Over the last two years, many of our clients have been rushing to create a Twitter handle, Facebook fan pages, Linked In profiles and so on. Specialist B2B social marketing firms have made grandiose pitches on traffice generation, monetization and so on. After having worked with some of the larger IT services firms in their social media marketing (SMM), we have learnt a few things.
1. Have a reason to connect in the social world: CIOs, Vice Presidents of Sourcing, typical corporate buyers do NOT make decisions reading a blog, a Twitter feed or a Facebook comment. Sad, but true. So if you really need to connect with them, SMM may not really fetch you the right returns on your investments. Remember, social media is so named for a reason: it is for a society.
2. So define your SMM audience: as a services company, your audience could include your internal employees, consultants, recruiters, and so on. Find ways to connect with them informally through the social tools. If you are launching a new service line, your consultants could give you feedback on its life expectations. If you have a new hire, your Tweet could announce the position and could feed into your Linked In group. For a start, use your SMM to leverage the audience closest to you. Your prospect client…ah, they will come in a bit.
3. Blog in earnest and they will come: Yes, starting a blog is cool, but not after the first post. If you really spend some time (10 mins) to write a thought, disperse it to your group, you will find it slowly getting you traction. Try this everyday (now I really got to eat my own dog food), and you will find it a decent strategy to connect with new people: influencers, market watchers, other bloggers who write to build an interest group.
It is not a bad idea to simply not blog at all. Try using it as an internal collaboration tool for your company to build ideas, share news, and so on. WP is cool.
4. Consider listening before selling: Quite often, blogs are repeats of web pages. Tweets announce messages about the company that has no relevance to the receivers. Facebook fan pages are filled with more marketing spiel, and Linked In groups are getting to be blatant postings for services. It will be helpful if you really spend a bit of time to listen to what your audience is asking for. Is your blog discussing the H1 visa issue with your consultants? Why not? Is your Linked In group announcing new opportunities in cloud computing? Why do you think you should not be re-posting such jobs for your group to read about?
5. Be traditional: your business comes from people who are worried about ensuring business-as-usual, who are fighting budgets, who are under pressure from C-suite to deliver tangible results. They are under pressure to help roll-out their own company’s SMM. It is easy to still be connecting with these buyers and make business the traditional way. Here again, the three elements do not go away: relevance (how relevant your buyer thinks your service is), responsiveness (how well your communication evinces a response from them), and reliance (if your client can think he or she can rely on your pitch).
I would be interested in hearing your SMM initiatives and how they have helped.
Tags:
Facebook,
Linked In,
social media marketing,
Twitter