B2B Social Media in 2010 – A Review of Applications That Can Be Measured
Many of our B2B clients are now engaging in Web 2.0 Social Media Marketing. The problem is that it’s overwhelming – even the terminology sounds like a foreign language.
Another hurdle is that marketing measurement tools don’t apply in gauging success of the initiative.
We recommend that clients start with a few basic Web 2.0 strategies to help them understand the power of social marketing. B2B is hard to measure so we have selected strategies that have some measurable component.
GETTING STARTED: B2B SOCIAL MEDIA
WIKIPEDIA
Build a page about your corporation and include links to highly targeted pages on your site. Warning! You must first read the Wikipedia content guidelines and strictly adhere to them or risk having your new page deleted by the editors.
Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from Wikipedia. Our experience is people from Wikipedia stay longer and view more pages than your typical visitor.
Build a company page using LinkedIn’s new Company beta feature. Request that the top management in your company also create LinkedIn profiles. This content gets indexed in search engines and can have a positive impact on your search rankings.
Measurement: Track inbound visitor traffic from LinkedIn and rankings.
LAUNCH A BLOG WITH RSS FEED
It’s a technically easy place for most clients to start. The biggest drawback being what to write about and who is in charge of this initiative. We suggest that one employee dedicate 4 to 6 hours per week to the blog and to posting on other appropriate blogs.
Measurement: Improvement in Inbound links, blog page views, blog posts and trackbacks.
CREATE VIDEO AND PODCASTS
Even the amateur video files in YouTube can get thousands of visits! I suggest adding video and/or podcasts to your site and submitting them such as Feedburner, YouTube, and even iTunes.
Measurement: Most of these sites offer measurement information. TubeMogul – a video publishing and analytics website – is a great resource that let’s video owners publish and track video useage (basic service is free).
ADD TAGGING CAPABILITIES
All our clients seem to have a library of content and we recommend that they add the “share/book” links.
Measurement: Occasionally check to see the number of bookmarks. For example:
- Delicious.com: Under the Bookmarks tag do a look-up for your company URL and track the number of times pages from your site have been bookmarked and had notes written about it. (The notes can be very interesting to read as well)
Think of Twitter as a broadcast mechanism and the rest is easy. Use it to alert your followers about new blog posts, events, or your latest video. The hardest part is fitting the message into 140 characters.
Measurement: While measuring “Followers” is an easy metric – it’s not as reliable as you’d like it to be. What you want to have happen is for people to ReTweet (RT) your posts.
With a few videos, podcasts and a blog, the client now has the basics to engage in social media press releases, which include not only text but also images, video and audio.
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January 21st, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Rosemary,
Thanks for the insightful analysis of these Social Media tools. Your thoughts in this area are as expert as the ones you have shared on Search Engine Marketing and SEO.
January 22nd, 2009 at 11:18 am
Rosemary, thanks for the great post – these are all great suggestions for those looking to get into Web 2.0. I have one more to add, that probably goes at the beginning – number 0. As a starting point, I encourage people to READ blogs that are out there. Learn to use RSS feeds, learn to search for blogs they find interesting (and related to their business) and set aside time daily or weekly to do some reading. Getting a feel for the style and content of other blogs will help immensely if they decide to launch their own!
February 8th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
These suggestions are great and I intend to recommend that my B2B clients review your recommendations as well as Gillian\’s.
Two questions and some suggestions.
Do any of the social media draw more attention from the search engines than others, i.e. blogs vs. social networks vs wikipedia pages or others?
And is it true that more and different presences on the internet increase your visibility to the search engines?
I, too, have a couple of suggestions to add. I suggest that, to start, my clients (generally small businesses who have time constraints) select the one Social Media aspect that makes the most sense for them and their business at present. Work on that activity for as long as it takes. Feel comfortable about its present-ability and their ease of use with it. After that, start with another.
Overall, blogs take more attention than social networks, so make your choice with that in mind. (Do they have more search engine draw than the social networks?)
Before you start your blog, create a list of twenty or so topic ideas so that on the days when you draw a blank, you have some topics from which to choose. After a while, the industry trends and topic popularity will help to drive the subject of each blog post.
I look forward to more of your internet-relative insight and advice. Thank you!
February 9th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
Kathryn: Thanks for posting. Let me answer your questions: “Do any of the social media draw more attention from the search engines than others,”
1) WIKIPEDIA: You will find that a search for most high-value search phrases will show a Wikipedia page in the top 10 listings. So, if a phrase you are trying to rank for should produce a Wikipedia page where you have a link – then you are likely to see visitors coming to your site from this link.
ToTheWeb’s Wikipedia experience for our own site has been very interesting. See a two-slide PPT that I created to show results.
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddb2dxts_233fkmgjrg2 (you’ll have to log into your Google account to view I believe)
2) BLOGS: I have seen my blog posts be indexed within hours of being published. I know this because I have a Google Alert set up for my URL and I receive an alert when Google finds the URL. If you’re writing about something newsworthy and current you may have increased traffic if you blog appears in Google and matches the searcher’s query.
Hope this helps.