“We want to build our social presence.”

“We engage thought leaders to improve brand resonance.”

“We’re keeping an eye on reach, true reach, and potential reach to improve amplification.”

I hear statements like this every day. Hell, up until a few months ago I said statements like this every day. These are common goals for social media, and there’s nothing innately wrong with them, but these goals are bad. Let me show you what I mean with a simple exercise you can use on your own goals:

“We want to build our social presence.”

Why?

“To be more visible to our audience.”

Why?

“To raise brand awareness.”

Why?

“So that, when a customer is ready to buy, we’re top of mind.”

Why?

“To improve sales.”

“To improve sales.” That’s your real goal on social. That’s your business goal. Building a social presence, engaging thought leaders, improving reach – these are all tactics to achieve your goal. It might seem like I’m splitting hairs here, but in an industry where we’re inventing words just to find new metrics (I’m looking at you, “retweetability”) it’s important to use proper business language to stay connected to business reality.

We need to start talking about social goals in terms of the number of leads generated, the number of support tickets created and closed, the number of email addresses collected. These aren’t the pretty, feel-good numbers, but they are real numbers. Once you start focusing on the real numbers you can start using the whatever metric as the flavor of the week to see if you can improve your real numbers.

This is how social will grow and evolve. When we can go into sales meetings and say, “I got you 20 leads this week and 5 look like they’ll close.” When we can go to support meetings and say, “We caught a disgruntled customer, fixed her problem, and sold her an upgrade.” When we can go to a marketing meeting and say, “We got 400 qualified email addresses for the next outbound campaign.”

Social will grow and evolve when we do. Are you ready for the change?

Question: Who is your best customer?  That ideal person that you’re trying to target with your B2B social media marketing?

When you stop to think about it, you probably have a pretty good idea of who those people are. Their age, values, habits. The ways they’re likely to receive and process information.

But how often do you think about it? It’s so easy to temporarily lose sight of the real people you’re trying to target with your social presence. In an effort to optimize your social strategy, it can become an overly scientific process of trying to reach some unattainable, amorphous group called “prospective customers.” It’s easy to forget that you’re trying to reach real people with real personalities and senses of humor.

That’s why it’s crucial, especially in social media, to think through your buyer persona – the picture of the person you’re trying to target. Once you understand more about the people you’re trying to market to, you can shift your tone and reach that group more effectively.

How can you use this information? Here are just a few ways to put that persona insight to work in your marketing strategy:

• Take advantage of the channels and technology your market uses. If you’re targeting a tech savvy demographic, make sure everything you create is optimized for mobile. If you sell to huge, traditional corporations, you might think about making sure your landing pages format correctly in IE.
• Use humor appropriate to your demographics. For the under 30 demographic: pictures of cats. Always cats.
• Tailor your messaging to the appropriate job level. Lower-level employees usually want something to make their job easier. Executives will likely care more about your product can help impact the big picture.

But do B2B marketers really understand how customers and prospects use social media?  Do they understand which social networks are most effective?  Are they choosing the correct channels for their content?

The lovely folks at MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute released their annual survey of B2B marketers that looks at content marketing strategies and social media. They found that 87% of B2B marketers are now using social media to distribute content. But are they getting it on the right channels? Let’s compare what B2B buyers vs. B2B marketers are saying.

Buyers: LinkedIn was the most influential social network when making B2B buying decisions.

Marketers: 83% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to market their products.

Verdict: Great news! That means that marketers are going to their audience. They understand that their audience goes to a professional social network to make professional buying decisions, and they distribute their content there. Go marketers!

Buyers: YouTube and SlideShare are also effective for buyers who want to find more information from a potential vendor.

Marketers: 61% of marketers use YouTube to distribute content, but only 23% use SlideShare.

Verdict: Customers want their vendors to be experts in their industry. Not only do they want your product; they want your expertise to go along with it. YouTube and SlideShare are both great platforms to display your smarts and share useful, influential content. All of those “4 Tips for _____” slideshows happen for a reason. Customers will eat. it. up.

