A Successful B2B Social Media Strategy Requires Relevance

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1. B2B businesses are making significant social media efforts without generating business ROI. Our customers tell us that the amount of time and energy that goes into daily social media marketing seems obtuse; they work hard to share a lot of content on a lot of channels, but that content does not lead to more sales or more qualified prospects. So why invest in social media? Most businesses know they should, but do not know how to do so effectively. According to Dr. Neil Hair of the E. Philips Saunders College of Business at Rochester Institute of Technology, “Only one in seven companies have a formal process in place for deploying social networking tools.”

   Use social media to become the influential voice of the big issue that impacts your customers.

   Do not just share your content. That’s what everyone is doing and it is not the advantage for smart B2B businesses. Your prospects want a dependable, reliable resource to filter out all the irrelevant content flooding their information searches. In a CNN news column, Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, a popular blog about social media, named content curation as one of the 10 Web trends to watch in 2010.By curating content online and sharing that content across your integrated marketing channels, you will attract qualified leads who want to hear more from you, and you will create a relevant social media presence that will bring customers to you.

   Content curation delivers consistency across your integrated marketing channels; your prospects can go to any number of resources online to get the information they need, but they will come to you if you provide them exactly what they need, when they need it. You must ensure that your voice is the one resource online where prospects can browse all relevant information available. Blogs, news, and research are necessary components of a relevant social media presence – share from all of these, but share only what is relevant.

   Most social media sites do not provide the level of relevance and precision that B2B businesses need to convert prospects into customers. Social media channels are just another marketing channel; Twitter provides a means to tweet, but becoming a brand leader depends on what you tweet. You need to identify what industry voice you want to own and use that voice online to create and share resources that validate your message and educate your prospects effectively. Successful online brand leaders speak to industry voice with authority, and use social media as one of many means to do so.

   If you are interested in learning more about content curation and online brand leadership, download our factsheet, “Top 10 Reasons Companies Struggle to Become Thought Leaders,” and register for our eBook, “Content Curation: Taming the Flood of B2B Marketing Content.”
   

   Visit www.hivefire.com for all the relevant information on content curation marketing.

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