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So you’re launching a B2B venture and have decided to use social media marketing to start growing your business. Smart decision. Not only is social media a cost-effective and potentially dynamic method for reaching an expansive online consumer base, but it is also a path to generating the type of referral traffic (word-of-mouth) that leads to a high rate of conversions.

Social media marketing is a natural fit for the B2B space, giving you the opportunity to interact and engage customers in a social setting where you can gain exposure, build relationships, and establish your place in the greater community. If you are ready to start putting social to work for your marketing campaign, consider these five best practices in getting your program moving in the right direction.

1. Always Have a Plan

The social media marketer must take a cue from the Boy Scout motto, and always “be prepared.” Not being prepared can lead to consequences ranging from underwhelming results, to severe damage to your reputation.

Before ever initiating a single social action there are important questions to answer: What are your goals? Who is your target audience? How can you create a system to manage your campaign efficiently? By mapping out a plan that guides your initial social interaction strategy, including accounting for the ability to produce quality content on an ongoing basis and having the structure to nurture relationships and monetize traffic, you can avoid costly miscues while conserving vital resources.

2. Don’t Hard-Sell Your Friends

The important truth about marketing via social media is that it is less about advertising lingo and sales pitches, and more about having a conversation. It’s understood that individuals from every industry are using social media to make purchasing choices, and they are basing those decisions on what they learn and whom they meet online.

Focus your efforts on creating content that educates potential clients about your products and services, providing insight they can use to save their company money or do their job more efficiently. By becoming a source of information that resonates with professionals within your industry, you can forge bonds with your customers strengthened by the social element.

3. Promote Sharing

The lessons you were taught as a child about the importance of sharing can serve you well as you apply them to social media marketing. Consider the power of being able to effectively reach a customer with social content, and through that singular success gain near instantaneous exposure to scores of like-minded individuals. There are few things more desirable than word-of-mouth recommendations, and when a customer validates content you provided by sharing it, they are in essence giving your business a referral.

In addition to creating valuable material that people are inclined to pass along, use a call-to-action and offer incentives for readers who share your content, placing single-click sharing buttons to the most popular social media channels on all of your communications.

4. Remember That It’s Not Just About You

If you think you can publish compelling content to social media channels and then sit back, relax, and watch the customer start rolling in, you are destined to be disappointed. Social media is not only about gaining exposure and building your communications base, but also about initiating conversations that allow you to learn more about your customers’ wants and needs.

Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on in your industry, reducing the burden of having to continually produce new content by identifying material from other relevant voices to share with your customers. By treating the audience you build on social as friends, soliciting their comments and impressions, and contributing to discussions, you can demonstrate the type of citizenship that wins trust, loyalty, and respect.

5. Utilize Software Tools

Embarking on a full-scale social media marketing campaign can be a sizable commitment of resources for any start-up. The good news is you don’t have to (and shouldn’t even try) to go it alone, and should instead call on dedicated software applications to help with everything from formulating strategies and automating routine functions, to monitoring activity and measuring results.

A software solution such as Argyle Social can effectively lighten the workload for the time-strapped entrepreneur, supplying expert-level support in identify and engaging the most promising audiences, tracking efforts and providing insight into maximizing efficiency. With scalable plans and instantaneous support that puts your new social media marketing campaign on the cutting edge, software management systems are an integral tool that make it possible for new ventures and small businesses to compete in the modern market place.

Final Thoughts

Social media can be a dynamic method for marketing your business to expanding pools of qualified customers. By formulating a thoughtful plan, embracing the social element, and utilizing the tools and techniques to help you provide excellent customer service, you can tap into the power of social media marketing to increase exposure and grow your brand.

What other tips can you suggest to help new entrepreneurs succeed at social media marketing?

There seems to be a tendency, or perhaps even ethos, among social media folks to treat everyone equally. We’re all people, on equal footing, and everyone deserves to be treated well.

But they’re wrong – We ARE NOT the same.

Now, I don’t take exception to the idea that everyone should be treated well. That’s all fine and good. However, I am certainly not the same as President Obama, the barista down the road, or even my father. We’re different people with different perceptions, needs, and levels of interest. To treat us all exactly the same would be a disservice to all of us.

