1.
B2B Social Media –
A Backgrounder
by robin frank
beep beep media
April 2012

2.
Part 1:
Overview of B2B Social Media

3.
Latest Data
• B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads/month
than those who do not.
• 69% of B2B marketers are shifting their budgets toward social
media.
• B2B companies that blog more than 4x/week see the biggest
increase in traffic and leads, according to @HubSpot
• 51% of B2B marketers plan to increase their spend on content
marketing, per @MarketingProfs
• 86% of #B2B companies are using social media
• Top use of B2B social media is for thought leadership at 60%,
per @btobmagazine

4.
Latest Data (continued)
• B2B companies are more likely to use Twitter than B2C
companies: 75% vs 49%, per @businessdotcom
• 41% of B2B companies are acquiring customers through
Facebook.
• 39% of B2B marketers say blogging is their most valuable
content asset, per @eMarketer
• 60% of B2B marketers cite thought leadership as #1 reason to
use social media, per @btobmagazine
• Social media helps B2B marketers improve search results
• B2B social media spending set to explode to $54M over next 5
years per @Forrester

5.
Social Media Statistics
• Twitter
– 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts
– 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011
– 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011)
• LinkedIn
– As of December 31, 2011 (the end of the fourth quarter),
professionals are signing up to join LinkedIn at a rate that is faster
than two new members per second.
– As of February 9, 2012, LinkedIn operates the world’s largest
professional network on the Internet with more than 150 million
members in over 200 countries and territories.
– Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

6.
Social Media Statistics
• YouTube
– 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (more video
uploaded in past month than three big TV networks in the past 60
years).
– YouTube gets 4,000,000,000 page views a day, which adds up to
1,000,000,000,000 a year.
– YouTube has 800,000,000 users (about the same as Facebook) who
watch 3,000,000,000 hours of video a month.
– YouTube Average viewing session remains a low 15 minutes
• Blogs
– 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011

7.
The Rise of the B2B Social Buyer
• Relies on social
media and online
communities during
the purchase
process.

8.
Solution Provider Credibility is also
on the Rise
• B2B solution providers
need to create fact-based
customer intimacy,
establishing a relationship
with the buyer based on
knowledge and creating a
continuous, coordinated
dialogue.

9.
B2B Marketers’ Jobs are More
Complex than Ever
• Dealing with
both social and
traditional
buyers

10.
The Goal: an Integrated Customer
Engagement Program

11.
Social Media is the New WOM Engine
• B2B companies should obsess about building
reach as much as B2C companies.
• Social media builds reach.
• Social Media amplifies the effectiveness of
online marketing. It doesn’t replace it!
– Use social media to promote all your online and
offline events.

12.
Social Media is Cost Effective
• While social media requires an investment of budget
and resources, it is nowhere near the costs
associated with other media.
• Even in tough economic climates, B2Bs can afford
social media programs and use these initiatives to
gain competitive advantage.
• Social media platforms provide excellent outlets for
customer education, building trust and shortening
the sales cycle.

13.
Part 2:
Developing a B2B Social Media
Strategy

14.
Social Media Strategy Elements
• Set Your Objectives
• Know Your Audience(s)
• Study the Competitive Landscape
• Define Your Strategy
– Platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube,
– Social Media Playbook
– Measurement and Reporting
– Management Tools

15.
Objectives
• Objectives (Customers and Key Stakeholders such as
investors, partners, and others)
– Increase awareness of company and the problems you
solve.
– Establish interest with compelling reasons for your
solution is better than the competition and more
details about your offering.
– Engage social communities with content that is
relevant, interesting, educational, and entertaining.
– Create thought leadership position.

16.
Target Audiences
• Identify target audiences
– Who are they?
– Where do they live online?
– Which social platforms?

17.
Your Competition’s Social Media
• Study the competitive landscape
– What are they doing in social media?
– What are their strengths and weaknesses?

18.
Platform Mix
• ID platform mix and messaging
– Create a unified presence that builds your story,
empowers your interactions, and helps you rise up from
being just another voice in the stream
– Create useful information, to select the best possible
media to package that information, and then to choose a
series of distribution technologies for delivering your ideas
to others, to encourage interactions, and to drive towards
certain target results.