Buyers: Content on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest is much less influential when purchasing a B2B product.

Marketers: 80% of marketers use Facebook and Twitter. And 25% have integrated Pinterest into their marketing strategies.

Verdict: Because Facebook and Twitter are the largest social networks, it’s easy to assume they would be the best way to reach customers. But because many people only use Facebook and Twitter personally, your marketing content may not resonate as well. And we all know that Pinterest is a new, shiny toy, but B2B buyers don’t want to see your software mixed in with their ottomans and recipes. It’s probably best to leave Pinterest to the crafters.
Thoughts? Do you as a marketer feel like you’re using the appropriate channels to reach your audience? Do you as a customer feel like you can consume content on the channels you prefer? Let us know in the comments!

Pingdom’s 2012 Social network demographics wanted to know the answers to these questions and more, so they examined age and gender data from 24 of the top social media sites.

Talking to B2B social media marketers every day about how to craft their social media marketing strategy and content, most of what they know about their social audiences is anecdotal. So, whether or not you’ve begun to close the loop with your social media marketing by tying your marketing efforts to real ROI, these demographics are a great place to start with creating your marketing strategy that makes the best use of your time and energy to truly engage your audience!

Before we get to the data, the sites included in this survey are: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, Hacker News, Slashdot, Github, Stack Overflow, Orkut, Quora, WordPress.com, Blogger, Flickr, Myspace, Tagged, Hi5, LiveJournal, Yelp, deviantART, StumbleUpon, Goodreads and Last.fm.

You may note one glaring omission: Google+. Unfortunately for us there is no data on Google+ in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the Google-owned tool they used for the demographics data. Also note that the demographics data used in this survey is for the United States.

OK! Onto the social media analytics!

1. Average Age Distribution in Social Media:

More than half of these social media users are between 25 and 44 years old.

While only 2% of social media users are 65+ years old, obviously this age group will continue to grow as social media users and consumers continue to age.

I think it’s important if you’re B2B  trying to sell via social, to note who the users of social media are versus the people within companies with the purchasing power, and make sure to tailor your content to both crowds.

2. Age Distribution per Site:

This chart should make something very clear; social media is most definitely not just for the young. Some examples:

• 55% of Twitter users are 35 or older.
• 63% of Pinterest users are 35 or older.
• 65% of Facebook users are 35 or older.
• 79% of LinkedIn users are 35 or older.

However, as you can see on the flip side, 58% of Reddit users are under 35. So, if you’re posting to Reddit keep it young, fresh and witty!

3. Average User Age per Site:

Based on the sites in this survey, the estimated age of the average social media user is just under 37 years old. Here are some other observations:

• The oldest users. LinkedIn has the oldest user base, with the average user being 44.2 years old.
• The average Facebook user is 40.5 years old.
• The average Twitter user is 37.3 years old.
• The age trend for Facebook and Twitter. Compared to a previous survey we did 2.5 years ago, the age of the average Facebook user has gone up two years, while the age of the average Twitter user has gone down two years. In other words, Twitter’s user base is getting younger, while Facebook’s is getting older.

4. Gender Balance on Social Media Sites:

• 17 out of 24 sites (71%) have more female than male users, that’s 2/3 of the social networks!
• The average gender distribution is 48.75% male, 51.25% female.
• Most male-dominated site? Slashdot (87% males) is the standout, followed by Hacker News (77% males) and Stack Overflow (76% males). In general, the more tech-focused sites in this survey have more male users than female.
• Most female-dominated site? Pinterest (79% females) is in a league of its own, followed by Goodreads (70% females) and Blogger (66% females).
• Facebook and Twitter have the same gender distribution: 40% male, 60% female.

Thank you to the in depth content and analysis and images from Royal Pingdom.

Meaning, it’s all about cultivating not just an online community of a high quantity of leads, but of high quality leads.

