One of the most common questions about B2B social media is whether or not (and how) Facebook fits into the mix. There really isn’t a simple answer and it’s best to think of it in macro vs. micro terms. There are hundreds of variables to consider, but starting with these three important b2b social media questions should help.
That said, some of the best expertise on the subject of Facebook for B2B comes from SocialMediaB2B.com’s co-founders Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen. At MarketingProfs B2B Forum , Jeffrey, along with Deirdre Walsh, and Susan Solomon, presented on the topic: Facebook for Effective B2B Marketing.
Below is the presentation used for the session. I encourage you to check it out. While it is my bet that the overwhelming value of the session was delivered in that room, the presentation is one of the most succinct I’ve seen on the topic. It’s definitely one I would use with anyone to answer the question, is Facebook marketing for B2B?
Below are two more of my favorite Facebook for B2B posts from Jeffrey and Kipp. If you are not following them and SocialMediaB2B.com, what are you waiting for!
Many B2B marketers approach Facebook with the knowledge of how to maintain a personal profile, but still shake their heads at how to get results from a business Page for their B2B company. There are two basic things you need to know about managing a Facebook Page for a B2B company.
B2B marketers see the growing numbers of Facebook users and join the ranks of businesses who set up outposts on the world’s largest social network. As Facebook is a tightly controlled environment, there are few opportunities for branding and creating a branded experience for your customers and prospects.
When Clara Shih says social networks are great tools for customer relationship management you can trust she knows what she’s taking about. After all, Shih created Faceconnector, an application that pulls Facebook profile information into Salesforce.com’s CRM application.
Can you do elaborate on why social networks are useful for CRM?
When you look at it from a business perspective, and it’s true for all businesses, but especially if you’re a small business; your network determines your success. It’s who you can establish partnerships with, who you can sell to on a repeated basis, who can refer to you. So when you have a powerful tool like Facebook, where contacts are updating their own profiles, and which lets you connect with people on a human level, that also helps facilitate business relationships.
It may surprise some people that Facebook works this way for business purposes, because people share a lot of personal details there.
Personal relationships are at the heart of business relationships. Talk to anyone in sales or business development; you don’t always talk to customers or business associates about work. You ask them how their kids are. You share personal stories… that’s really a way to establish trust. And trust is the basis of business.
Do you think connecting through social networks will ultimately be part of an expected way that business gets done?
I think certainly for some generations the answer is yes. The expectation for someone in their 20s is that you will be able to find them on Facebook; you will be able to send them a message and interact with them in that way. If that trend continues, when those cohorts of people graduate and enter into decision-making roles at their own companies, I can see that it will change how business gets done.
It becomes a personal brand. So is it far-fetched to think that five years from now a customer, or a prospective customer, will want to go to your page or your personal profile, to see which of their friends is a customer of yours that they can use as a reference? It’s totally plausible that it becomes a part of the purchasing cycle.
Do you have suggestions for how a business should allocate their time with social media?
The most important thing is to start with their goals. There’s so many uses for social media, just like there’s so many different ways to use a website. You can use it for marketing or customer service or to source ideas from the community on how to improve your product.
Rather than trying to satisfy them all at once in your initial foray into social media, I would highly suggest choosing the top one or two use cases, and setting expectations about what that is. So that it’s very manageable and it’s very clear.
Once you have the strategy, you can say, “Well if we want it for customer service, we’re going to have to check this every day,” and have one of your customer service managers check your Facebook page every day at a certain time, creating a regular behavior and a habit out of that. Now if it’s for a different use case, you might not have to do it as regular. There are various tools out there that can let businesses know when they’ve been mentioned, so depending on the use case, one or more of these tools might make sense.
In your book you have a chapter about how social networks can be a valuable for innovation and collaboration. Can you share some suggestions for companies who may want to use social networks in this way?
The idea that you now have many customers who want to interact with you, and who may have ideas on a daily basis, requires someone owning that community at the company. You need to have infrastructure to manage the community, whether it’s on Facebook, or Twitter, or on your company’s own site, to capture those ideas and be able to rank and somehow prioritize those ideas.
Where I do see this happening already ties into customer service. When people complain, oftentimes they may have a suggestion for a better way of improving your product or service. Or they may be complaining about something that’s very specific that the company can innovate on.
A lot depends on how the company approaches it. When the company welcomes feedback, people really respond and you’ll find that often it’s less about complaining and more like people thinking, “Wow this company really cares about me and values my opinion.”
What are some other ways that social media can be advantageous in the B2B environment?
