Social Media B2B

This guest post is by Amanda O’Brien, Inbound Marketing Manager at Hall Web Services, one of Maine’s largest web development firms.

It is important to create a set of goals for any business program, and social media is no different. One of the most important parts of your social media strategy is to create a list of questions to outline those goals before you start creating profiles.

• What do you want to get out of Social Media?
• Who are you trying to reach and what communities do they participate in?
• What type of content are you going to share?
• How are you going to measure your results?
• What community are you going to participate in?

There are hundreds of social media sites, thousands and thousands of blogs, forums and millions of conversations happening each day. That in no was means you need to participate in all of them, most of them or even any of them.

What you do have is the opportunity to expand your physical community or local sector into a larger online community that is interested in you, your products, services and staff purely based on the content you produce and the communities you participate in. Geography no longer matters on the web!

Here are two great places to start your community research:

Twitter Search

Most social media sites allow you to connect with your current networks and expand on them. My favorite part about Twitter is you are mainly building followers by your interests and sometimes location. Spend some time in the Advanced Search feature of Twitter Search and see if people are talking about your business, your industry, your keywords and decide if this is a place you could really make some good business connections.

Twitter’s advanced search lets you modify your search and get very specific. You can search for tweets that include certain keywords and omit other terms. You can narrow your search down by location, dates and more. Take a few minutes and search for your business, industry, your website keywords, or even your name and see what you come up with.

LinkedIn Groups and Answers

The demographic of LinkedIn is a bit older and it is generally used as a business networking tool . LinkedIn is the daddy of social networking sites and it is because of its ability to adapt to the needs of their users and the use of Groups and Answer sections. The discussions and news posted, shared and commented on inside these individual groups is what brings so much value to LinkedIn as a social networking site. Generally speaking, the more specific and smaller the group, the more in-depth the conversations. Same goes with the Answers section of LinkedIn. You can get quite specific on your Question topics and really drill down to the community you want to talk to.

Those are just two quick ideas to test the waters. Taking part in social media is about more than posting updates. It is about creating a community online that is generally interested in your content. The number of followers, subscribers, friends is nowhere near as important as who those people are, and if they are interested in you and your company. With a little research you should be able to find a few of the right communities that you would provide benefit to your company.

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