Social media offers B2B businesses nearly limitless opportunities to interact with customers and potential leads. But shockingly, as many as 80% of companies may be missing out on the full benefits of social media, or worse, not handling these opportunities correctly.
The good news is that you can help to reverse this trend immediately when you know how to really make a good impression on your target market.
1) Increase Your Reach With Meaningful Posting
You may have heard that the higher the number of posts you make on social media, the more people that will see them. Interestingly, that isn’t the way social media works; in fact, posting for the sake of posting will actually decrease your reach.
It is important to post regularly to maintain momentum, but avoid sacrificing quality (or relevance) for quantity. Your brand message needs to remain consistent throughout your postings, but the most important factor is to create content that is genuinely valuable to your target market. This will involve some research into your customer’s buyer behaviour, work-related issues and motivations. Don’t feel you have to write War and Peace with each Facebook or LinkedIn update. Often you’ll achieve a better reach with content in graphical format that’s captioned with a short but useful statement. Also, consider that your customer won’t always be engaged by obvious self-promotions. It will be the non-sales focused content that will get noticed the most.
2) Respond Quickly
No customer question posted on social media should ever go unanswered. If your goal is to have a positive impact on your market, the best way to do this is to reply to queries as soon as possible after they’ve been posted. Remaining silent and not providing an answer online will do little more for your brand than cultivate doubt in the minds of your customers.
3) Reinvent The Wheel
There are hundreds of thousands of business pages on social media. How will you set yours apart from the rest? For the answer to this question, refer back to your USP. What makes your company different? Why should customers care? The more unique and innovative you can be, the more you will stand out in the minds of your target customers. There’s nothing wrong with looking to see what your competitors are doing, but the key is to look at their pages and see what they aren’t doing so that you can fill in the service gaps.
4) Stay Committed
Even if you only use one social media platform, you have made a commitment to supply your customers with useful content on a consistent basis. Imagine doing this for a year or two, getting lots of followers, and then ceasing to post. Many businesses do just that, lose their following and then have to start from the beginning. These days, it’s easy to post on social media, even if you’re out of the office, thanks to social media scheduling tools that allow for automatic posting. However, it’s important to not overly rely on these tools to ensure that a good portion of your interactions are based on real-time communication. This is especially important when using Twitter.
5) Use Hashtags Wisely
Hashtags are very useful in social media, as they make your content instantly accessible to everyone having similar interests, even if they don’t follow you. When you choose the right hashtag, you can significantly broaden your reach in Twitter and Facebook search results. It doesn’t really matter where in your post you choose to place your hashtag; the goal is to ensure that the hashtag you choose is relevant.
Don’t fall into the trap of overusing hashtags. You’ll want to limit your hashtag use to three as a maximum on Twitter, and five on Instagram. Otherwise, it will just appear as an annoying jumble to your customers.
There are three types of hashtags to choose from: the content, the trending and the brand-specific hashtag. The content hashtag is one where relevant hashtags about your products are woven into your post with a link to your catalogue or line of products. The trending hashtag contains words and phrases that may have become popular with millions of users. Although these can bring you a lot of exposure, it’s important to consider whether using them will add any real value to what you’re posting.
The brand-specific hashtag can be something created by you to celebrate an anniversary or similar milestone in your company. If enough people get wind of it, your brand-specific hashtag may go viral and turn into a trending one. Learn more about how powerful hashtags are with this article - The Power of the Hashtag and How Important it Has Become.
When a customer is engaged with your brand, you become their first choice in the market when seeking out solutions relevant to your products and services. This loyalty will grow into advocacy and before you know it your customers will be promoting your product for you, around the clock. To find out more about B2B social media marketing and how working with an agency can help increase your lead generation potential, please give one of our specialists a call on 01332 343 281.
