Patience Hurlburt-LawtonThere is a paradigm shift that is happening in the social media world: B2B companies can actually have a successful presence on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Companies are finally beginning to realize the value of increasing brand awareness, managing their reputation, generating leads and connecting with customers via social media.
Social media marketing is not only beneficial to B2B marketing strategies – it’s essential. To drive this point home, let’s look at some case studies of successful B2B social media campaigns.
Facebook: Marketo
Marketo provides marketing automation and sales software for small, medium and big-time businesses. Now, if all they did on their Facebook page was regurgitate information from the “About Us” section on their website, it would get pretty boring pretty fast.
The focus of their social media presence, however, seems to be in providing useful, informative material to their audience. Posts with titles like “want your blog to lead to conversions?” and “what you need to do to create epic content” allow readers to click over to their blog and learn some really useful stuff. Mix in some humor, truly captivating infographics, inspiring quotes and engaging videos and it’s easy to see why they have over 26,000 likes.
Talk about a great Pinterest presence! Grand Image provides fine art for the retail, corporate, residential, hospitality, and healthcare markets. Their Pinterest account is lively, relevant and jam-packed with creative and interesting boards, like “Art, Design, Wall Décor Tips,” “Framing Ideas,” and “Color Inspirations.” They’ve also blended in a little bit of harmless self-promotion with pins that show customer success stories and behind the scenes.
http://pinterest.com/grandimage/
YouTube: Cisco
When you think of great video content, you probably don’t think of Cisco. But that’s just what they’re doing on their YouTube channel – pumping out videos and tutorials to help and inform their viewers. The videos are snappy, engaging, well-crafted and just plain fun to watch. Their YouTube channel gives practical advice and has a more informative than self-promotional vibe. And that’s probably why they have over 23,000 subscribers and close to 4 million video views.
http://www.youtube.com/user/Cisco
There’s plenty of other B2Bs out there that are doing social media right. Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and Twitter (among others) have become important touchpoints for B2Bs that can ultimately lead to more leads and more sales.
