What is the #1 social tool for B2B marketers?

Linked In is number 1 in North America. Facebook is trying to make some inroads. Why Plaxo is not more successful is a bit of a mystery to me - it has great features, but Linked In reigns supreme.

I've worked with a B2B company that has tried FaceBook, Twitter, their own blog, and LinkedIn. Hands down, LinkedIn was the most successful for building business relationships for their business. BUT their goal was simple: to build awareness and membership (free) for their new service (an infosec community portal with free software downloads). You need to establish your goals and then measure results from your efforts to see what really works. LinkedIn worked for them. I read an article not long ago that talked about the value of "ROO" instead of "ROI," and I'm starting to believe that's a good way to go. ROO is Return on Objective and, in some ways, it makes more sense because it makes you define your objective ahead of time. Some people forget to do this.

The question was about B2B marketing -- and if you're selling to businesses (not consumers or kids) the hands-down winner is LinkedIn. The value of LinkedIn is that it's 100% about business. Facebook and Twitter are about social and personal -- and are viewed by a very high percentage of BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS as a waste of time.

That said, here's a reality check...

Despite all the thousands of articles and blogs you read today about the all-purpose wonderfulness of social media marketing -- when the BIG GUYS have a real marketing job to do, with big bucks riding on the outcome, they DON'T rely on social media to do the job...

See this recent Wall St. Journal article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704754804574494290698479688.html#

Michael,

First, you should take into account your businesses objectives as Lisa suggests. While some social media mediums work well for one business they may not work as well for another.

Creating a blog for your business is generally a good way to start out. Through your blog you can provide information that will be useful to your clients. This not only showcases your expertise in your industry but also provides an outlet for conversation with your clients, builds rapport and gives your business the human element.

Social networking sites are also a great resource since they enable you to easily network. However, be careful of the type you choose. Myspace and Facebook are great sites if you are looking to attract a younger crowd focused mainly on socializing with friends and family. Professional networking sites attract an entirely different type of crowd. These are your professionals looking to extend their professional network.

Ultimately, you want to interact and create conversations with your target audience. Once you have identified your target audience, research different social media platforms to find out which will allow you to connect the best.

Lisa and Leslie make excellent points.

Before businesses jump into social media, they need to consider its place in their overall corporate strategy.

Most commonly, social media can benefit sales, marketing, customer service, and internal communication. Before you worry about what social media channels to participate in, you need to decide what your business goals are in these and other potential areas where social media may have an impact.

Creation of your social media strategy should meet your business and user needs. The former includes defining resource availability in terms of personnel and technology. The latter includes the question of how your customers desire to be communicated to and where they are already participating.

Once you answer those questions, only then can you determine of the right mix of social media & collaborative channels (external, internal, or a combination).

Although people are more important than technology in making social media a success, technology does play a part. What can your existing technology support? Do you need to enhance your systems to better support your social media strategy so you can gather actionable intelligence?

Absolutely agree that whatever social media you select, it has to fit your overall marketing goals. However, after talking to a lot of clients and others about this very issue -- and seeing their results -- LinkedIn is the hands-down winner for B2B.

All platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, ning, etc. are simply blank slates and flexible platforms. No matter what your industry, product/service, or technical background - your organization can leverage each for different reasons.

Asking which is best, is like asking what "the internet" is good for. It's whatever you need it to be - as are social media platforms. Each one can be used to 1. build credibility in your company/product 2. reach prospects 3. reach business partners 4. keep tabs on the competition 5. keep customers up to date 6. externalize your expertise 7. hold promotions....the list goes on...just like all the things you can do with any marketing program.

From a personal perspective the two that have worked best for me have been twitter and linkedin. It sounds cliche, but it really does depend on what you are trying to do. I use twitter and linkedin for broadcasting my content with twitter getting more traffic. I use linkedin for customer insight. My peers have done well with Facebook, I have not.

My rankings:
1. Twitter
2. Linkedin
3. Facebook

One great advantage that LinkedIn and other professional social networking sites have over sites like Facebook is that you would be directly marketing to other professionals. But I would say that LinkedIn is really beneficial for insight and developing new relationships and subtly marketing through those relationships.