Give the people what they want

Before you start talking with a person or audience you should first understand who they are, what they are looking for, and what language they speak (figuratively and literally). It’s that context that allows you to serve them in the best way possible.

It’s this need that drove us to integrate not only a CRM, but one that integrates tightly with Marketing Automation providers like Pardot, Marketo, and Silverpop. Your company works hard to learn all it can about it’s prospects, leads, and customers – and as social media professionals, we need to tap into that wealth of information to provide a better service to our customers.

So please, stop treating everyone the same, and start treating everyone better.

Photo credit

That’s when you spot the self checkout.

If you’re like the majority of Americans these self service stations, as this graph from a Cisco survey on self checkout shows, are exactly what you want in retail.

What does self-checkout have to do with business automation?

When creating automations the goal is to empower consumers. In the grocery store, this takes the form of helping customers get in and out faster by making checkout quick and self-sufficient. In the B2B organization this might take the form of automatically sending sales collateral to cut down on wait times.

In both cases, the automation is helping the customer quickly get what they want.

What should B2Bs be automating?

Checkout, but not customer service.

Outreach, but not follow up.

Support ticket creation, but not responses.

More information requests, but not help requests

What’s the takeaway?

Focus on using automation to save your customers and staff time, then reinvest the time saved into customer satisfaction and engagement.

Well, it has been if you listen to the detractors — every home screen update, privacy change, marketing push, and revenue model has heralded the end-times for the big blue beast. So far, all of those predictions have been wrong, but a new study from the Pew research center shows the demographic that pushed the network to prominence is starting to tire of it.

Teens have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful “drama”.

Talk is cheap, what do the numbers say?

For all the talk that teens have about being fed up with Facebook, sharing and uploads are at an all time high. And while there’s been talk of a slow down in growth on Facebook, it’s still prevalent enough that people feel obligated to make an account simply to be social.

What’s the Future Hold?

Facebook isn’t the first social network and it won’t be the last. Here’s a Google Trends Graph on MySpace.

Slow initial momentum, a huge tipping point growth, a rocky peak and a slow decline is indicative of the network that died not with a bang but with a whisper.
Now let’s check Facebook:

There’s a similar growth, a similar rockiness, but as of now no decline. This graph, and it’s similarity to the networks that came before, is the reason so many people talk about the failing of Facebook. Some believe it’s inevitable, that what makes a network interesting is its newness. Some say that the time has come to have a standard social network, a modern yellow pages. Which of these schools of thought proves true and which category Facebook will fall in is a story only time can tell.

Sites like Medium, Narratively, and New York Times’s adventures in focused story-telling like Snow Fall, the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek deliver a new perspective on the art of story-telling in the medium of the web browser. Beyond being immersive and beautiful, the initial success of these story-telling formats reveals one important insight: Users crave safe haven!

In the internet age where Miley Cyrus’s new hairstyle is on the same playing field as developing international politics, some users are reacting against the “noise” of content overload. No one knew this better than Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, the creators of Medium. They had made publishing accessible in an unprecedented way, and now their mission was to curate and elevate worthwhile content — and present that content in a way that truly honored its message without distraction.

So what can we glean from the boom in this style of story-telling?

Focus

Superficial sharing is not an indicator of brand engagement.

While Liking, Sharing, and Plus-One-ing are low-barrier ways to reveal content beyond your brand’s reach, these low-barrier methods of sharing require little more than an impulse click. Sites like Medium only show sharing links when an article is fully complete. If users “share” your content, but don’t fully absorb your message, then your brand is merely adding to the social chatter.

Edit

Effective messaging requires reduction.

Narratively effectively breaks stories into sections and paragraphs for both visual effect and for semantic clarity. Have you ever flipped pages in a book to see where a chapter ends — to see where your next marker of accomplishment is? Your site’s content implement similar markers of accomplishment simply by effectively breaking blog posts and pages into digestible sections.

Show

Images are powerful when used with purpose.

