#1 – Make Your Content Better

Adding content to your LinkedIn Company page will not only make it more engaging, it will drive traffic to your site. The more, the better. I’m talking blogs, thought leadership articles, webinars, case studies, etc. After all, traffic to your site could drive conversions. Isn’t that what you’re aiming for?  

#2 – Don’t Go It Alone. Go It With a LinkedIn Group

Starting a business-related or non-business related LinkedIn Group is a great way to establish and build relationships with clients and customers. Often times, the non-business group does more to grow your brand. It shows that you are an actual well-rounded human that has more to offer society than financial charts, marketing estimates, or ROI forecasts. Popular groups bring traffic. Traffic drives leads.

#3 – Are You Leveraging LinkedIn Company Updates?

Please get this through your head. Your business partners and potential customers do not know all there is to know about your company. In fact, they probably aren’t straining themselves to learn. That’s on you. That’s why LinkedIn Company Updates should be your friend. Sending out one or two updates a day will keep your followers in tune with company happenings. Updates are also a great way to share relevant, engaging content. Not to beat a dead horse but engaging content drives traffic. You get the idea.

#4 – Do Your Analytical Homework

Guess what? Analytics aren’t for socially inept nerds anymore. Well, they can be but they are also for super cool folks like you. And on LinkedIn, the metrics of your social strategy are easy to access. LinkedIn provides admins with informative analytics that delve into new and unique page visits, site views, and promotional banners. Additionally, admins can also glimpse the companies frequenting the network. Knowledge is power. It will enable your content team to improve upon what they are doing and revisit pages that are underperforming.

Making your LinkedIn Company Page the best it can be need not be a huge undertaking. But it should be a priority. It will elevate your online presence, help you form new business relationships, drive prospects and clients to your site, and bolster traffic. With LinkedIn Company Pages, you will get linked into leads. Yes, bad pun intended.

What is interesting is that 86% of B2B firms are using social, compared to 82% of B2C. And how they are using it is surprising as well.

59% are focused on Thought Leadership
48.9% are focused on Lead Generation
45.7% are interested in Feedback/Reviews/Recommendations
34.7 are interested in paid advertising on social sites

Linkedin has proven to be an incredible asset for B2B Social Media Strategy & execution. With Hubspot defining Linkedin (45%) as the most effective B2B source for lead generation followed by Facebook at 33%.

With Today's Linkedin announcement that they are now enabling company status updates, they are taking another step forward in further allowing organizations to connect directly with potential targets.

Here is an example of the new Company Status updates

With the ability to outline services, drive recommendations and now adding a voice to the brand, it will be interesting to see how organizations capitalize on yet another avenue to interact with potential clients.

Cintas & RackSpace are maximizing the Linkedin platform to further drive engagement with their brand by outlining their products & services and driving recommendations for their offerings.

Here is the RackSpace example

Because B2B social is generally more targeted than B2C social, the ability to drive targeted interaction in one location while also providing a comprehensive footprint throughout the channel is key. Brands can engage via groups, Q & A in Linkedin answers and use the inherent tools in the platform to drive targeted interaction.

Philips Linkedin Group Example

Organizations can also purchase PPC Ads as well as targeted rich media to further drive their acquisition strategy.

With so much attention given to Facebook, B2B organizations should maximize their Linkedin experience. Whether it is to further amplify thought leadership, drive acquisition of leads, or promote feedback/reviews & recommendations, Linkedin's latest changes can further enable an organization to meet and exceed it's goals & objectives.

The report got some good pick-up among our marketing blogging brethren, and their individual spins on the results were a veritable study in glass half-full/half-empty interpretation: some declared that the B2Bs are stuck in the social stone age (not my conclusion), while others observed that B2B marketers are right in the thick of things, social-wise, if only they could get their C-levels to see the light (which was pretty much my conclusion).

As the author of the report, I feel I owe B2B marketers an apology. While I did manage to place the blame for the B2B social lag squarely on C-level naysayers in the report—noting that only 9% of B2C upper managers are bearish on social, compared to a whopping 36% for B2B – I offered frustrated B2B marketers a rather narrow and unsatisfying remedy: contact White Horse, and we’ll set those C-levels straight.

Yes, it’s true. I sullied the sacred cause of knowledge-sharing with a shameless agency plug. And the proof of my transgression is that not every B2B marketer in the land has so far beaten down our door to learn how we can turn things around for them. This could mean that they’d prefer some method of building a business case for social media that didn’t involve talking to me. That is understandable.

And so as penance for my transgression, I now devote the rest of this post (and all of the next one) to sharing what I know about building the B2B business case for social – a kind of DIY for those who would prefer a sharp stick in the eye to an agency phone call. (Again, I get it.) There are just three things you really need to know:

1. Social media is not what your CEO thinks it is.

Imagine yourself as a busy CEO living in a kind of info-stream bubble, wherein a narrow stream of content demanded nearly all of your attention, and the only streams that filtered in from the outside were the ones that were too annoyingly pervasive to ignore. What stuff would get through?