@ArgyleSocial shared an interesting (and awesome) story of poor vs. fantastic customer service, proving further that these one to one individual relationships matter not only to the individual involved, but when these interactions occur publically on social media platforms, they are each important marketing and branding opportunities.

South African mobile communications and technologies commentator, Arthur Goldstück says, “This is the key difference between a social media complaint and a call centre complaint: when it is made through a call center, it is a solitary, personal expression of dissatisfaction to a single individual, who has the ability to placate the customer in private, or not, as the case may be.” A complaint that is not handled well via social media has potential for different (read: broader) consequences than traditional complaint-routes, which shouldn’t be acknowledged as the only way for gripes to come in anymore.

I think it’s important that B2B social media marketers to think of yourselves as wearing almost every single departmental hat. You’re one part marketer, one part sales, one part customer service, one part interesting dinner party guest, and the list could go on and on depending on what your business is.

The next step to fully embracing your new responsibilities to your company and brand, is making sure your strategies and processes in place for handling all incoming leads, complaints, etc on your social media properties are appropriate in regard to speed and quality of response.

Social media is quickly becoming (if not has already become) the hub for B2B companies to interact with their business partners, customers and potential customers. Doing it well can benefit the bottom line, and doing it poorly can be forgotten… slowly. Having a strategy is the first step… then all you have to do is, just one of our favorite mantras here at Argyle:

Images Via Readers Random Ramblings Blog, 500 Memes

OK, so that settles it. We all need to be producing content, but what kind of content??

The data shows an interesting difference between B2C and B2B content marketing objectives. B2C marketers place a greater emphasis on improving brand perception (+16% compared to B2B), improved SEO (+15%) and increasing traffic to site (+15%).

For B2B marketers, the emphasis is more significant in the areas of generating leads (+26% compared to B2C), thought leadership (+22%) and nurturing leads (+10%).

Generating B2B Leads:

In a perfect world, your perfect customer needs you, finds you, and cannot wait to buy your product, service or whatever your pink elephant is. So, create content that will help potential customers solve their problems, including but not limited to, using your product.

- Answer the specific questions you hear your customers and prospects asking. We’ve talked about how to create content from ground zero before, and it still applies.

- Showcase customer success stories. You have a customer or two, right? Take five minutes of your time talking to them and then use their story to create B2B marketing content that kills two birds with one stone.

Making Your Thought Leadership Count:

Thought leadership is an important part of branding for B2B social media marketing, and so while your management team is drafting your newest white paper, your blog need not die.

Many companies are turning to their employees on the front lines to create content for their B2B marketing content. It’s a great way to create brand spankin’ new content and tap into creative minds around your company. Just like Eric Brown of Urbane Media says, there’s no reason why someone who is communicating with customers over the phone shouldn’t be able to use his or her first hand experiences to create some thought provoking content.

Making Sure B2B Leads Feel the Love:

If you haven’t realized that sales and social media marketing go hand in hand in the B2B world, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Just last week, Argyle’s social media manager overheard one of our sales guys talking about a lead that he was trying to get on the phone, and it turned out that the lead had been Tweeting with @ArgyleSocial for the past few hours. If you don’t work in one big box of an office, as we do, and are still siloing your Sales and Marketing departments, it’s time to hold a meeting.

If you’re not going to invest in B2B social media marketing software that allows different users from each department to both have access to leads coming in via social media, then at least hold weekly meetings to run through your most highly engaged social media community members and hottest prospects with both teams.

Moreover, your marketing department could then create B2B marketing content that’s geared towards these hot customers, and sales people could create blog posts with targeted content specifically to help win these leads. It’s a B2B social media marketing win, content generation win and once it’s a sales win, it’s officially a Michael Scott win/win/win.

Image via Econsultancy.com

Any objections?

No?

Good.

When we talk to social media marketers about their strategies, we usually hear several general goals. B2B Marketers want to increase awareness, drive traffic or generate leads with their social media efforts. All of these are great objectives.

