Three B2C Social Media Approaches for B2B Success
Tue, Dec 28, 2010
Communications, Facebook, LinkedIn, Marketing, Social Networks
Finding new ways to market your B2B company can sometimes be difficult. The buying process is different and more complex than the B2C buying cycle. Many of the social media marketing tips and tricks these days are focused on B2C businesses and they are not easily applied to the unique aspects of B2B.
Many new internet marketing tools are more robust than their predecessors, have some form of analytic data that you can collect and are moving the bottom line for other B2B companies. Let’s look at three social media approaches that are traditionally for B2C companies and their applicability for B2B companies.
1. Facebook Advertising
Facebook definitely has the B2C approach under control. We now like businesses and products on the world’s largest social network. Getting the same type of results for a B2B company is harder. One of the most powerful parts of Facebook is their advertising platform because of the way you can target your ads. You can target your business’s connections to the ad viewer: places of employment, current and previous positions, location and so much more. These ads are also currently very inexpensive.
For the branding exercise alone, it may be worth it to test Facebook Advertising and see how many impressions and click throughs you get to your website. The free analytics will tell you all you need to know about your spend and results.
2. Geolocation Services
Geolocation services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and Yelp have gotten a lot of attention in 2010. They are a no brainer for B2C companies. A smartphone app that people use to get traffic in the door? Of course. Participating gets a little bit harder when you don’t have a location or if you are in the B2B space and your purchasing/buying cycle doesn’t quite follow the logic of “my friend checked in there, I should buy my HR Software from them too.”
Geolocation applications can be used for B2B companies too. As with many social media tools, geolocation applications are about relationship building. Using the service may introduce you to new people you didn’t know before or strengthen relationships you already had. With most geolocation services you can also leave tips. This is a great way to share your expertise in your industry. Go to a location that perhaps your customers would go to and leave a tip. Geolocation services are also great for events. Have people check-in at your conference booth, upload a picture, leave a tip reminding them about your session and when they do the actions left behind – give them a special giveaway or prize.
3. Peer Reviews
We hold a lot of weight to what our network says. We also share a lot of the same connections within our own B2B industry. B2B businesses should consider how they can use peer reviews or testimonials to help add credibility to their services and their company. Many B2C sites have customer reviews for products, and we can add those same types of reviews for B2B products and services.
If you are not able to easily add peer reviews or testimonials to your site, consider using the new LinkedIn features to collect reviews on some of your most popular products and services. LinkedIn recently launched an addition to their business pages, where LinkedIn users can review products and services that you put on your company profile. With the beefed up company pages, there are also analytics to keep an eye on who is visiting your company LinkedIn page.
Instead of throwing our hands up at the internet marketing and social media approaches that are available to B2C companies, consider how to use them to your advantage. We may not be able to use all things in the same way, but there are definitely features and extras that have value to B2B businesses.
I would love to hear comments below on social media ideas that are generally used for B2C companies and how you are using them in your B2B industry.
Amanda O'Brien is VP of Marketing at Hall Web Services, one of Maine's largest web development firms. Follow Amanda on Twitter at @amanda_pants.
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Thanks Amanda for these useful tips.
Re LinkedIn company pages – I think there is enormous potential here – however I think LinkedIn needs to tighten up in 2 areas. Firstly there doesn’t appear to be stringent checks in place to check whether people listed as employees are “real” employees. When individuals set up new individual profiles it appears there is no check around email/domain name as to whether that person is entitled to be listed as a company’s employee. I would prefer to see the owner of the company profile have to “accept” employees. I had a week long battle with a gentleman in another country to accept that he didn’t actually own my firm’s profile (his firm had the same name).
Also – re the company’s products and services page (a terrific vehicle to receive recommendations), it appears any employee is able to edit the page. This can be difficult to manage even for legitimate employees. Again – some method where the company profile’s owner can assign editing privileges would be ideal.
If you can get the community together to bring this to LinkedIn’s attention that would be great. I tried via their online customer support area to gain assistance with the “multiple owners” issue but received no response.
Bruce
Thanks Bruce,
I am with you that I see a lot of potential with LinkedIn, but they have to work on a few things. Especially as more and more people use it we need to have a checks and balances for protectig our company pages so no one has to go through what you had to go through.
Managing a company page can be hard, especially when no one gets a notification of a change to an employee, a new ‘follower’ or if someone leaves a recommendation for a product or service. That makes us responsible checking the company page regularly and looking for additions or changes.
I hope as LinkedIn matures we will see the changes that both you and I think are important. Good luck!