The following is excerpted from a blog entry at Crain's Social Media Group.
Earlier this week, I taught a class, Creating Your Company's Social Media Strategy, at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. The class was only 90 minutes and we had to move quickly to cover all of our material. Because the majority of the attendees worked at consumer-facing companies, I focused on creating a social media strategy for a B2C company.
A few hours after the class, an attendee posted a public thank you on
our Facebook page. I quickly responded as myself, thanking her publicly and asking what was the most helpful thing she learned. She quickly responded on Facebook with the following comment:
Why should B2B companies use social media? It's a great question and one that can't be answered effectively in a Facebook comment. So here's my longer answer.
Social media increases your company's overall SEO.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of getting traffic for free from search engines. Many factors contribute to your website's ranking in search engines, and one of the most important factors is the number of inbound links to your website. Simply put -- the more people linking to your website, the more important Google will think your website is, the better your company's search results will be.
Done well, a social media strategy is a cost-effective way to quickly increase inbound links to your website and ultimately your overall SEO.
Social media provides an inside look at your company.
Marketers at B2B companies may think they have nothing "interesting" to share with the general public and thus shy away from social media. But take a step back and reconsider what might be "interesting" about your company.
Sure, maybe the product or service your company provides does not lend itself well to photos, videos and blog posts. Yet your employees do. Chances are you have several employees who are considered industry experts. Why not ask them to contribute to a new company blog? Be interviewed for a short video that will be posted to YouTube? Participate in a Twitter chat or a Google+ hangout?
In addition to industry experts, your company also likely has employees who are doing interesting things to support your community. Why not profile their work with philanthropic causes? A great example is
this video produced by the Chicago-based LinkedIn office in support of Movember, which raises money and awareness for men's health.
Social media lets employees collaborate across your company.
Some companies block access to social networks in attempt to increase their employees' effectiveness. That's a bad idea for two reasons. A.) Employees can still access social networks via apps on their smart phones. B.) It sends a negative message to your employees that your company doesn't trust how they'll spend their time at work.
Internal use of social media can actually increase employees' effectiveness -- particularly if they don't work in the same location. Social networks like Yammer and National Field provide private solutions for companies that want employees to collaborate virtually on ideas and projects. They also help executives keep tabs on what's happening across the company.
"The organization finally has visibility into what people are really working on, and it also enables the process to be open and participative," says Dion Hinchcliffe, co-author of
Social Business by Design, in a
recent interview with Fast Company . "We're talking about a natural and open process of collaborating that looks just like a Facebook feed: You see what's going on in your company, in your department, or with your team all the time. You gather information that you need and you share the information that others need."
Tracy Samantha Schmidt is director, training and strategy, Crain's Social Media Group at Crain Communications.