19.
Social Media Playbook: A Guide
• Social Media Playbook: a procedural guide to aid social
media spokespeople for your company
– Audiences
– Voice/Tone
– Content Strategy
• Timing
• Editorial guidelines
• What can/can’t be said
• Promotions/Special offers (whitepapers, reports)
– Content Creation System
– Monitoring guidelines
– Spam policies

20.
Key Messaging Doc
• A living “Google doc” of your company’s positions on leading
industry trends and issues.
• Gathered from fraud prevention best practices, sales
personas, analyst opinion, press coverage, mgmt opinion.
• Used as a reference in creating social editorial on the fly,
using keywords/phrases.
• Reviewed quarterly.

21.
Editorial Calendar
• Marketing/Editorial Calendar
– Spreadsheet of all content across all channels, by date for
creation, publishing, promotion, and tracking.
– Guarantee that you always have something proactive to
talk about.
– Includes current/older content, but also integrates with PR
schedule, event-driven mktg, blog editorial planning.
– Ensures you are proactive, not just reactive, to drive
eyeballs to owned assets (site, social, blog, etc).

22.
Content
• Prospects don’t care about your products; they want
solutions to their problems.
• 60% of the sales cycle is over before a buyer talks to
a salesperson.
• Publishing and sharing content online is the single
biggest lever to increase lead generation.
• Create awesome content and reduce the friction of
sharing it.

23.
Atomize Your Content
Reactive example
New Aite Group report:
"Online Fraud Mitigation: Tools of the Trade“
27 October 2011
Today Tomorrow Next Week
TWEET: COMMENT: BLOG POST:
You can market fraud Here are 2 ways to not Download the report
prevention to your affect online usability… from us. Here’s our
customers! <link> take on what to do…

24.
How Social Media Leads Happen
1
Twee
t
Landing
Page
Form Lead
Like Blog Landing
Post
CTA
Page
Product Landing
+1 Page
CTA
Page

25.
3 Must-Haves for Social Media
Lead Generation
• Get people to connect with you.
• Get people to share your stuff.
• Place calls to action everywhere.

26.
THE Links to company
blog posts
10-4-1
Links to third-
party articles
Link to a company
landing page
RULE

27.
Know Your Expiration Date

28.
Twitter To-Do’s
• Create Profile
• List in directories
• Follow and engage key audiences and press on Twitter
to gain followers
• Participate: use keywords, define keywords, retweet,
@reply, create lists
• Content strategy: customer support, interesting
information in the industry, education, even humor
• Monitor keywords and key lists of stakeholders and
customers

29.
LinkedIn To-Do’s
• Build out company profile –jobs, description
– Encourage employees to create profiles, connect, get
recommendations
• Monitor and participate in key groups
• Create company group
• Share updates
• LinkedIn ads – wait – currently not high returns

30.
YouTube To Do’s
• Add videos and create company channel
• Create playlists
• Add tags
• Add annotations
• Add friends/gain subscribers
• Optimize for SEO

31.
Measurement & Reporting
• Identify key analytics and targets.
• Create customized analytic report and provide monthly
reporting.
• Offer/integrate recommendations based on learnings.
– Evolve content and promotions to emphasize what you
find to be successful.
– Create strategies for flexibility and adapting to
changing market conditions.

32.
Tools for Management &
Monitoring
• Hootsuite
– Schedule and monitor posts on Twitter/Facebook
– Link accounts to save time
– Hoosuite analytics for Twitter
• YouTube Insights
• Twentyfeet
– Broad cross-platform monitoring
• Klout
– Monitoring influence across social networks

33.
Social Media Monitoring
• Industry blogs
• News websites
• Conferences/events
• Analysts
• LinkedIn Groups and companies
• Twitter profiles – lists of PR, competitors, analysts,
influencers, etc.
• Note: create workflow for alerts, and responses

34.
Social Media Analytics
• Suggested analytics to measure
– Inbound website traffic referred from social media sites
– Inbound blog traffic referred from social media sites
– Growth in blog commentary (per post average)
– Blog article “Likes”
– Growth in Twitter followers, retweets, @replies, and hashtags
– Growth in followers on LinkedIn
– Growth in group members on LinkedIn
– “Authority” measures for blog, Klout
– Number of new prospects who admit first following us on
social media

35.
Social Media ROI

36.
Thank You!

37.
Background