B2B social media marketing is a new staple for companies who want to expand their social media reaches to their limits. As more and more businesses use social media to both connect with one another and create communities and brand loyalty on social media platforms, more and more businesses are looking to get in on the action. This kind of brand value is attractive to any business, and it should be something at the forefront of your own mind.
Social media is like the new frontier for businesses, and it offers a lot of promises and mystique; a new land that needs to be conquered and farmed of resources. For the most part, there is a very positive aspect to this kind of marketing: it’s cheap, it’s reasonably simple to create and execute strategies for, and it’s also very far reaching in terms of audience availability. On its face, this form of marketing isn’t problematic at all.
Businesses, however, need to be aware of a fatal marketing trap they fall into, and that is being too cautious with their branding reaches.
A Plausible Scenario…This Could Be You
Here’s an example of a plan gone wrong: Business A sees what social media is doing for their competitors and they decide to put their own horse in the race. They set up a plan to start posting their content on Social Media Site B because the audience there is the demographic they want to target.
From there they set up a content strategy plan: the create an account and make it optimized and professional and from there the content starts rolling out. Videos, articles, blogging content, shorter blurbs. Everything is going great…
…Until the content well dries up. This can happen for a few reasons; most content on the Internet isn’t donated or free and requires paying writers and writing services. Some companies only have a minimal content budget, while others pour a lot of cash into content but the cash river stops being so free-flowing after a while.
This is often coupled with the idea that sharing content from others is promoting other businesses and that’s a big no-no. This leads consumers to believe something that probably isn’t intentioned: this businesses just wants to be self-promoting, they aren’t interested in actually communicating with me. When consumers believe they’re being involved in an advertising ploy, they’re more likely to unsubscribe/unfollow, or to not follow to begin with. Business A’s audience potential plummets.
This leads to a lack of brand advocacy, and this can bleed into employee channels. Many brands don’t teach all employees about personal optimization, which then bleeds into the company mainstream. Business A’s pages suffer and lose ranking standings.
This loops back into content exclusivity. Typically businesses who don’t want to share content from other channels don’t like using social media platforms where that is part of the point. This means Social Media Sites C, D and E are off the table, killing their ability to share content from site B AND closing off an audience pool that they could utilize.
Utilizing a practice like this leads to a very slow growth channel, making their very minimal attempts at utilizing social media essentially useless. Lead generation, email subscription list sign ups and follower counts slow to a crawl.
Business A has failed in their overall mission.
The Takeaway
Now this might seem like a lot of extremes grouped into one scenario, but it happens all the time when businesses don’t understand how to use and utilize B2B social media strategies. Read over the example and see how many marketing mistakes you can point out. Even making just one, not even the first snowballing mistake, can lead you to lose a lot of leads that you could be making otherwise.
There are definitely a few lessons to be learned here, and here’s a quick cheat sheet to keep you up to speed:
- Don’t say you won’t share outside content. This practice helps build social value and shows that you’re willing to share with consumers instead of bombarding them with ad after ad.
- Make sure everyone in the company who has access to business social media accounts understand SEO optimization. This formula still counts for your social media profiles and content.
- Allocate a certain amount of money or resources to keeping your original content fresh. Some content manufacturing businesses sell packages that generate articles per week or month so you can keep your unique articles, blogs and social media postings generated regularly.
These mistakes are all very common in the business sphere, even if they may seem like common sense. Keep them out of your own strategies and you should be fine.