B2B has many of the same concerns that B2C might have – you want to have good branding, you want to hire good people, you want to be able to innovate on your products and social media is ideal for all of these use cases. And when it comes to sales, social media is an especially strong fit for the reasons we talked about – for the relationship building and the trust that is typically the cornerstone of most B2B purchase decisions.
You always hear how in social media you can’t do the hard sell, you have to do the soft sell. But people know why you’re on there – your purpose is ultimately to sell, if you’re a business.
It is ultimately to sell. And that’s OK if you acknowledge it. But it’s also to show that you care about people. If you go to Cisco’s Facebook page, they have a great page there and it’s largely B2B oriented. They have one tab that’s consumer oriented but a lot of the page centers around their B2B use case, and they have almost 100,000 fans. It’s people who, maybe they’re an IT manager and they’re dealing with Cisco products all the time and they want to be able to connect with that brand.
You suggest measuring social customer lifetime value – can you explain what this is and why you think it’s important.
Customer lifetime value is a method used by a lot of business owners and marketers to figure out the monetary value that any given customer might have over their lifetime as a customer. And while this is valuable … in the Facebook era it’s not just what a single customer can buy from us, but it’s how that one customer affects this entire ecosystem, from a customer service angle, from a marketing angle, from a sales angle and so on… Let’s say you have a customer who is really active on Facebook and Twitter. This customer could have a huge impact on your business, even if they may not be buying that much on their own.
What I urge people to do is to revisit their goals in social media and based on that come up with a calculation for social customer lifetime value, so that they’re adequately investing in customer relationships, not only based on the financial return of an individual, but on the larger return, overall.
Often when social media is mentioned, the first questions that arise are about return on investment. There are a lot of business activities, like public relations and sponsorships, where it’s hard to assign a hard dollar return, and yet it’s such a hot button issue with social media. Do you have any thoughts on why this is so?
I think it’s because social media can take up a lot of your time. And if you haven’t been strategic about prioritizing you goals and allocating your time to achieve those specific goals, it can quickly feel like you’re spending all this time and not getting that much back. I think that’s why people focus on ROI. But I think if people start from the goals they’ll find they’ve they don’t have waste all this time and they can align it more closely with what they want to achieve.
But when people ask me about ROI of social media I always answer, How do you calculate the ROI of the internet? And the answer is, it depends on how you use it.
Thanks Clara, for a most informative conversation. As usual, I’ll be keeping up with you on Facebook and Twitter, and readers, you’re encouraged to do the same.
About the B2Bblogger:
Deni Kasrel is a seasoned (slightly spicy) strategic communications specialist. She helps companies build their brands and engage with communities so they can sell more stuff. Having enjoyed a fruitful eclectic career, Deni is versed in both traditional and digital communications, with special emphasis on content strategy, website development and social media marketing. You may contact Deni via LinkedIn, follow her on Twitter @dkasrel, or visit her blog: The Communications Strategist.
Jeremy: Hi, My name is Jeremy and I’m a social network addict.
Group: Welcome, Jeremy.
Jeremy: In May of 2009, I opened an account on Twitter and shortly thereafter I found myself launching a business. The barriers to entry and costs were so low; I was just going crazy getting started up. After 13 months, I realized I was using social networking sites 43% more than I used to. I discovered how easy it was to connect with people I hadn’t talked to in years. And I was like “connecting” with them, becoming “friends” again. I know crazy, right. Even learning things like how many kids they have (and seeing pictures of them), the businesses they were starting and running.
From a business side of things, I even connected with a CMO of a major corporation via of Twitter. I interviewed him. I became part of a community of B2B marketing executives contributing to advancing the discipline of marketing. I have established thousands of online connections and hundreds of in real life meetings.
But like I said, 43% more than I used to. That was when I found you, SNA (social networkers anonymous). You helped me see the error of my ways. Now, it’s me, my newspapers, and land line. Thank you.
Group: Thanks for sharing. Keep coming back, it works if you work it.
And well, frankly it just frustrated the heck out of me! I really, really struggle with the label of “Addiction” on the increased usage of social networking technology. Here’s a passage:
Experian Simmons is out with a new package of stats that document the incredible growth of social networking in the US. (Experian is an Edelman client.) Here are some of the notable highlights…
First, some 66% of online Americans use social networking sites today, up from just 20% in 2007. This has been covered a lot before. However, what’s notable is that it’s an increasingly additive activity – 43% visit multiple times each day.
source: Experian Simmons
Advancements in technology have ALWAYS improved the lives of Americans. It’s never been easier to connect with, stay up to date with, and communicate with people. It’s never been easier to meet, find, and start relationships with new people. Using social networking technology to do this is a problem? An addiction? A dependency? Because I do it multiple times a day?
