3 Tips for B2B Marketers to Start their Social Media Journey

3 Tips for B2B Marketers to Start their Social Media Journey:
It’s usually consumer products and services companies that get most of the attention with social media marketing, but there are plenty of reasons for B2B Marketing professionals to get into the social game. How about 54 billion reasons? That’s the forecasted spend on US B2B social media marketing spend for 2014 by Forrester Research (via eMarketer).
If you’re a B2B marketing professional trying to make sense out of where your business fits on the social web, consider these three tips to get you started.
1. Establish a Listening Program: Brand monitoring is the most common dimension social media monitoring efforts focus on, but extend your efforts to Audience Analysis and Social Keyword Research as well to get a handle on the community you’re trying to engage with. Trending keywords can facilitate real-time marketing or longer term editorial planning and SEO.
2.  Give to Get with Content: Commit to aligning content with searcher personas that also meets your marketing objectives. Information and education have their place with B2B marketing. Understand those needs of your target audience and develop content (optimized for keywords of course) that meets those needs but also facilitate your prospecting pipeline.
3. Leverage Social Media Marketing campaign tools across channels to promote optimized social content. Creating multiple media and content for a single promotion to a mix of social destinations is very time consuming and inefficient unless you use tools. Examples of social media marketing campaign management tools with corresponding analytics include: Awareness, SWIX, Sprout, Pop.to, WildFire, Objective Marketer, Spredfast and Socialtalk.
Essentially, B2B marketers don’t need to “do social”, they need to “be social” and that means time and resources for participation, analysis and action. Customers can tell the difference and everything from measures of engagement to leads generated will show the difference as well. A listening program will give you insight and intelligence about the social market you’re trying to reach. You can identify the influentials you should connect with and monitor what others are saying about your brand. You can also identify what types of content to publish and promote from you B2B blog. Social media marketing campaign tools will help you stay organized and coordinated in your social content promotions.