What Today’s Marketing Numbers Mean for Your B2B Business – Part 2: Social Media

Social media: Levi’s had 40% growth in Facebook likes by adding individual like buttons to their products on their website

Social media can be daunting for B2B companies: how do we use it? Who monitors it? and what’s the purpose? are common questions in getting started. But social media has proven itself time and time again as an awareness builder, a platform for client interaction, and an ROI-driven.

The key takeaways from the Levi’s case are creating ease of sharing and using integration: consumers share what they like, and this goes for B2B content as well as B2C products like Levi jeans. Making it convenient for your site visitors to interact with and share your content will build your reputation on social media sites and drive traffic back to your website.

Levis Facebook campaign

Levis FB likes

This doesn’t have to mean elaborate social media campaigns designed to gain Facebook fans, or a hashtag (#) campaign on Twitter. The first step is to integrate share buttons on every page of your website, and certainly every page and post on your blog. Doing this requires choosing a type of share button (such as “follow us on Twitter” vs. “share this on Twitter”) and placing a small code snippet into each page.

Once you have basic sharing capabilities in place, you can integrate further and create an intricate web of social links:

  • Integrate share buttons into email newsletters and announcements
  • Have employees include follow buttons in their email footers
  • Optimize white papers, eBooks, and other PDF content with share buttons
  • For content behind a form, add share buttons to their corresponding website landing pages

RCC social media sharing

 

RCC social media share buttons

When we revamped our popular B2B whitepaper, Eight Steps to B2B Website and Marketing Success, we built a landing page with social sharing capabilities to encourage content sharing. It’s always better to make sharing easier than to have a prosect give up on spreading your valuable content because it would take extra time.

Some of the most common buttons in use are the Facebook like button, the Twitter follow button and share a link button, the LinkedIn share button, and the +1 Google button.

Having the buttons in place across your website and online materials is a great way to get your foot in the social media door.

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