As more people discover the ease of use of the social web, as broadband and wireless reach more people, as new devices, (someone released something called an iPad, no?), and as Moore’s law continues to make it more affordable, is it right to use a term like “Addiction?” Isn’t doing so going to make the end result far more likely to turn people off to it, rather then having them embrace it?
Wouldn’t it be better to focus on the greater impact the social web is having on our society – like bringing us closer together, improving our economy, helping us quickly respond in times of crisis, and bettering our position in the global marketplace.
I wonder if back in the 1930’s they were saying, “43% Americans Addicted To Driving – Going to more places, getting further away from their homes”.
What do you think? Am I off my rocker? And simply justifying my social networking addiction in my own mind? Or is it time to stop with the “Addiction” label?
More and more B2B marketers are turning to lead scoring as a way of optimizing lead management. Many of us will remember when we used to process raw Excel lists, handing over hundreds of names with job titles and companies to our sales department, only to find that leads weren’t being followed up on. It wasn’t possible to know which leads were the most interested in your company, and wasn’t easy to see which matched your target buyer.
Recent advances in marketing automation and sales CRM software have made it easier to streamline the whole process. Marketing and sales professionals can apply lead scoring algorithms to leads, effectively sorting and prioritizing them for nurturing programs and sales follow-up.
In our next episode of #B2Bchat, we’ll dig into the questions that surround lead scoring.
Does your company currently use lead scoring? If so, how long have you used lead scoring?
How specifically has lead scoring helped? Are there measurable benefits?
What information do you need before you can begin with lead scoring?
Which software/tools do you use for lead scoring?
Do you use a single score, or multiple scores? Do you score implicit and explicit data separately?
Which types of activities do you score most highly?
Which factors do you consider when scoring explicit data, e.g. demographics/firmographics?
Do you apply negative scoring? For which actions?
How often do you review your lead scoring in your company? Which department is in charge of lead scoring?
Advice for taking lead scoring to the next level?
What are the best resources out there to learn more?
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on Lead Scoring Best Practices, Thursday, April 8 at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
Should your B2B brand be on Facebook? What is Facebook’s value for business to business marketing? Some companies are dabbling, some others have had remarkable success. And there are those that need to learn more before building a solid strategy.
Over the course of an hour in our weekly #B2Bchat, we covered around half a dozen questions and hundreds of tweets on the topic of Facebook and B2B marketing. Here you will find the top questions and answers from participants, compiled and edited for easier reading.
Q. Is Facebook a platform for content distribution or audience engagement?
Facebook is both a platform for content distribution and audience engagement, but it depends on what the audience wants. Most often it starts with distribution, then following with engagement.
Before deciding on Facebook or any other social media channel, do research on the market to assess the importance of that social network. Sketch a buyer persona.
Besides engagement, Facebook can also act as a means of audience retention.
Q. Should marketers have content exclusive to Facebook?
Creating exclusive content for Facebook is time-intensive, and may not be worth the investment if that is the only place it is posted.
Marketers will often share content across several channels, including their blog, YouTube, website, Twitter and mobile.
Blog and Twitter integration with Facebook are the most common forms of integration and are easy to set up.
More important than exclusivity is the question of content quality.
Q. What is Facebook’s value as a market research tool?
It is a great tool for crowdsourcing ideas and getting feedback.
Facebook makes it easy to conduct polls and surveys.
There aren’t enough options yet within Facebook for marketers to segment data.
Facebook should consider opening up an API for Fanpage data.
Advice for B2B Marketers
If marketers do not yet have a Facebook strategy and/or the means to manage it effectively, they should create a placeholder Facebook presence which redirects users to other channels, e.g. a website.
A great way to engage an audience on Facebook is to offer configurators, widgets and applications.
B2B companies which were referenced within the #B2Bchat as companies to watch on Facebook: Cisco, Avaya, Dell and Ernst & Young.
Q. What is the largest barrier for B2B companies to start a Facebook presence?
A significant barrier to expanding/improving a Facebook presence is simply having the time to devote to it.
There is skepticism and fear amongst B2B marketers when embarking with Facebook because of its unknown ROI and the potential of having to back out of commitment if it doesn’t work.
Some of Facebook’s rules are the biggest B2B barrier: page ownership, limited analytics, customer service, and closed search.
Some business buyers resent business contacts friend requests as they see Facebook as means to maintain personal space and work/life balance. When we polled the #B2Bchat participants on their own balance between business and personal Facebook contacts, it ranged from 0% to 50%, with the median being 30% business contacts.
