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Social Media Marketing is definitely the newest and most groundbreaking marketing tactic in recent years and has become an essential part of any Internet Marketing campaign.
There have been many success stories of B2C working in this area and I am sure you have heard of all of them. Now, with the wide spread use of social media by business owners everywhere B2B can now successfully enter into this medium.
A recent eMarketer study reveals over 90% of B2B buyers use social media to research purchases and are heavily influenced by third-party feedback in their purchasing decisions.
The directive to “be where your audience is” has never been more relevant or more possible than in today’s Internet world where marketers can know precisely who and where there audience is. “Being there” has also gone beyond a direct dollar relationship—a presence in social media has simply come to be expected. Businesses that aren’t there are creating a negative perception of themselves as being behind the times or unavailable to their clientele.
Additionally, in 2011, companies do their due-diligence via Google and you want to be on top of any and everything that might come up from others in regard to the company and its product. What happens when the client does a final check before doing the final purchase? Will the Internet do well by you? Will that cursory search win or lose you the contract?
Will a search on Facebook, Twitter, and Google come up with nothing? Or, even worse than nothing: only self-promotional contextual ads? What are you hiding when you spend big bucks on ads and your own self-promotional website but have nothing really coming up well on search?
Engaging broadly in Social Media in the form of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and corporate blogs is like catnip to search — especially in Google of 2011 which shamelessly prioritizes real time content (thanks to Twitter), videos (thanks to YouTube), and highly-textual content (thanks to Google’s blog-love).
All of the above speaks nothing of online reputation management. Neglecting resources to this leads to PR catastrophes as proven by countless examples, including “Dell Hell” from many years ago. Or as simple as: homeowners association told Colonel Van T. Barfoot, a WWII veteran, to remove the flagpole from his front yard after flying the flag on Veteran’s Day and Labor Day. Their demands were met with an immediate backlash from citizens all throughout the country after social media was used to share this occurrence.
Being an end-user is one thing, it is a whole other level of knowledge and application to manage a businesses presence on social networks. There are many possible pitfalls and things to be aware of when creating and managing a business social network.
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