When viewing the glimmering social streams of Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Linkedin, image previews draw a user’s attention. this is important and necessary in the social media space, as each post vies for attention, but when users temporarily leave that space for your article, to download your content, or to view your image full-scale, your intent was for them to absorb your content and its meaning before leaving. We see on Medium and Narratively that one large image per page fold really sets the tone for each article or section of a story. When used sparingly, these images enable a story. As we can see in social media — when used liberally, images can really degrade the synthesis of any story.

Curate

Finally, it’s obvious that not every page or piece of content you intend to share is of equal importance.

By suggesting relevant and valuable content when users need or request it — you can cultivate your audience’s comprehension of your brand as relevant to their own interests. Tweens are fleeing social media in droves in part because of the flood of advertising attempts that they see as an intrusion their desires for like-minded communities. Share content relevant to your industry. Suggest your own content when it is relevant to the topics your users are currently reading.

If an inactive lead retweets your company, are they still inactive?

To clarify, I’m asking you two questions here:

Question 1: If a lead who stopped interaction with your company over six months ago were to retweet, reply, favorite, like, or otherwise interact with your brand, would you consider them active and try to reach out?

Question 2: Do you have a process in place that could actually make that happen?

On the first question

There isn’t a one-to-one correlation between social interaction and intent to buy. That said, any potential client who interacts with you certainly has a leg up on a cold lead. While a single interaction might not be enough to say a lead is alive and kicking multiple interactions in a short period or interactions with specific content, for example, is a good indication of interest.

On the second question

For most people, the answer is ‘no’. For us, the answer used to be ‘no’. And that was a problem. A perfect prospect was being treated the same as someone who would never purchase us, and while I’d like to treat everyone the same, there are only so many hours in a day. That’s why we started building our Social CRM. You can learn more about it elsewhere on the site but the long and short of it is — social CRM and MA integration creates a process for dealing with active social leads.

Sound interesting?

We think so too. Why not request a demo and take a look at what we can do?

The new Cards provide your followers with the same rich messaging alongside a pre-filled (and uneditable) form with a configurable submit button.

Here’s a sample of the new Cards.

Do I need this?

If you are reading this blog post, then the answer is probably yes. Collecting leads who are interested in your company or products is crucial to moving marketing and sales efforts forward. Doing it direct on twitter is a huge win.

Lead Gen Cards are currently only open to those in Twitter’s beta circle which you can be a part of by committing a significant marketing budget to Twitter Ads, a great investment if you are looking to grow more in the twitter demographic.

For those not yet ready to dedicate a good portion of your marketing budget, you’ll have to wait until it gets released into the existing stable of twitter advertising tools and there’s no word yet as to when that will be.

So where does the lead information go?

Lead information, Twitter announced, will be securely communicated directly to your business. Our contacts at Twitter tell us that this means they will work with you to send the info to a secure endpoint (Update: for the techies out there, that means a HTTPS POST or GET to a url). Once the data is there, it’s up to you to nurture and move the relationship forward. This information includes name, email address, and twitter handle.

No word yet if this includes prepackaged integrations with marketing automation, email service provider, or CRM systems. Update: I just got word that they do, in fact, support sending info to Salesforce, Mailchimp, Acton, Constant Contact, Eloqua, Exact Target, Hubspot, Infusionsoft, Marketo, Optify, Pardot, and Vertical Response.

And then what?

That’s an important question. Don’t think that just because they gave you their info it’s fair game to slam them with spam. Now that you have their info you need to continue the conversation in email and in the social space. So keep the conversation going on twitter, it’s where they found you and probably where they’d like to hear from you too!

When marketers are first introduced to the power of automation they often get a little automation crazy. I did the same thing – I not only wanted to automate the initial outreach, but also the follow-up and the follow-up to the follow-up. I wanted to build this grand machine that could, with a series of logic gates, trick the world into thinking it was human.

Unfortunately, the world that I wish for isn’t the world that is and a series of automated responses are, at best, a clumsy conversation and, at worst, downright spammy. But I am a stubborn man and wanted to see my idea come to light and so I persisted.