Facebook groups people too broadly for B2B marketers’ purpose.
The term ‘fan page’ doesn’t fit well for B2B.
Facebook needs to have more effective integration with other lead generation activities.
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
The popular social network now has a population of over 400 million and is on a path towards online domination. It seems that everyone, and even their parents, is now on Facebook.
What’s that all mean for B2B marketing? Should your B2B brand be there? What is Facebook’s value for business to business marketing?
In this week’s #B2BChat, we will share ideas and thoughts on B2B marketing and Facebook. Some companies are dabbling, some others have had remarkable success. And there are those that need to learn more before building a solid strategy.
Here are some questions we will use to guide the conversation:
In your own use of Facebook, is your network more personal or business related?
If your brand / company does not have an active FB page, what are you missing out on? Anything?
Is Facebook a platform for content distribution or audience engagement?
Have you had success advertising on Facebook? CPC or CPM?
Which targeting methods work best?
Ad landing pages: on your website or on Facebook?
Do you have content exclusive to Facebook? Or is it repurposed from other environments?
Whose role is it to manage a corporate Facebook presence?
How do you process/act on analytics data gathered from Facebook?
Which analytics providers have the best solution? Webtrends, Omniture, Coremetrics, Google?
What is Facebook’s value for market research
What are the top Facebook widgets for B2B marketers?
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat on B2B Marketing and Facebook, Thursday, March 25 at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at MarketingFinger.com. You can follow him on Twitter at@andrewspoeth.
Facebook marketing for B2B is a tricky subject, mainly because the behavior of people on this social media platform tends to be geared towards personal conversations with friends, not necessarily business networking. However, we shouldn’t forget that the business contacts who perform purchases for their institutions are actual people and they may very well have a Facebook persona.
Thus, if your business has determined that your target audience lives on Facebook, and if you’re ready to invest in building personal relationships, then it’s worth taking a look at the new capabilities for tracking activity on Facebook pages.
Measure Facebook Metrics Together with Your Other Analytics
Granted, the Webtrends Facebook analytics offering is limited by a few details for now. First, in the next couple of months, this feature will require a service engagement with Webtrends. Second, the Webtrends method will only allow you to track page activity within custom tabs. If you want to know more about the capabilities, I highly suggest attending one of Justin Kistner’s webinars on the topic. The good news is that the long-term plan is to have Facebook analytics as a “do-it-yourself” offering, so if you’re not in a terrible rush, this may happen by the summer.
A Final Word of Warning: Use the Momentum and Find the Right Solution for Your Organization!
If your business has decided to have a presence on Facebook, make sure that it is about building relationships and use the cultural momentum of social media and of specific platforms. If Facebook is for you and you have good employee advocates, plan your move and make your move, do not wait 2 years. To balance out that advice, I also highly suggest reading Steve Rubel’s thoughts on dropping .com URLs in favor of Facebook and other social media destinations. There is no solution that works for all businesses, so whichever direction your organization decides to take, make sure you do so with full/transparent intent, dedicated resources, and a way to measure your success.
About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is marketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.
Social media is all the rage, but you already knew that. Seth Godin calls it a big cocktail party. The English say, “No, it’s more like an evening at the neighborhood pub.” Either way, it’s something big happening somewhere else—it’s not a party at your place. Go ahead and enjoy the party, but make sure you plan ahead to make it worth your while when the party’s over. To keep the party going on your own turf, you’ll need to take home all the data you’ll need to follow up and reconnect. Here are five quick steps to make sure your partying leads to something productive.
1. Remember you’re partying at someone else’s house. Whether you’re on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or another social media platform, you’re away from home. It’s not your website or blog. Facebook may have drawn a huge crowd, but it’s Facebook’s crowd. Don’t be lulled to sleep thinking your “friends” on Facebook on actually yours. At any moment Facebook can change their TOS (terms of service) or freeze your account. When that happens, the party’s over.
2. Make provision to take the party home with you. You’ll want to be a good guest at the party; you’ll also want to set the stage for the next contact at your place. You’ll need permission and a pathway to make it happen.
3. Make it easy for the folks at the party to find your house and to feel welcome. Put on the hat of a direct mail marketing expert and hear the word’s of the experts of yesterday admonish you: “it’s all about the list.” If real estate is all about “location, location, location,” digital partying is all about “data, data, data.” Five thousand friends on Facebook don’t count as an asset for your business until you have their name, address, email address, and phone number on your own database along with their permission to contact them again. Give folks a reason to visit your place and then invite them to leave their contact information with you.
