Social Media B2B

Having silos in an organization is bad, most people who have studied management can agree on that. Silos are one of the biggest problems facing organizational advancement in social media today. Often because people see social media still as “nerdy” or “technical” so they tend to want to leave it to one person or a group of people to handle so that the rest of the organization, doesn’t have to learn about it. This is likely a more crucial organizational failure for social media than any other discipline within a business.

B2B Social Media Needs An Army
Talk with any search engine optimization professional and they will likely tell you that the key to great SEO is creating compelling content and working to create a network of links back to the online destination that you are trying to promote. Marketing on the Internet today is about creating an ecosystem of people who share, link to and are interested your online information.

Many companies are spending a large amount of money monthly to build online networks for social media marketing and organic search engine marketing purposes. While this is important, they are overlooking a core advantage that they have: employees. I don’t care if you have 5 or 500 employees. Getting your whole organization involved with social media is a business advantage that you can not afford to ignore.

Simple Tasks Employees Can Do To Make An Impact
When getting an entire B2B organization involved with social media, key priorities exist. The first is to educate current employees and empower them. Secondly, a process needs to be in place for new employees to get trained as they join the company. Though I would point out, that having some type of social media policy or guidelines for employees online behavior should be a precursor to this level of involvement.

Ideas For Getting Employees Involved

1. Set Up And Optimize LinkedIn Profile – LinkedIn is the default B2B social network and when developed across an entire company it can drive powerful results. For example the URLs in a linked profile can be customized with anchor text to help send search engine ranking authority to a corporate Web site from each of the employees profile pages. Additionally employee profiles can be optimized for searches within LinkedIn that can help drive leads and new business opportunities.

2. Establish Employee Blog or Posterous - While things like Twitter or Facebook are good for sharing information online and building credibility about industry knowledge, they don’t transfer the full communications benefits in the way that a blog does. If employees contribute to a corporate blog, then it only makes sense that you help them establish one of their own. This way they can better learn how online communication works and can hopefully begin sharing information relevant to their own interests, both professionally and personally. Posterous, a simple blogging platform, I have mentioned before is a quick and easy way to get something set up that is not overly technical or hard to use.

3. Educate On The Proper Use Of Social Networks For Business – It seems that the stories people talk about when referencing how employees use social networks are all negative. A main reason is because organization doesn’t help educate employees in regards to online etiquette. Though if your organization establishes good practices, then employees can understand the best way to support the company while they are having online conversations.

While these are only a few simple examples of ways to get employees engaged in social media, I encourage you to think of the possibilities for your organization. Think of the goals you could achieve if you empowered people who are already advocates for your company.

Is your company doing this?

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