Why use Social Media in B2B?

This topic is often debated when I’m working with our clients and in leader forums. It’s a hot topic and one that doesn’t have a one size fits all answer. While there are best practices and proven tactics to fill your funnel and improve conversion, it’s often done poorly and without realistic goals so most don’t see the ROI.

Social media can be overwhelming and challenging to figure out. If you are active, there’s always something to improve, optimize or address. If you’re new to social media marketing for your business or new to a particular platform, getting started can be a drain on time, if you’re not focusing on the right things.

Here are a few questions that I ask my clients, when they are not sure about allocating resources to social media:

• What are your competitors doing?
  If you don’t think social media marketing is worth it, think again. Your competitors are out there and if you are not, that speaks volumes.
• What impression of your firm do referrals or potential clients have when they search your business online?
  Clients have a high expectation of companies they work with. If you are not presenting yourself and your firm online as a thought leader, a market leader or customer service centric you’re missing out on potential clients. A website is not enough.
• Is education a key component of your client service model?
  If you are an educator, one-on-one sessions will not work long-term. Leveraging social platforms to provide educational informational to your clients and prospective clients will enable you to build loyalty, nurture and build your brand with your prospects.

EMI isn’t different. We are constantly challenging our goals and objectives for our social platforms and determining how to allocate our resources to work that drives the most value for our clients and prospects. We chose to strategically pull away from Facebook for several months and focus on LinkedIn. Once we are comfortable with our level of success with LinkedIn, we will revisit our Facebook strategy. Twitter has been on pause for quite some time. We are considering Clubhouse and Instagram as we see our client demographic changing.

Want a few tricks or hacks? Here are a few things that we’ve learned and use that have helped us:

1. Take 90 minutes and plan the content for your entire month. Each week take 30 minutes and create your posts all at one time. Then, simply post based on your schedule.
2. Tag people in your posts to invite them into the conversation or topic.
3. Like and comment on other posts every day. The algorithms are always changing, but activity is important to getting your posts seen. This takes 15-30 minutes and you can learn a lot about your prospects.
4. Always respond to people who comment on your posts. This may seem obvious, but most companies don’t do this. They post and forget about it. Having conversations and sharing information is so important to building relationships.

The key is to keep it simple and focus on adding value with social media. It can be a time drain without achieving the results that you need if you don’t have a plan and a process. If you’d like to discuss how you can improve your social media plan, need help building your content plan or want to brainstorm, do not hesitate to contact me at [email protected] or (513) 309-0719.