4. On social media, use the same tools you’re using on your own digital domains to capture email addresses and enable “opt-in” participation. On Facebook you can use MyHTML or Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to drop in the code you’ll need to create an opt-in form. For sites like Twitter, use the field for “website” to hold the address to a special landing page. On the page, give folks a compelling reason to connect with you and then make it obvious you want their opt-in data and make it easy for them to give it to you.
5. Integrate your social media into your marketing program. With the opt-in form, social media becomes another input source for your ongoing marketing efforts.
Whether it’s a worldwide cocktail party or an evening at the English pub, social media is a thrilling, active place for you to enjoy a party away from home and meet cool people. No matter how rewarding the party is, there’s always the next morning at work. You’ll be at work much longer than you’ll be at the party, so be sure you get all the data you need to move the party to your house (work) and keep the party going as long as you can.
About The B2Bblogger: Trey Pennington (@treypennington) uses technology, marketing, and stories to connect businesses with the people they seek to serve. With an educational background in marketing, including an undergraduate degree in marketing management and an MBA, combined with a masters in education, Trey understands the need for businesses to discover and develop their core story and to engage their marketplace in making the story their own.
His book, Spitball Marketing: Using What You’ve Got to Get More of What You Want is due out in early 2010. You can read more from Trey now at his blog www.treypennington.com.
As you are planning your social media efforts, here are five things to consider.
1. It’s not a panacea or a magic pill that will cure what ails you.
Your problems will remain your problems. Social media can help, but if are struggling to generate leads or have slow response times in your contact center, social media alone won’t fix that. On top of that, Twitter gives your customers another vehicle to communicate with you. If you are not prepared to listen and respond, think twice before creating @yourcompanyname.
2. If you are doing it, because that’s what the “cool kids” are doing, you are bound to fail.
Yes, there are B2B companies succeeding with social media. Your company can too, but only if you make social media part of an overall marketing strategy tied to specific goals. Facebook, Twitter, You tube…there all just tactics. If you’re only thinking about creating a Facebook page because your main competitor did…slow down and consider how the use of social media can help you achieve your overall goals. If you are doing it for any other reason and you don’t have it tied to specific goals, you’ll likely be wasting your time (not to mention that you will have no way to monitor and measure your success).
3. If you are the internal champion or evangelist, roll up your sleeves, you are in for the fight of your life.
I can almost guarantee the moment you sit down for your presentation with your boss and you pull up Twitter – you’ll see a post like this one I sent last week:
@MarketingVeep you can always use a paper towel in a pinch -Jeremy
“How can something like that help us,” she’ll say. Followed by a few minutes later, “Facebook, my kids are on Facebook 24×7, I’m always telling them to stop wasting so much time on there.”
If the executives in your company are new to social media, you’ll need to be prepared to use every opportunity to consensus build. Without the support of the entire management team, your social media road will be much harder to travel. [BTW- @Marketingveep needed coffee filters on a Monday morning.]
4. You have already underestimated the investment in time by at least half.
While the majority of social media tools and web sites are free to use, they all take time to manage. Lots of it. A blog can be especially time consuming due to the writing involved (at the same time though, it can be the most rewarding). You and your staff are likely stretched pretty thin already, it is important that you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start slowy and measure time spent to help you plan better for future initiatives.
5. Don’t let fear cripple you, you will make mistakes.
Write this down – I will send a tweet with a typo. I will not panic.
While there are best practices in social media, much of your success will come through trial and error and learning what tactics work best for achieving your goals. Like any marketing program, not everything will work or go as planned. Don’t let that stop you from trying. The benefits far outweigh the typos.
What else should B2B marketers know about social media?
Hi, I'm @jeremyvictor, the founder of Make Good Media and Editor In Chief of B2Bbloggers.com.
B2Bbloggers.com is an online magazine for B2B marketers. Our goal is to engage, educate, and make it easier for B2B marketers to find the information they care about to do their jobs successfully.
As a publisher and new media marketing agency, Make Good Media advises businesses how to integrate social media and content marketing with traditional marketing tactics to attract, nurture, engage, and convert customers in the brave new B2B world of the social, mobile web. How can we help you Make Good Media?
Can you do elaborate on why social networks are useful for CRM?
You always hear how in social media you can’t do the hard sell, you have to do the soft sell. But people know why you’re on there – your purpose is ultimately to sell, if you’re a business.
About the B2Bblogger: Andrew Spoeth is an independent marketing consultant who specializes in B2B demand generation. He most recently worked as the marketing director at Enquiro, one of North America’s leading search marketing agencies. You’ll also find Andrew speaking at industry events, co-moderating the weekly #B2Bchat series on Twitter, and blogging at 
About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (
