Social media marketing has become a unique way for B2B companies to interact with clients and prospects from having conversations, getting feedback and gaining insight into potential products. Social media continues to grow and expand into more channels for communicating with your fans and followers. You may think that your company is just too boring to find something to interact with customers about on social media. However, data shows that companies using social media increase their loyal customer base and gain sales while satisfying customer service issues via social media. Here are five ways that you can improve your customer interactions through social media marketing.
1. Use Images
The growth of both Instagram and Pinterest shows the popularity and effectiveness of imagery. Both sites allow still images and videos to display your products or tell a story. If your products are too complex to explain through imagery, then you can take pictures to tell the story of what people do with your products. Find a unique angle to show in your images and videos to attract the attention of your customers. You can even tell stories about charitable efforts or company outings.
2. Market Your Brand
You can use social media to build brand awareness through a combination of images, logos and content marketing. Social media is a great way to broaden your market if you have an experienced marketer at your helm. Find a social media marketer that can identify your ideal audience demographic and direct social media posts to that market. Depending on your niche, different channels are better for generating brand awareness.
3. Promote Your Content
Content marketing has become increasingly important for B2B companies, and you can use your social media marketing to promote it. While you can only publish your content once, you can continually link to it in social media posts on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other sites. Each post offers the link to a potential new audience, and if you use the paid ads on social media sites, you can direct these links to specifically chosen demographics.
4. Increase Your Search Ranking
According to the Content Marketing Institute's 2015 B2B content marketing survey, social shares have influence your your site's page rank. As you share your content, more traffic will be drawn to your site and show Google that your site is offering something important to followers. As your followers engage and share your content, it continues to build momentum in search.
5. Generate Leads
Social media sites can be a plethora of leads. The most popular site for lead generation for B2B companies is LinkedIn. However, depending on your industry, you may find other sites including Twitter and Facebook as a good way to reach out to potential clients. At the very least you can use them for connecting with people through chat or messaging. One popular lead generation tool is video creation. Videos can be posted on most social media sites and they are very successful at driving conversions to landing pages. To see more statistics on how other B2B companies are successfully using social media, take a look at this Social Media Today infographic.