Social media is ubiquitous in our lives, and yet, there continues to be a disconnect in how B2B marketers think about social media in order to generate leads and sales. At a time when more than half (55 percent) of all B2B buyers say that they search for product and vendor information on social media, B2B sellers are doing a remarkably bad job of delivering that information.
Just check out the latest statistics. According to Biznology, 95 percent of B2B marketers have established some sort of social media presence, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. That’s promising, but at the same time, only half of those B2B marketers are active on those social media sites.
And that’s not all – according to data from Media Post, just 10 percent of all B2B marketers say that they are able to articulate their company’s value proposition on social media effectively. No wonder so many companies set up a social media site and then basically forget about it: they just can’t figure out how to make it work for them, so they give up.
One possible explanation for why so many B2B marketers struggle with social media so much is that they are so focused on short-term results, that they ignore the long-term payoff from social media. To put it another way, every tweet that you put out into the Interwebs is not going to result in a sale. Every Facebook status update that you share with your fans is not going to result in a phone call follow-up asking about your latest products. But it will result in a sea-change in how prospects view you. But that will only happen over a longer period of time.
There has been some recognition of this fact, in the form of data showing that B2B marketers primarily think of social media as a lead generation tool. Putting out all those tweets and updates and video clips will eventually lead to some customers contacting you, right?
But that leads to the second problem for B2B marketers. All that social media content you create is, for better or worse, evanescent and fleeting in nature. You put a tweet out there, and poof! It’s gone. If someone doesn’t read your tweet right then, the odds go down markedly that someone will ever read that tweet. Contrast that to content such as a whitepaper, which lives on forever. It’s essentially a piece of evergreen content that you create. You can offer it over and over again, and it will never disappear.
So how do you deal with the problems of social media as a B2B marketer?
Perhaps the best advice is to focus on one social platform at a time. It’s nice to have Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn all working at the same time, but if you don’t have the time and resources to dedicate to all of them, it’s best to focus on one at a time until you build enough momentum.
Of these, Facebook is by far the easiest to manage. And, given the reach possible on Facebook, also the one with the greatest short-term payoff potential. There are literally more than 1 billion people using Facebook, and some of them can become your customers.
Focus on tips, advice and information. Aim to educate and inform your audience. But do it in a way that’s fun and engaging. Once you do that, you’ll start to see some traction in social media. And, better yet, you’ll start to see the leads start to roll in.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.