What if you posted content and no one cared?
If you want to be good at social media in a B2B environment you need to be able to connect with your audience. Passive, one-way conversations don’t work in a social media setting; even if you’re trying to just fill an SEO need. If you really want to communicate your message and make a difference with your communication efforts you have to connect with your audience. This means that you need to plan accordingly for each platform, not only for the content you choose to post but also how they work (e.g. Twitter is more real-time than a LinkedIn group).
Here are some thoughts on how to make those connections.
- Ask questions that create a dialogue among your followers. If you wonder why no one responds to your posts it may be because they feel you’re not interested in their opinions. The easiest way to get over this is to simply ask a question and seek feedback.
- Get others to share content and ideas from and about you. There’s nothing wrong with reaching out to your followers to offer support; that’s why it’s called “social” media. Just be careful that you don’t over ask and remember that you’ll need to likely return the favor some day.
- Bookend your content around topics. If you have news around a product or service you can build further awareness and credibility around what you’re doing by posting third-party content around your news. This can help eliminate the “look at me” image you may be giving by just posting your news release, and in addition helps to show you are part of a broader industry news cycle and on top of the trend.
- Take the discussion offline. It’s always helpful to network offline and discuss how to create and leverage content to build connections. If you’re not going to at least one conference a year you need to change that. You should also leverage LinkedIn and connect with people in your industry or field. In fact, you should connect with all of us here at B2B Voices: Aaron, Arik, Kate and me.
- Benchmark against others. There will always be someone doing something better than you or different than you, so follow them and see what you can make work for your brand.
These are just a few ideas on how you can make your brand more valuable to your stakeholders. What is important is that you find a strategy that works for you to make those valuable connections. I’ll be speaking on this topic in June for a panel at the B2B Corporate Social Media Summit in London and will update this post.
If you enjoyed this post you may also want to read:
Navigating the Legal Road Map of Social Media
What’s your “I” in social media?
Four spring cleaning tasks for B2B communicators
Why LinkedIn’s Company Pages Now Matter More
Do most online communities fail?
Avoiding the one cup approach to social media