But once you’ve figured out the goals and strategies of your social media marketing, who makes the day-to-day calls about how to proceed in social media?  What about those more granular aspects of your approach to social media?

Once you’ve addressed the overarching questions, it’s important to make sure that you have your day-to-day processes and contingency plans in place. For example, how will you answer questions like:

Will you acknowledge retweets of your posts?

Is there ever a time you should send a direct message instead of an @ mention?

How will you address negative comments on Facebook? What if they happen Twitter?

How will you route inquiries to your sales team?  Your services team?

We certainly don’t want social media to become so laden with rules that it feels robotic, but having a general idea of how you’re going to interact is a good idea. Why? It helps you maintain a consistent brand, no matter what. It’s impossible for the same person always to be manning your social media interactions, and different people on your team will make different calls about how to handle particular questions or comments.

Plus – if you’ve created some guidelines, you can easily weather personnel changes, vacations and other team differences with a consistent brand personality.

Thoughts? Are you a planner or more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants marketer? What situations have you thought about and planned for in advance?

“Twitter was home to a staggering 77% of total online conversations about and during the debate.” Mashable noted according to a social media analytic report by Attention. So while like it or not, the candidates have to deal with Twitter’s 140 character soundbite-centric world, what can we B2B social media marketers learn from the #debate?

1.Both candidates have a five point plan to fix the economy

Five points to fix the economy. FIVE. If it only takes five points to fix our economy, then you never need a B2B social media blog post, marketing plan, or white paper with more than five points. I mean, sure there are exceptions to every rule, but the candidates seem to understand that we’ve come to a point as a society where if information isn’t short, sweet and easily digestible- your audience will up and leave for another source providing them with what they want.

2. Body language counts for almost as much as what was coming out of the candidates’ mouths.

I keep hearing and seeing the comparison of the two candidate’s body language. Mitt, head up, smirking smartly. Obama, head down, writing, thinking or as Saturday Night Live parodied, being distracted by forgetting Michelle’s anniversary present. What is “body language” to a B2B company with 1:1 social media marketers? I’d say it equates to company culture. Your company culture infiltrates the emails sales people are sending to clients, the tone marketers use to write copy that goes on the website, blog as well as social media marketing. It’s not just what you’re saying, it’s how you’re saying it.

3. No matter how big the gaffe, the news will go on.

Sure Twitter was abuzz about the debate in a way never before seen, and it was talked about a LOT, and is still being talked about. However, once the Jobs Report was released the very next day announcing that the unemployment rate is now 7.8%, the lowest level since almost four years ago in January 2009, did you notice what the Democrats did? They focused most if not all energy on highlighting this key indicator of Obama’s abilities, drawing focus away from his failed performance at the debate.

Life goes on, the world keeps turning, and there’s always new news. If your B2B social media team find itself caught between and a miss-tweet and a social media snafu- say your apologies, to be sure- but change the subject! Attention spans are short and if the debate can show us anything, it’s that no matter how big or bad you think something has gone, take a deep breath and change the conversation, because people will be talking about something else… tomorrow, if they aren’t already.

Did you follow the #debate on Twitter? Did you enjoy it for it’s “comedy gold” like @EricBoggs? Did you join in the debate chatter yourself? Did you find yourself on a Storify account of the debate the following day, as I did? I hope you’re looking forward to the Vice Presidential debate as much as I am! Should be a doozy, and at the least, there will most likely be more B2B social media marketing lessons to learn! Feel free to follow my (warning: highly partisan) tweets @CMBlog and let me know what you think!

Images via Digital Trends, Rollins College Facebook

Want to get more retweets? We’ve found the key: Start tweeting about sports.

In a recent study I conducted on the social activity of Argyle’s customer base, 21 of our 50 most retweeted accounts were sports-focused. For comparison, no other category had more than three accounts in the top 50. The most retweeted post in Argyle history was from an LA Lakers community site: “Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant, Ron Ron, Pau Gasol and Dwight Howard. That’s not a bad starting five.” (Hard to disagree.)

