The internet has become a huge part of business, especially Marketing. An insightful guest lecture into social media's use in the business to business environment by John Stanton (Joint MD) and Gifford Morley-Fletcher (Director of Strategy, Inbound Marketing) from Base One brought to my attention the vast array of social media platforms from which B2B companies can communicate with current and potential customers. To me, the use of social media in marketing was predominantly a B2C activity however, the opposite is actually true, 75% of B2B brands have twitter compared to just 49% of B2C brands. Base One's social media landscape [2] depicts some of the key social media platforms and their uses.
Why use social media? How does it work for businesses?
Instead of blindly picking a social networking platform and produce random messages for followers/friends/subscribers, businesses need a strategy, a strategy that combines several types of social media to effectively communicate with the correct audience in the correct way. I'm going to take twitter as my primary example, and illustrate it's use in communicating with current and potential customers for selected B2B brands. 140 characters isn't much, fitting in all of the information a business wants to convey is hard, this sentence is 140 characters long #fact. So here's my top twitter tips for B2B communication via Twitter.
- Connect your media. As i mentioned earlier interlinking social medias is important and will reach more customers. Using just one platform will become stale and might not communicate the whole message. Tweet links to company blogs, websites, events pages, pictures (i.e. Flickr), things like this help to expand potential and current consumers interaction with the company whilst making your profile worth following.
- Make it interesting. At the end of the day, a company is not viewing your profile, an individual from that company is, so make it interesting and relevant, not just boring corporate retweets, BUT, remain professional. No-one wants to do business with a company who tweets offensive jokes, retweets every single article that might seem interesting or gives bowel updates of the individual who updates the twitter account (yes i have seen it!). A great example of my 1st two points is from @hpnews (Hewlett Packard) who, in the following tweet, provide a link to their blog about an interesting and relevant subject at the time (I strongly recommend reading the blog-link).
@hpnews Data Central, @NFL Superbowl Edition: The Quarterback of the Future?" http://bit.ly/eqODvq
Whilst on the blog there is a link to all of their media on the side of the page, another example of interlinking media. - Respond. The term web 2.0, popularised by Tim O'Reilly relates to the participatory and interactive nature of the web today, one which companies can take advantage of. People will often tweet at companies about problems (current customers) and enquiries (potential customers). Although time consuming it could be very useful to respond to consumers, from a PR perspective it looks great and is a brilliant way to get real answers to
- Monitor. Monitoring is a great way of seeing what people are saying about your brand, products and competitors. The simplest way of doing this is to simply type the search term into the twitter search box, and a list of real time results are produced. Small business might also consider tweetdeck. More complex monitoring tools will allow for a variety of search terms and emotions to be monitored, even a psychological profile of an individual can be produced by simply monitoring tweets! An interesting blog article explaining some of these tools was produced by Pam Dyer from Social Media Today [3]. @BTCare use monitoring tools to constantly see what people are saying about a variety of their products and services, you can tweet at them and they will respond to any query. This illustrates incredible customer service, through the use of social media.
These are just some of the ways businesses can use social media, in particular twitter to communicate, please feel free to comment any more.
Every week I'll suggest 1 twitter account to follow and 1 article/blog to read so here goes week 1!
Top Tweeter: @basebot -specialist B2B marketer from Base One
Top Tweeter: @basebot -specialist B2B marketer from Base One
Reccomended Read: Marketing Week: Social media users complain little but want fast response. http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/sectors/media/social-media-users-complain-little-but-want-fast-response/3022232.article
[4][1] Tweets per day Graph: http://tinyurl.com/6xqfbrj
[2] Social media landscape: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5823830/B2B_social_media_landscape.pdf
[3] Monitoring tools: http://socialmediatoday.com/index.php?q=SMC/192464
[4] Twitter comic strip: http://tinyurl.com/5w9p5p3
Why do you think B2C usage is proportionately lower than that of B2B counterparts? Surely it is advantageous for B2C as well as B2B companies to exploit such a vast pool of potential consumers.
ReplyDeleteHeya Josh,
ReplyDeleteOne of the main advantages for its use in B2B is the small amount of time and resources it consumes,due to the smaller customer base these comapnies generate the majority of their profit from as opposed to B2C whose customer base, is on the whole, larger. Thought generation is another important use for B2B companies, especially the use of blogs to communicate new ideas and concepts. This links directly to the fact that the buying process in B2B transactions is much longer, more complex and requires a large amount of informtation to make, in the US 95% of B2B buyers check the company website before making a purchase. This, as opposed to the majority of B2C transactions, the buying process being much simpler and less complex, therefore consumers are less likely to actively seek information online about these products/services.
Hope this helps. Thanks for the comment.