Twitter is great for brand awareness.

Facebook Pages is a great platform for businesses but it seems to do better for B2C businesses.

The best tool is the one you use - consistantly.
Let your personality show and be helpful.

So I think we're missing the point here, all together. The question shouldn't be "what is the best tool?" It should be how do we use all the available tools together to get the most out of social media. The reality is that within the next couple of years, we will all be migrating off of some or all of the SM platforms we are using today, replacing them with new tools. Remember Firendster, MySpace, etc? Remember when Linked is was a Resume posting site? Now days, the most important aspect of Social Media is you-- the content you develop and drive to, the conversations you put out there and how you establish your relationships with the community. But in order to do this, you rely on tools like:
- Blogs
- Photo Posting Sites (Flickr)
- Video Sites (YouTube)
- Survey Sites
- Your Company Website

And more importantly, you need to be able to track where this all drives to. Are you increasing brand awareness/quality? Are any of your social media efforts driving to sales? All of this is track-able. Check out this blog post by Parker Trewin on Tracking Social Media http://bit.ly/4vFF3L .

At the end of the day, the key is to be where your customers are. Be able to respond and know what's working and what's not.

Met with Deb Schultz formerly at Six Apart and now at the Altimeter Group and we spent a lot of time talking about enabling everyone in your organization to build relationships. In addition to what Matt said above social tools need to do at least two things: be easily used/adopted and leveraged across the organization.

I also love Barbara's L. comment because the best relationships are built on trust and "letting the you" come out with the tools you use helps lay an authentic foundation.

Matt makes some very good points. The real objective is to be where YOUR customers and prospects are. Before you join the lemming run to jump into a particular social medium just because it's the latest "in" thing or someone is touting their millions of viewers, you need to check to see if YOUR customers are in that particular audience.

Simply ask two dozen (or more) of your best customers/prospects specifically which particular social media sites or blogs or magazines or industry sites, or e-newsletters, etc. they go to MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK. Those are the places YOU need to be.

As I and others have said before, BtoB professionals have very different habits and preferences than the general consumer world. Survey them and you'll see for yourself.

Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com/

Perhaps the more important decision to make is what to do when you decide which social site to use. Are you simply looking for followers and fans or are you actually interested in having a social dialog with your customers.

Neither Facebook nor Twitter will have much of an impact on your business unless there is actual conversations occurring on a daily basis in an effort to build value.

Twitter is the in thing right now and has taken over the face book thing

To join the choir, I think it's about strategy first and tools last. I like this quick strategy guide by Jay Baer to get you thinking.

http://www.slideshare.net/jaybaer/developing-a-social-media-strategy-in-7-steps

With that said, it really does depend on your audience. I say ask them.

If you have your blog posts automatically posted to Twitter it can lead others to your blog plus they can retweet your blog post for more reach.

I say LinkedIn - although it's as much oriented to sales as marketing types. But it's definitely the best forum for making real business connections.

Unquestionably LinkedIn has been the most functional for B2B in our company. Twitter is still being decided on. We started our own Blog recently, and many are saying that the interest in blogging is lessening slightly because of Twitter, which is sad.

I'm seeing a land grab for Twitter user names like in the old days of .com domains from the Internet. I think the agreements with Google and Microsoft will have huge impacts on Twitter and will drive everything to strong keywords as the way to segment your communications. If you look at it, Twitter is a built in permission-based form of email right now, but better in many ways, worse in some.

Facebook seems to be useful to learn more about the personal side of people as you try and build a relationship.

Every time I meet someone, get a business card, or get an email, I send a connection from LinkedIn and I find it helps me immediately increase my connection to them.

Here is a good article in B2B Magazine from July about Social media in the B2B world. http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090720/FREE/307159994/.... It validates Al's point about LinkedIn, and adds some good info about how B2B marketers are leveraging both branding and demand generation as their focus with Social Media. But they also share how Facebook and Twitter ARE gaining a good share of use.

