Social Media B2B

Managing a social media presence for a B2B company or client takes time, and one of the things that should always be in the back of your mind is how to make it more efficient. There are many tools that help with posting information and monitoring what people say about your brand, but in this post we are going to focus on finding relevant content to share with your network. Most social media practitioners suggest you share more content from others than from yourself (assuming you are creating content as you should be). This doesn’t mean repost everything you see. You need to read what you are sharing and make sure it is worth sharing. Providing valuable and helpful information to your network makes you a trusted source of information.

Many businesses slow down in the summer, and this is great time to look at the sources of information coming in. Everything should be reviewed, and just like a desk-cleaning exercise, if you don’t need it, get rid of it.

RSS Reader
If you use an RSS, make sure you are actually checking it at least once a day. The biggest problem with these readers is that they become daunting when you get behind. The numbers of unread posts just keep growing and it makes it hard to even look at it.

• Mark everything as read so you have a clean slate
• Remove feeds that you never look at
• Remove feeds that you never share, unless it provides value to you personally and there is no need to share
• Hide feed counts (in Google Reader: drop down next to subscriptions). This removes the pressure of how many unread posts have stacked up.
• Add some new feeds that you always read and share. This helps re-energize your reader, rather than seeing the same old feeds.

Twitter
Sometimes it is easier to use Twitter as a source of information rather than use a feed reader. The people you follow post information relevant to you. Sometimes it is from sites you don’t follow. This is great when you are watching Twitter, but lots of information goes by that you never see. Here is a suggestion to manage Twitter more like a reader and provider of information.

• Select people or Twitter accounts that provide the best information
• Create Twitter Lists of those accounts, separated by topic
• A huge list of people who tweet a lot is not helpful. Keep the lists small and manageable
• Add these lists to your preferred Twitter client and go to them when you can during the day. This makes the content more permanent, as opposed to just flowing by in your Twitter stream.
• You can also set up alerts, in a program like Tweetdeck, of these lists to see tweets in real time
• Create Twitter searches for keywords to find additional sources. Follow them as needed
• Note than you may want to unfollow people who don’t provide value to you, but these are people who tweet too much about things you are not interested in, rather than ones who rarely tweet.

LinkedIn
This is a good time to go through your LinkedIn groups and see if they are providing any value to you. If you are still getting emails with group updates, considering changing the frequency of those emails, or eliminating them all together if you never read them. Our inboxes are cluttered enough without having our networks send unnecessary messages that never get read. Many of these groups have newsfeeds where other group members post relevant articles. In addition to the discussions that occur around these topics, these relevant articles are a good source of content that you can share with your network. Find other groups that might offer some value and start the process again.

Email
And finally, what does your email inbox look like? Have you subscribed to newsletters that you no longer read? It is time to unsubscribe. You should only subscribe to three kinds of emails: things that will help you in your job (industry news, practical tips), special deals from companies you might actually buy from, and information that you can share with your network. Not only can you share individual articles, but many emails now include share with your network buttons. If the newsletter provides great value, you can show them some social media love and share the entire email. The advantage of sharing this way is that it provides more value to your network than you just posting a single link. Your followers might subscribe and receive future emails with valuable information. And they might even remember the original link came from you (I did say might, but this is all about sharing, right?).

What else have you done to keep relevant information flowing in and keeping the junk out?

Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.