Social Media B2B

Note: This Post Was Inspired By How to Handle Silence, the Worst Kind of Feedback

When it comes to social media a major concern for B2B companies is negative feedback and managing risk. While this is an important concern, it amazes me that more B2B companies aren’t concerned about something far worse: apathy. Apathy is the thing that will stall social media marketing success faster than anything else. Apathy is what gets executives and marketers fired. Apathy is what stops someone from being an effective leader. Apathy is the social web’s version of silence. It makes your company irrelevant.

Understanding from the beginning that you need to actively work to generate comments and interactions is important when starting a B2B blog. Comments and interactions drive sharing of content and will drive leads. The question everyone wants answered is how do companies get comments and avoid apathy?

6 Ways To Generate More B2B Blog Comments

1. Take A Side – Being vanilla doesn’t get you comments. A major issue many companies have in social media is they are so worried about risk that they publish content that is not interesting and overly product centric. If you take 5 minutes and look at the business content on the web today that is generating the most comments, the common element of the posts would be that they all pick a side of a issue or debate. The content isn’t offensive and doesn’t generate unneeded risk. It is simply an interesting opinion and perspective. Have you picked a side in a blog post recently?

2. Ask Questions – People love to talk about themselves. Sometimes though they need to be prompted to do so. Asking questions in blog posts is a great way to generate comments. At Social Media B2B we often ask a few questions at the end of each post, but we also include some through out the post as well.

3. Answer Every Comment – Something that companies and blog authors sometimes do not to well is responding to comments. People want to believe that they have been heard and didn’t put a comment into the black hole that is the Internet. Answering comments provides affirmation and increases the chance that a reader will leave a comment again in the future.

4. Mention People In Posts – Bloggers have long understood that if you link to another person’s blog or mention their name, it will often lead to them leaving a comment on the post. This works especially well for B2B companies because more and more organizations are implementing social media monitoring systems that track these mentions, thus increasing the likelihood of a response.

5. Use Social Networks To Drive Comments – Sure you can ask questions in your blog posts, but additionally you can also leverage social networks to ask for comments and position blog posts in different ways that may lead to more interaction. When sharing a blog post on a social network like Twitter or Facebook, it is not an obligation to simply post the title of the entry and a link. Instead you can directly ask for comments or pull a sentence from the post that you feel may generate more conversation.

6. Have Coworkers Comment – The Internet is about momentum. A blog without comments doesn’t have momentum. Think of content on the social web, the same way you would think of how a mob of people acts. People like to gather around a hub of action and pile on to it. So how do you make this behavior happen when you don’t have any action? Generate some initial action yourself. Have employees, business partners and others close to the company leave comments to blog post to show that action exists around that idea.

Blog comments are valuable for many different reasons. They help ideas spread, provide valuable insight, generate offline conversations, etc. How do you generate blog comments for your B2B blog?

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