IM, face to face, especially in conference will always win out over impersonal, tech related, and electronic communication...and the trend is deffinitly pushing us into that direction with all the new apps that will put us into more direct facial contact. Faces and human form are what sells...period. Give me an email address and i will garantee a web hit, give me an IM and i will garantee a sale.

If we're ranking technology platforms, then it's a tie for first between LinkedIn and Twitter, with Facebook a distant second (for B2B marketers only - B2C marketers = different story).

No medium is more important than the message it carries. So the #1 social media tool for B2B is a compelling, noise-cancelling, erudite message that is worth people taking the time to relay / repeat / re-tweet to their colleagues.

I enjoyed Lisa's comments. Facebook & Linkedin have been helpful in our RagsToWealth.net viral message, but the real bump in success has come from folks who are happy with the decision to come on-board.
Logan Pierson
www.RagsToWealth.net

I believe social media marketing requires an integrated plan and all social platforms (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the rest) will serve a different purpose. You need to join and be active on all of them.

I think relationships with-in social networks is your best tool. Your ability to tweet and retweet with a core group of people can reach a massive audience. Or at least one that reaches a bigger audience than your own. Power in people can play a big role. However, I believe LinkedIn and Focus are more individual based. They play a bigger part in show-boating an individuals skills with briefs, featured discussions, and recorded responses on key issues. All said and done. I would say Social Media if your biggest marketing tool. Bogging, LinkedIn, Focus, Facebook, and your Twitter network are key players in the social media world.

I have found that LinkedIn and a Business Blog were the two most helpful for my B2B market as a CRM consultant and business coach. Facebook seems to work somewhat for B2C clients of mine. The value of Twitter is less obvious but a good way to start micro blogging before you have a full dedicated business blog.

Again it all depends on where your prospective customer hang out and use for searching and validation of your products and services. They all take effort to keep updated with valuable content.

Why use just one? You can link your twitter, FB, myspace, linkedin accounts for ease of posting. If you want to take it a step farther consider a B2B email marketing campaign. This is a great way to advertise to specific industries and reach those who don't use the social sites.

www.SmartLeadz.com

The best part is posting. Duh!

Something I forgot to do till recently.

Posting your SN links in your email, website, blog, etc. all very professionally :)

It wasn't until last month that I did this on most of my websites and blog. My connections grow slowly, and they grow daily.

facebook,more information please enter into www.focaleshop.com

Michael

I've seen some very good replies here talking about defining the goal. This is of course very important because without it we don't know if we were succesful or not.

The way I'm finding success with Social Media is in listening and mapping our prospects. I consolidate Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, Google Alerts and other sales/marketing intelligence in our CRM and as we learn more about what our prospects are talking about we feed this back through to the sales team to allow them to "engage" in their personal conversations. What I'm finding to be valuable is to consolidate these sources in our CRM where it has context and make it available to the whole company.

Using Social Media for Broadcast in a B2B environment seems to be missing the value of what Social Media can bring to a business.

As has been said, perhaps the most important element is not so much the platform as creating relationships with others. It's helpful to provide content and helpful information and genuinely interact with people so that they see who you really are. Once they know and trust you they are more likely to use your service or buy your product. www.guyfarmer.com/businesscoach

Michael:

According to this: http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/linkedin-leading-socnet-for-marketers-1... it looks like LinkedIn is leading the way. Why they are in the lead I would not say it is the most effective.

Carlos HIdalgo
The Annuitas Group
www.annnuitasgroup.com

Hi Michael - I'm going to jump into the fray here echoing what Lisa, Leslie and Kathy and so many others here have said -- set your goals and objectives first, know what your audience is reading and where they spend their time.

One resource I would recommend is Scott Allen's book "The Virtual Handshake" in it he gives 7 attributes that might be important for your business. Pick one or two of them and this alone will help you focus your time and effort.

As Leslie mentioned - start with a blog. If you keep it informational and educational - it's free advertising. Be sure to encourage customers to register for the updates via email -- especially if they don't cruise around the web.

And in a B2B environment - sites like THIS ONE are a fantastic way to participate, network and learn from other B2B professionals. There's no need to scatter your presence all over the web - focus on a couple high-impact sites and become a fixture and an expert there.

Personal relationships with influencers.