While a study by BtoB Magazine conducted last year pegged 93% of all B2B marketers to be engaged in some form of social media marketing, I still see some B2B marketers shun a mufti-dimensional social media program. Sure, LinkedIn is okay but all the others?

Perhaps the name is the first barrier. The soft, squishy “Social Media” label belies the incredible influence that blogs, twitter, Facebook, Google+ can have on a business-to-business brand. But I like to think of “Social Media” more as visibility media – or search media. Jeffrey L. Cohen, Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com agrees. He recently wrote that “prospects still find their way to your site and your content by search, and Google (Plus) is giving B2B marketers another tool to help with that.” That’s actually true for all the social media elements.

But just exactly, how does Social Media work to help your prospects find you? Let’s start by examining a company’s digital foot print.

In the graph above, the mighty Web Site is situated on the left with corporate and product messaging, and possibly e-commerce waiting patiently for visitors. Just four years ago, the quip “build it and they will come” held true for web sites. Some studies suggest that as much as 93% of internet visitors went directly to the Web Site as recently as 2008 – without the assistance from Google or another search engine.

However, today that relationship has completely reversed. Now 90% of visitors arrive at your site through search, represented in the graphic as the circle on the right. It is no longer enough to just build the site. Marketers must expand their presence on the internet to get closer or rather more visible to the search engines. And one of the most effective ways to do that is to use social media to expand the company’s digital footprint.

The most common social media vehicles are noted on the chart. However, the real key to maximizing the footprint is not so much which elements are selected but rather that these social media elements are integrated with each other – as well as refined to best appeal to certain segments of your prospects and customers. For example, a new product is usually launched with an announcement on the web site. A message is also posted on Facebook about the new product as a tweet directs readers to the blog on the microsite that explains in greater detail the product benefits. A video of someone using the product is posted on YouTube, and the blog feed is updated on the management team’s LinkedIn page. The next day, the twitter account takes up new tweets and retweets. Facebook has a couple of new posts. The next week the same integrated approach is applied to promote the next topic identified in the editorial calendar.

It is actually a fairly straight forward and efficient process but it takes a good plan and some discipline to keep all the pieces working together. There is one other important element to success – engaging relevant content that has been optimized for the search engines, but I’ll save that for my next blog. If you would like to explore further how to create or enhance a strategic approach for B2B Social Media, please contact me.

patriciah@scgpr.com
612-288-2403

-Pat Henning

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