Social Media: The Biggest Mistake B2B Companies Make – Are You Guilty?
Businesses' attitudes to social media have evolved from a few years ago in that at least now, the vast majority of businesses no longer need convincing that they need a social media presence. Most businesses are now seen to be using social media which is great to see the next challenge, however, is for businesses to use social media more effectively in order to win business and that's where I hope this article will help.
Ask yourself a question and please answer honestly. What results from your social media efforts have you achieved so far?
That a business has decided to connect with you clearly means something, yet many businesses I see fail to reach out to followers to even get to know their names, and definitely don't develop a deeper understanding of what they do and the challenges they face.
Rather than 'Social Media' I prefer to use the term 'Social Networking'. From now on in this article I will only ever refer to the term Social Networking, if that's ok with you. This I feel is a much more accurate reflection of what is required. If you were to attend a networking event, you wouldn't just go around shaking hands and not talking would you? Well this is the online equivalent of connecting on Social Networks and failing to take things to the next level you are simply shaking lots of hands.
What is required in order to network effectively is dialogue. Reach out to people, get to know their names, what they do, what you do, what challenges they face, what challenges you face, where you can possibly help each other now or in the future, do they have any other contacts that may be useful to each other etc. You need to have the same kind of conversations online that you would face to face in a networking event.
Now of course there are those contacts that you make on social networking that aren't as savvy or as friendly as you, and that's fine. I get that some unenlightened folk are far more concerned with increasing their number of followers in a vain attempt to look good. They have no intention of talking to their connections what they want is a follower. I'm sure that you will agree with me however in that there's no point in having a follower on social networking for a follower's sake. How on earth is an Ethiopian goat herder ever going to benefit my business after all? Choose to social network only with your target market. There are many people that follow me that I don't follow back as quite simply they aren't my target market. You don't have time to talk to everybody.
With this in mind, if you try to network and you do happen to find them irresponsive then that's fine too after all the person that manages the social networking is probably not the person in the organisation that you need to connect with anyway and is more often the not a 'gatekeeper' anyway.
Over the years I have refined my social networking technique and it works well. So well in fact that I generate approximately 30% of my business this way. I will outline my Social Networking approach below:
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Social Media: The Biggest Mistake B2B Companies Make - Are You Guilty?