Social Media for B2B

It's not about "Likes, Shares and Tweets", it's about the conversation. And how can we turn this conversation into conversions?

The Opportunity:

Social media is great. Especially if it's your goal in life to be "liked". Just don't let that be the end-all be-all goal of your marketing department. 10 million twitter followers does not equal one nickel in your pocket. But... it does provide you with an opportunity to put momentum behind a topic of conversation that you want to have.

The Payoff:

When you have a clearly defined goal such as number of impressions, or number of downloads. A real, tangible, quantifiable goal. You can leverage social media and it will help to achieve that goal. Notice I said "help to achieve". The key to capitalizing on social media is not how big your megaphone is. The key is to tap into the natural advocates inside your audience. If they love the "honest" conversation you've started with them, they'll take it to heart and look to bring others into the conversation.

As your conversation grows into the reach of your extended audience - you will have a greater ability to reach your clearly defined goals.

The Example:

Lumension is an IT security company regarded as an up and coming leader in a market dominated by larger brands. The new kid on the block with the big ideas about how they're going to change the world. As part of thought leadership campaign we developed an eBook for the CEO, to educate them on why and how to regain their focus on IT security.

Armed with our strong conversation piece, let's examine the sharing strategy that we put in place.

Within the eBook

The simple implementation was on every single page within the eBook – social sharing buttons. Nothing original there, but effective none the less. Via Facebook, Twitter and pre-canned emails, our audience was able to send out your basic social messages. Each message was uniquely tracked to the tactic and origin. And the pre-canned emails... if the use was on Outlook – a beautiful HTML formatted email with tracked links up pops. All they have to do is type in a name and hit send. We also had a solution for those readers not using Outlook.

People love videos

Instead of producing just one overarching video as we had done in the past – we produced the video as bite-sized videos or each chapter of the eBook. Each of those videos was framed off from the eBook content next to a set of sharing buttons. Don't want to be that guy who shares corporate eBooks – how about just being the guy who shared this interesting video on a focused security topic.

The 3rd tier audience who might click on that video link – was presented with a targeted landing page with that video your friend tweeted about... and if you find it to be interesting, well here are 7 other videos you'll find in our new eBook. It's free – just click and download.

And since we're just using YouTube to host our videos anyways, let's make them open to the public and too search. Stumble upon one of them, and you'll see a quick pitch at the end of the videos for the full eBook and the short URL to go get it at. And that short URL – yep it resolves to a longer URL with all of the necessary campaign tracking data.

The sharing of the videos; accounted for one third of all sharing for this campaign.

eMail Signatures

B2B companies tend to send a lot of emails. Leveraging a dynamic email signature we already had the entire company using for the last two years, we merely updated the promo to include the eBook. No social exchange is more effective than that of the personal correspondence.

The corporate email signature promo

The Results:

Our social engagement strategy delivered 63% of all of the eBook downloads for this campaign. That 63% breaks down like this:

• » 52% came from the corporate email signature

• » 33% came from the pre-canned sharing emails

• » 8% came from Twitter

• » 7% came from Facebook

At first glance, you may consider those numbers to be low. ONLY 15% came from Twitter and Facebook. Yes, that's true. But don't forget our goal and audience for this campaign. IT security administrators and directors were being asked to pass information upstream to their CEOs. They engaged, and they shared. They just did it with a medium that aligns with their predisposition to privacy and security: email.

See the B2B Social Media Sharing in Action

See the social sharing components in action for yourself dowload the eBook What Every CEO Should Know about IT Security.