Actually, we don’t have to imagine that, because Twitter’s Trending Topics will tell us what’s floating at the top of the social stewpot. So let me just pop over there and see… OK, at the top of the list we’ve got Mel Gibson, #youlookprettystupid, #oldpeoplenames, and Bachelorette.

While it is demonstrably true that some old people have funny names, this alone will not bolster your business case for having a corporate Twitter account, especially if your CEO is old and has a funny name. A cursory glance at social media’s dominant content might leave any executive with the impression that it consists mainly of debates about Justin Bieber’s hair. They might also be forgiven for concluding that social media is comprised of Facebook, Twitter, and something vaguely sinister called ChatRoulette.

Which is why every B2B social media business case needs to begin where few of them actually do: by pointing out where the actual conversation is taking place. If this seems perfectly obvious to you, then at least allow that it may not perfectly obvious to your execs, and B2B social adoption has suffered for it. Our survey found that B2B marketers are about one-third less likely to participate on industry-related bog commentary and forums than to maintain outposts on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Yet our own client research persistently shows that the vast majority of useful B2B conversations – the kind that influence decision-makers – take place on blog commentary and forums. This isn’t a revelation; studies of B2B social usage by Forrester, American Business Media, and Business.com have also underscored the importance of these venues.

B2B marketers need an expansive definition of social media. The litmus test is simple: is it a place where a) business conversations are occurring and b) you might be allowed to participate?  When viewed through this wide-open aperture, social media becomes urgently relevant. B2B sales tend to be complex and consultative, after all, and where do B2B buyers go for consultation? A surprising number start with simple Google searches, and those Google searches increasingly lead to, yep, industry blogs and forums.

This of course begs the question: assuming all this juicy B2B social stuff is out there, waiting to be plucked and presented in a Teflon-coated business case, how does one set about doing that? This is the part where I leave off my blog post with shameless question-begging, so that you’ll read the next installment, in which I’ll cover what tools and metrics work best. Stay tuned for 2) Social media is what everyone else is doing and 3) It's about pie, not ROI.

The fundamentals of social media -- networking, user generated content, content sharing and real-time interaction -- has been going on in Listservs, user groups, chat rooms and branded and industry publication and association sites for years. Some of the earliest users of the web, were B2B marketers eager to use the new technology to automate and accelerate conversations and discussions among experts and specialists. so its surprising that they have been reluctant to embrace the new players. 

But I suspect there will be an explosion of private and gated online communities in the B2B space soon. Pioneers like Sermo and VuMedi are gathering doctors, vetting them and offering platforms for robust, specialized conversations away from public eyes and ears. This pattern will be repeated over and over again in the next few years augmented by bandwidth to support video, animations, limitless numbers of real-time interactions and enhanced security. 

This will continue the migration of offline B2B communications from conventions and trade magazines or journals to webinars, podcasts and specialized community sites. The first wave of this transformational shift is documented in Business.com's 2009 Business Social Media Benchmarking Survey. Sixty-nine percent of those responding participated in webinars. 62 percent read user-generated reviews or ratings and checked out prospective partners, vendors and competitors' web sites or company blogs. More than half searched for company information on social media sites, participated in an online B2B forum or read or downloaded content on a 3rd party content site.

This survey of 2948 business-to-business executives discovered that 65 percent of respondents use social media as part of their normal work routine, even though 54 percent of the companies surveyed block Twitter and Facebook in the workplace. The usage of social media runs up and down the corporate food chain from line managers to C-levels and spans virtually every department, not just the marketing and external facing guys in organizations of every size from micro start-ups to global MNCs. The average respondent used six different social media resources in the course of doing business.

So why are these guys so antsy about using social media to marketer their goods or services?

Three reasons: 1) Its new and its not worth fighting over. Its not in the budget, it's hard to compare with either conventional best practices or existing programs and there's no percentage in risking your neck for social media.

2) There's little evidence that social media buzz yields sales. In a B2B environment where lead generation and nurturing shepherd groups of prospects through an extended buying cycle, there's little reason to believe that social media help close. The value, or so it seems, lies on the front end of building awareness or preference or maybe validating an initial shirt list. So this makes social media a "nice-to-have: but not a necessity.

3) Lack of Control. Anyone can comment, add, edit or pipe up. This takes a tailored sales process and turns it into a free-for-all where marketers can no longer control the ball, the pace of play or the sequence of activities. Social media is way outside the comfort zone of B2B sales and marketing people.

But the good news is that B2B players are experimenting with these emerging media. Seventy percent maintain accounts or profiles in social media spaces. and sixty percent maintain blogs or monitor their firms online reputation. More than half, of the respondents, use Twitter, monitor reviews, advertise on social media sites, comment on social media sites or answer questions in online forums. 

As a rule the smaller companies are the early adapters, but everyone is pretty much making it up as they go along. The dominant expectation is that social media will produce web site traffic; prospects who are open to engaging with business-to-business brands. The B2B arena is a rich landscape for social media. In the New Year look for several breakout efforts to harness and use these channels which will be copied extensively.