Five Ways To Get More Value From Your Social Media Activities

If you’re like most B2B technology marketers, you’re probably already using social media as an integrated part of your marketing strategy. But with so many platforms and so many different ways you can use them, it can be hard to decide where to focus your budget and resources.

As part of our series of bite-size videos exploring current B2B technology marketing best practice, we asked senior marketers from some leading B2B tech brands to give us their hints and tips on getting the best value from social media.

Five key points stood out for us:

1. Know What You Want to Achieve:  Lots of organisations still jump on to Twitter or Facebook because they’re worried they’ll miss out on opportunities if they’re not. But just having an account on every platform won’t in itself have any impact. The key is to define very clearly what you want to get out of social media, and then build your strategy around that.

“Don’t start a Twitter account or a blog just because your sponsor, your manager, your director says we need one. Ask yourself why you need it.”
Zoe Sands, Head of Digital Marketing EMEA, Juniper Networks

2. Be Selective: Unless you have limitless budget and infinite resources, you won’t be able to use every single platform to its full potential.  Understanding which platforms and activities deliver the most value to your organisation, and focusing on just one, two or a handful of key ones, will get better results than trying to be everywhere.

3. Match Your Content to Your Audience:  Social media is great for sharing content – but it’ll only pay off if what you create is what your audience wants.  If your audience really needs practical installation guides, sharing your latest Downfall parody video isn’t going to help. Find out what your target market needs, then meet that need with useful, tailored content.

“The content needs to be refreshing and engaging – you can’t push the same content out week after week, you can’t recycle it. You’ve got to present new content and talk about different things in different ways.”
Madeleine Hudson, Consultant Online Marketing Manager, Microsoft

4. Measure The Right Things: Social media gives you lots of data to analyse, but not all of it is useful. Without a firm grasp of the metrics that are important for your organisation, you may end up wasting time and money on reports that don’t tell you very much, or give you an unrepresentative view of your customers.  Understand what metrics are useful for your business and ignore the rest.

5. Be Realistic: There are lots of great things you can do with social media that you couldn’t with traditional marketing.  But ‘doing social media’ doesn’t mean you’re suddenly going to be inundated with thousands of hot leads and customer advocates. Just like any marketing activity, it takes time, effort, planning and a lot of testing – and quite a lot of failing – to discover what really works.

“It’s about time and effort to make things happen regularly. If you don’t bring out one or two blogs a week, if you don’t tweet every day, if you’re not posting regularly, then you’re not there.”
Ceri Jones, Senior Marketing Consultant

For the inside track on how brands like Microsoft, Juniper Networks, Oracle and Cisco are successfully using social media for marketing, hop over to Mindshare Café and watch our Social Media Best Practice video series.

We’d love to know what you think, too. What social media approaches have worked for you, and what didn’t go so well? Let us know in the comments.