Social Media Marketing - Remembering the Basics

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Nothing is probably riding the hype cycle as much as social media these days.  By the majority of indicators social media is not a fad anymore.  It's revolutionizing the way we communicate and it's here to stay. Given all the buzz around it though how do you leverage it effectively as a B2B Marketer?

Just because social media is a new platform does not mean that "old" marketing principles do not apply any more. It's easy get swept by thinking "this time its different" (remember the "innovative" approaches of company valuations during the dot com days of late nineties?)

Here are a few principles to keep in mind when you are starting out with your social media campaings:

Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
If facebook was a country it would be the third largest country in the world. Thus, it is all the more important that you are targeting your ads and content to the right audience. As a B2B marketer, at the time of writing this blog entry, you can probably get more target-able groups in LinkedIn. However, Facebook is fast catching up with folks setting up Facebook Pages and Groups related to subject areas.

Taking a Phased Approach
By now we know more than enough about the effectiveness of our Google Adwords campaign. Facebook seems to be fast catching up with a matured and effective advertising platform for B2C campaigns. The question is do your buyers include Facebook as part of their consideration phase. There does not seem to be enough industry data yet on the effectiveness of B2B campaigns on Facebook.

Measure, Measure, Measure
Given the sheer size of people on the platforms its all the more important to take a "data driven marketing" approach. I should be able to calculate the ROI for the marketing campaigns I am doing on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facbook etc. For example, how many raw leads am I generating from LinkedIn? Number of re-tweets is interesting for sure. However, do you know what your conversion rate is for the tweets/re-tweets? Because the platforms themselves are evolving it will be a while before we have matured tools to measure and monitor.  If you have a marketing automation solution make sure you are able to track a raw lead coming from one of the social media outlets.