Social media can be challenging for organizations that operate in the B2B space.  Consumer brands seem to dominate and thrive on popular platforms like Twitter and Facebook, while B2B brands are often faced with the difficult task of strategizing unique and creative ways to reach out to target audience members to get their attention and engage in conversations that will lead to increased awareness, and ideally, generate leads to drive sales.

Twitter and Facebook often seem like the obvious and logical social media platforms while LinkedIn is often bypassed or forgotten. The social site has long offered some great features for human resources departments along with the ability for brands to join conversations in the site’s Q&A section, LinkedIn’s limited functionality has made it less attractive and a bit more challenging for marketing purposes. However, LinkedIn has made some changes recently, and if your organization isn’t currently active on the professional network, it might be time to reconsider. Here’s why:

Finding and Activating Brand Advocates

It’s a common belief that brand advocates can only be found and empowered on Twitter and Facebook. These platforms can be a challenge for B2B brands looking to find and empower their brand advocates to support sales efforts. For example, you could have enthusiastic users shouting your product’s praises on Facebook, but that user’s network could be a scattered number of professionals, friends and family members. While this is great for word-of-mouth advertising and reaching a wide number of consumers, it’s not an ideal situation for drumming up B2B sales.

However, on LinkedIn there are now ways to identify and activate brand advocates to share information about your products and services through their professional network. This creates a great opportunity to reach a target market through current customers, as the person’s network is likely made up of people with a similar job or working in the same industry.

Here’s how to empower brand advocates on LinkedIn:

• Set up the product recommendations options for the LinkedIn company page. This allows people to go to the LinkedIn company page and write positive reviews of products. When these are posted, they can share the post with their network
• Add the recommendation button to your company’s product page on the company website. This allows people to click on the recommendation button, and share with their network that they suggest purchasing this good or service. This plugin will live on the site for other customers to see
• Develop product recommendations. To do this, empower the marketing and sales team to encourage satisfied customers to post and share testimonials. While larger well-known organizations might not need to do this, many smaller B2B brands will. The marketing and sales team should be more than willing to help, as customer testimonials on a LinkedIn page can ultimately become a very useful tool for them.
• Promote the product recommendations on other social media outlets. Although B2B should be using LinkedIn, that doesn’t mean they should ignore Facebook and Twitter. Your customer’s recommendations provide quality content for the other social media outlets

Adding Social to the B2B Purchase

One of the important reasons that Facebook has become such a highly valuated company (at last look, it was $50 billion) is because it turns the online shopping experience for consumers into a social one. You can purchase products right from your Facebook page, tell your friends about it and see who else purchased the items. It creates a mini-community around every piece of clothing or game someone purchases.

LinkedIn never really offered that, but with the newest features, it’s becoming possible. When purchasing IT equipment, someone can see how many recommendations your product has, offering a sense of connection with others. It allows potential customers to feel like they’re making the right decision, and that comfort level can lead to more purchases and better recommendations.

Creating a Online Customer Reference Program

And since all this B2B social influence and testimony can be placed on your company’s LinkedIn page, you now have the opportunity to host a customer reference program on a platform that many people use to research companies. So by hosting satisfied customers on the page, they will be able to convince their network of prospects of your company’s benefit.

This process empowers your company to reach out directly to satisfied customers, letting them know about new products or services. It can also create larger pool to pick from for your public relations team, in case the media wants to talk to a willing customer spokesperson. That translates the value of your efforts offline, which is a goal of any social media campaign.

By having the ability to move a social media campaign offline, the B2B experience on social media can be used much more effectively. And by utilizing LinkedIn, there’s now a natural fit for B2B brands, which can be used for increasing sales and creating a network of users. That’s something B2B brands have been waiting for.

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