means the ball has to get to the striker. Certain teams work with the long ball, and thus ensure the striker rapidly getting access to it.

Step 3: Content planning

After determining the topics the next step is to effectively plan the cont. Three content levels can be used when doing so: content updates, content projects and content campaigns.

Updates
Updates are short messages sent with a given regularity. It is a combination of formal content (data, news, hiring…) and informal content (culture, messages on employees, backstage information). These are content pin-pricks which will keep the fans and followers informed of various important and less important matters. The updates are shared mainly via social media. They keep the memory of your company alive.

Projects
Projects are active over a longer period and concern a given theme. Example: a project could be a project launch, a new department, in important survey, a major customer event or a search for employees. As a company you regularly create content concerning the theme during a given period lasting anything between 1 week and 3 months. Projects strive after a clear target. The content is planned depending on this target. This information is mainly shared via online channels (regular smaller and bigger pin-pricks) and can be supported by offline media. A project can possibly also be supported by a campaign. Projects focus strongly on a clearly determined company aspect.

Campaigns
Campaigns are shorter but more intense than projects. Campaigns are often supported by offline media. This content creates an awareness of the company or is used to spread around important company news. All media are used to force a short-term result (usually renown and sales).




Step 4: Conversation-worthy content

Which content is conversation-worthy? That is the main question asked today by many social media and Internet experts. In order to answer that question, we organised a unique survey to prepare this paper. During the survey we gathered all conversations on about 1,000 Facebook fan pages of two hundred global brands. In total we analysed more than 770,000 conversations about these brands. The same was done on Twitter: during a random week in June 2011 we analysed tweets concerning about 300 brands. This resulted in 246,000 conversations. In order to gain insights into what people share with each other, we used data-mining (a complex, in-depth analysis of all available conversation and data) on a million brand conversations. The survey generated many details, but these are the main conclusions:

• The classics still do the trick: contests and games. Content with a game aspect, contests… It results in many a conversation. Together with interaction this gamification receives a lot of ‘likes’. The word 'free' still does a good job as well. When one can get something for free, this generates conversations. And this does not only concern free products, but also free content.
• Structural collaboration. Involve people in your decisions and they will talk about it. When their engagement rises, the number of conversations increases. This need not be complex. Asking a question to the fans can generate a lot of interaction. Furthermore consumers will show their enthusiasm by means of ‘likes’.
• Current events. Fans love sharing news about your company: consumers love to stay informed about news of their favourite companies. But wider topics are also conversation-worthy. Even if not concerning products directly, people love to talk about art, music, food, sports… and they show that they are interested by ‘liking’ this content.
• Positive messages. There is more interaction when sharing something positive than something negative. Consumers love positive stories. Positive messages also obtain a lot of e-’likes’. 

Step 5: Managing conversations

The moment content is shared widely amongst (potential) customers, it is recommended you actively participate in the conversation. That is where we use my first book’s approach (The Conversation Manager): observing, facilitating and participating.

• Observing: listen to the reactions to your content. Measure how many conversations are generated, what their sentiment is and how much impact they have.
• Facilitating: make the sharing of content easy. Add share buttons to everything; make as much digital content as possible. But facilitating does not stop there: it also implies building relations with opinion leaders in your sector. A good relation and strong content will ensure that opinion leaders will be happy to share your content with their network.
• Participating: participate actively in the conversations. If questions are asked, try and answer them as accurately as you can. 

Step 6: Measuring success

Evidently it is very important to actively follow content efforts and to measure the impact they have. Determining targets largely depends on the objectives you have set yourself. Nonetheless we would recommend including three levels of success indicators in your measuring system:

1. Success indicators with a direct impact on the company targets
2. Success indicators with a direct impact on the marketing targets
3. Success indicators linked to the conversations concerning your company 

There you go, those are the six steps of our content marketing approach. As mentioned before this is based on the input from several market studies. All details can be read in this paper. Feel free to down load it in order to read everything at a later stage

Article source: http://socialmediatoday.com/stevenvanbelleghem/440945/content-marketing-6-steps

Top 10 Reasons Your Videos Aren’t Viral

By Debra Ellis

10. Your target audience is too small. If the only people in the world interested in your video are your parents, don’t expect millions of views.

9. You didn’t optimize for search. The search engine bots don’t read “video”. Add text filled with good keywords so your videos will show up for the right people. (Don’t bother if the video is for Mom & Dad. Send them an email with a link.)

8. Your videos don’t fill a need. Viral activity happens when people share content with each other. If there is nothing in your video worth sharing, nothing will happen.

7. Your PR campaign didn’t work. This usually happens because there ISN’T a PR campaign in place. Contrary to social media lore, reporters don’t spend their days scouring YouTube for videos. (If they did, nothing would ever be reported.)

6. Your videos are too long. People have the attention span of a gnat these days. Keep videos under four minutes to maximize the exposure.

5. Your videos are boring. Yep, that’s right, BOOOORRRRRING. Of course it’s almost impossible to make some topics exciting, but give it a try.

4. You are unlucky. Odds are that you’ll win the lottery or be struck by lightning before you have a viral video. Buy a ticket, get a lightning rod, and make a video. You might as well cover your bases.

3. You didn’t hire the right SMEE (social media expert extraordinaire). There are people who promise that they will make your videos viral. So you know, those promises aren’t guarantees, they are more like wishes. If you think that you need a SMEE, read number four again.

2. You don’t have cats and dancing babies in your videos. It’s a sad but true fact – cute and funny are requirements for viral videos. (Gross and disgusting works too, but who wants THAT associated with their brand?)

1. You aren’t making and posting videos. The only true guarantee for viral videos is that you won’t have one if you don’t post one. To win it, you have to be in it.

To create winning videos every time, make them interesting, relevant, and helpful for your customers and prospects. They may not go viral, but they will generate revenue. And, that’s why you are in it. Right?

Article source: http://socialmediatoday.com/debraellis/451772/top-10-reasons-your-videos-aren-t-viral

Socializing Your Brand: A Brand's Guide to Sociability [Infographic]

Source: http://www.reactorr.com/blog/index.php/2011/12/branding-infographics/