This is the second part of my blog looking at some of the reasons why social media efforts within the B2B sector fail to achieve results and why some B2B companies still need to get a better understanding of what it’s all about. Last time we looked at the importance of differentiating between various social media elements (and understanding their respective benefits), along with the fears that some marketing managers may have of an inability to control the social media ‘channel’. Let’s now look at a few other common issues.
“We are all over social media”
Setting up the channels, unfortunately, does not mean that a company ‘is all over social media’. In fact, far too many companies, with the best of intentions, have created the platform – setting up a Twitter feed for example – then given someone nominal responsibility for it (alongside their ‘day job’). This person may have created a few tweets initially but ultimately other things get in the way and the feed slowly becomes dormant If that is the case, then clearly there is no justification for a marketing manager claiming that they are adequately provisioned for social media engagement. It’s like saying ‘yeah I joined the gym a year ago, went once and I’m now going to do the New York marathon’.
Key Questions
Before claiming to have an acceptable social media presence, marketing managers need to ask themselves a few simple questions.
- Is the company posting content often enough? The biggest issue here is simple having the resources – if a company is going to blog, tweet, post on LinkedIn or upload videos on YouTube, then they need to do so regularly and frequently.
- What is the nature of the content? This is possibly the biggest challenge for B2B companies and, in particular, B2B engineering organisations. Companies may choose to bring in a person with some knowledge of social media, but that doesn’t mean that the new hire will have an understanding of – and, therefore, be able to comfortably post or tweet content about – the company’s technology, applications and markets. That’s one of the reasons you might see serious B2B companies blogging and tweeting about the most bizarre things (an employee bringing their dog in into the office is one of my particularly favourite inanities from last year). Is this going to help you sell more product? Is it going to put your brand ahead of the competition? Of course not. There’s no point in having an employee who is a ‘whizz’ at social media but who doesn’t have enough confidence to post compelling technical content that will actually appeal to your audience. Having someone with both social media and technical prowess is the key.
- Is the company’s social media material actually reaching people? Companies need to ensure they have a sizeable audience – the effort in posting content is going to be wasted if nobody sees it! Yet even now some large multinationals have only a few hundred followers on Twitter. Building this following is just as important as creating and sharing your valuable content.
In conclusion, successful social media campaigns require the creation of good and relevant content and the posting and sharing of that content on a regular enough basis. However, that is not enough. You could be creating good quality social media content fairly frequently and still fail to get anywhere, simply through not having a large enough and correctly targeted set of followers.
Learn more about how B2B technology companies an implement successful social media campaigns by visiting the Pinnacle Marketing website: https://www.publitek.com/services/social-media
