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Five Steps To Getting Started in B2B Social Media

Here are five initial guiding steps to establish a Business To Business Social Media Strategy. This is not a complete guide, nor is it meant to be. I believe these are the first five things a company should be thinking about when they realize they should be engaged in the Social Space.

1. Your Message
Just to confirm you don’t need to change your message, value proposition, or qualifying questions. You just need to list them in concise “smaller” formats in order to getting your message out. So collect your key messages and great one-liners you use everyday. These will be great for status updates.

2. Identify The Key Social Platforms
As you begin the process of starting you need to identify which Social Platforms your target market will be on. I can almost guarantee if your B2B then they will be on LinkedIn, next you will find these same people on twitter and facebook as well. So in reality the Big 3, you will more than likely want to engage in.

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3. Identify Your Internal Company Resources
Who do you currently have putting together and drafting your marketing pieces. This should be the person handling the day to day initiatives of your Social Media Strategy.

4. Answer who should oversee your Social Media Strategy
At the end of the day who do you currently trust to generate business for your company who are the people who are ultimately responsible for sales? Your response is your answer to this question. More than likely you have an EVP or VP whom is responsible for sales company wide. This person should give final oversight to this department.

5. Create a Preliminary Social Media Policy. ~ASSUME NOTHING~
This initial policy should be to identify the processes for engagement approval. Who and or which parties will need to approve your final message(s) you are communicating, such as legal. I would not establish to many others until you are involved in it. Create policies before you ever get the opportunity to review every scenario would be a bad Social Media Strategy. In addition, don’t through initial ideas or strategies out the window based off your assumptions on how things have worked in the past in other marketing efforts or dealing with customers. Take the time to learn and review the processes behind each strategy. ~ASSUME NOTHING~

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Who Should Manage Your Company’s Online Message & Marketing?

When it comes to managing your companies online message and social media branding who should it be? I will share with you some of the pro’s and con’s of each category below. In the end I believe you should review this with the assumption you need a little of each profession and you may need to be more of a mediator when putting these together in a room. So the real challenge for you is to get them all to come together (play nice) and come up with something extremely powerful for your companies Social Media strategy.

So lets review:

Internally:
When you consider what your companies already doing to manage its sales message and who is currently handling that it is easy to assume that this person should head up your Social Media Strategy. With Social Media for business being so new, you will want to be sure that person who heads this up is “open” to this new movement as by now you understand it is definitely not going away.

You may possibly hurt your position and strategy by keeping it with your current marketing manager as this new advertising method can be very hard to grasp. In addition the knowledge and understanding it takes to capitalize in this space has up till now come from hands of trial and error.

Social Media Firm:
In the selection process of finding a Social Media firm to handle your Social Media Strategy be sure to secure a firm who has proven successful people on the team. While case studies may be few as this market develops, they should be able to showcase personal success.

In addition, new firms are popping up everywhere. Be sure to dig into these firms experience and understanding of B2B or B2C marketing and how that plays into Social Media Strategies.

Ad Agency (not the same as a Social Media Firm):
One thing many companies are gravitating to doing is to relying on their current Ad and PR Agencies to point them in the right direction with Social Media. This could be one of the worst assumptions to be making as many PR & AD Agencies are not well versed in Social Media and tend to operate off of theory rather than proven successful strategies.

Be sure your current agencies have taken pro-active steps to stay current on the Social Media movement within hiring proven successful social media professionals.

Internet Marketer:
In your search for a strong Social Media Strategy it is very easy to come across successful Internet Marketers. While this is an additional arm that needs strong consideration to your companies strategy. You do not want to throw out your standard processes you have in place in generating leads, engaging customers with key questions, etc… These elements need to be melted together when you do consult with an internet marketer.

I think there is a place for all of the above, I will say again the key is to getting them all to play nice together to bring your company to the front of the Social Media movement.

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Five Steps To Getting Started in B2B Social Media

Who Should Manage Your Company’s Online Message & Marketing?

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