Why do accounts that post about sports get such high retweet rates? Should we really all just start tweeting about sports, or are there deeper factors at work?

Before diving into that, let me just take a moment to satisfy the budding statisticians in the audience. I’m defining the “retweet rate” of a given post as the number of retweets it got divided by the number of followers that the account has. So, if an account with 10,000 followers posts something clever and gets 100 retweets, that’s a retweet rate of 100 / 10,000, or 1%.

The retweet rate for an account, then, is just the average of the retweet rates of all of its posts. And based on the data we’ve collected, a “typical” account has a retweet rate of .1%. So for every 1,000 followers the account has, a post receives, on average, about one retweet.

Back to the original question: what’s with all these sports-related retweets? To get to the bottom of this question, we have to understand why people retweet.

Why do people retweet a post?

Many community managers make the incorrect assumption that people retweet content because they like said content. This is false. People click links that they think will be interesting. They favorite posts that they find particularly notable. But they retweet content they think will resonate with their followers.

A retweet is like retelling someone else’s joke. Sure, you found the joke funny when you heard it the first time. But you’re retelling it to someone new because you think they will find it funny.

When someone retweets you, they are telling their followers “Hey! You might like this!” And that begs the question: Who are your followers’ followers? And do they care about your content?

Consider Your Followers’ Followers

Sometimes there’s a natural overlap between your followers and your followers’ followers. For instance, if you really love Breaking Bad and you follow @BreakingBad_AMC, it’s likely that a healthy number of your followers also watch the show. Therefore, content posted by the community managers running @BreakingBad_AMC have a very receptive group of followers’ followers.

Now consider that you’re the community manager for a company that makes accounting software. Your customers all have one thing in common–they’re all accountants. But who follows accountants? (Yes, you’re allowed to chuckle at that.) The answer is actually really simple: all kinds of people follow accountants. Their wives, kids, neighbors, friends, coworkers and golf buddies.

Get where I’m going with this? Most of their followers aren’t accountants. So if you’re the aforementioned accounting software’s community manager, tweeting a torrid stream of accounting-related content simply won’t get retweeted. You may be incredibly successful at generating clicks and favorites, but retweets will be few and far between.

Use the tried-and-true cocktail party analogy. If you were at a cocktail party and you met an accountant, the last thing he would want to talk about would be work. He’d be worried that your eyes would glaze over and you’d immediately look for a way out of the conversation. In social media, the unfollow button is incredibly close at hand at all times, so that accountant is much more likely to start a conversation about Breaking Bad, both in real life and on Twitter.

(@BreakingBad_AMC isn’t an Argyle customer, so I can’t run an easy report on their all-time retweet rate. But after eyeballing some of their most recent posts they’re getting a retweet rate five to ten times higher than an “average” account. Hardly surprising.)

So what do I do if I sell B2B accounting software?

Many community managers will be in a similar predicament as the aforementioned accounting software community manager. So what do you do if your followers’ followers don’t care about your content? Some suggestions:

• Identify commonalities in your followers’ followers. Many of Argyle’s followers’ followers are 25-40 years old, putting them solidly in the group of people who remember the 90s fondly. On a recent Friday, we created a campaign around the hashtag #90sSentence asking people what their favorite 90s-themed sentence was. These posts got a ton of retweets.
• Participate in targeted hashtag conversations. The goal of a retweet is to amplify your message, but it’s not the only way to achieve this. If you regularly participate in a targeted community formed around a hashtag, your message will be seen by exactly the people you care about. Amplification achieved.
• Optimize for different metrics. While retweets are a powerful tool for some brands, it’s totally valid for you to optimize your efforts for metrics such as mentions, favorites and clicks while discarding retweets as an important KPI. There’s nothing wrong with admitting you’re not the LA Lakers.

How many retweets does your brand get? Are you more like Breaking Bad or accounting software?

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