3 Ways Social Media Works for B2B

I often look around and wonder how many others out there feel as shell shocked as I do when it comes to marketing in 2011. It was as though I had my head buried under the covers for five years and then woke up one morning to someone tweeting in my ear.

Where did this all come from and better yet, how did we survive before the advent of on-line information?

I think the pervasiveness of this medium really sunk in for me when I was told that a friend had actually trumped a fellow candidate for a job because of his LinkedIn recommendations. Once I heard that, I knew that businesses were taking social media seriously in a variety of ways.

From a B2B perspective it is sometimes hard to see how blogging, tweeting and on-line networking can really help to boost your brand awareness, but if your business isn’t “socializing” how will it attract “friends”?

Three ways social marketing works:

1. Generate Site Traffic:
Posting regularly within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will generate traffic to your website through links. Period. It is that simple.

2. Links for SEO:
Link building is key. The more links you have to your site the more powerful the site. This will happen for you if the information you provide is valuable such that word gets around and fellow industry bloggers start linking to your blog. Then the site starts to appear on fellow blogger’s blog rolls and specific posts are linked as reference and become points of discussion in other online publications. Google really likes these incoming links.

3. Increased Search Engine Rankings:
Major search engines frequently rank social media sites high. Using brand names and keywords in your profiles can help you to generate traffic for your social media sites and company homepage. For instance, each time a new blog is posted a new page is indexed by the search engines. So, for a website that originally had 20 pages in the search engine pool, blogging once per week for a year can approximately more than double the number of indexed pages within the first year.

Has social marketing helped your business? Share your story with us.