My initial automated outreach was well received, but the second it became apparent that the conversation was an echo of something I’d written several months earlier the conversations stopped and never started back up again.

After a few weeks of this, I was starting to get bummed out. We were an automation based company and our automation wasn’t working. Out of ideas, I turned to a google plus community. Jaded by my experiences and expecting the same silence my emails had gotten, I asked a question to no one in particular.

And much to my surprise, I got an answer. And then another. And another and another and another and before I knew it my question became one of the most engaging posts on the page. In the private conversations spawned by that post I secured a massive amount of interest in my organization and even moved a few prospects over to sales.

I stumbled into a situation I’d been actively searching for in the weeks prior. It’s not that people didn’t want to talk, they simply didn’t want to talk to a machine.

With that, I began to reassess the way I approached automation. Instead of automating my messages I took to automating everything but my messages. Monitoring, publishing, tracking, sorting, I automated my social housekeeping to maximize the time I had to start and maintain actual conversations.

Now I’m actively engaged in several communities, a contributing member of conversation, a trusted counselor for how to manage social, and (most importantly) a lead generator.

In changing the way I approached social media, I changed the way the social world reacted to me. And for that, I and my company have gained the benefit.

You see, she’s never known the world without social media — Facebook was launched when she was 5. She was never a part of the novelty, never absorbed by the insanity of the idea that you could easily keep in touch with people, even if they weren’t immediately available. To her, this is the way the world always was and always will be. To her, social media is simply the way things are.

So when I asked her how she uses sites like Facebook (which, I’m informed, has been decidedly deemed as uncool) I was met with confusion. Her reply, “I talk to people?” was more a question than an answer. She couldn’t understand the concept, the idea, that there was a way to use social media.

After a confusing conversation I was left with a novel notion — that the separation between social media and simply being social no longer existed.

I took this idea to work on monday and began asking my higher up how they were using social media and again I was met with confusion. The notion of broadcasting articles to groups of friends, of gathering likes, of monitoring clicks was not only foreign but offensive. To treat their friends like numbers was an affront to their friends.

Yet here we are, counting clicks.

And that’s when it hit me, a solution so simple it had been overlooked, forgotten in the social media circus that’s been gaining traction over the years — the simple secret of social media is simply to be social.

Generally, this answer is hated for two reasons: it seems too simple to be true and it’s difficult to measure. On the first point, it is rare that the simplest answer is also the easiest and even rarer that a complex answer adds more value. Just look at how nuts the physics community went when Einstein told everyone that Energy is just mass times the speed of light, squared. On the second point, well, that’s true. It hard to measure the value of saying hello, of offering to help, of chatting by the water cooler. But to think that something unmeasurable is also unvaluable is height of foolishness.

So now that you know the secret of social, what is there to do? Well, if you’re still asking that question you don’t seem to have understood the article.

Over the past two decades we’ve worked on making the flow of information faster, and it is a nobel pursuit which has given us the power to cheer on another country’s rebellion in real time from the other side of the globe. But as technology gets cheeper and more available, it becomes apparent that speed isn’t everything.

Take the Boston Bombing — the world watched on in bated breath as every semi-relevant tidbit was combed through and dissected live on the air. And in an attempt to be first, many organizations sacrificed accuracy and as a direct result, credibility. CNN was one such organization, who reported everything from an erroneous description to a confirmation of arrest when the suspect was still at large. That cavalier attitude cost CNN credibility, and at the end of the day many people were taking the reporting as an opinion rather than a fact.

What CNN lost that day is shaping up to be the new currency of the ‘net. We’ve shifted from a world where it took time and money to distribute information on a massive scale to a world where the sharing of information is as simple as clicking a button. And if you paid attention in econ 101, you’ll know that as the supply rises, the demand lowers.

But we thrive on information, just like we thrive on air and water. People won’t devalue information, they’ll just appreciate accurate information more. That’s where editors come in. These are the people for whom the story isn’t their baby, for whom the news break isn’t a career maker, for whom the mistake is the end of a career.

These are the people for who the new currency of the net, accuracy and credibility, is king. These are the editors and they are the future.