Social Media Strategies Key for B2B Marketing to Boost Search ...

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by: Denise Gervais

If you are a business to business (B2B) marketer then you are probably familiar with social media marketing, and if you aren’t then you really should be. Social media marketing, a necessity for many companies is often now a major focus of a business marketing strategy.

Based on a recent BtoB magazine and business.com survey of B2B marketers conducted August 16, 2010, social media marketing can significantly help improve traditional online channels like search rankings.

According to this survey, in the United States almost half of B2B marketers said that their social media efforts had positive effect on search performance. Although increasing search performance has always been a key part of search engine optimization (SEO) goals, it has not been a key marketing strategy for business to business marketers when it comes to social media marketing. Instead, B2B marketer’s key goals for social media marketing have in the past included:

• Building brand awareness

• Increasing traffic to website

• Generating leads

All of these goals can certainly be improved by social media marketing however B2B marketers should be adding search results to their goals. Search rankings are largely driven by the volume of high-quality inbound links a site receives. For this reason, a large bulk of the advice SEO experts will give centers around the concept of building more inbound links. In addition to blogging and posting articles, social media is a great way to create such inbound links.

As companies create content that is compelling enough for followers to be interested in, chat about, and share on Twitter and Facebook those inbound links from such social sites will be increased. Businesses are also finding an increase in their search rankings from their social media profiles. Therefore, companies can use social media to create more inbound links and improve not only their SEO but also their B2B marketing strategies.

While it looks like B2B marketers are getting on board in understanding the importance of using social media marketing & SEO strategies to improve the B2B marketing, they are missing a very important opportunity when it comes to monitoring potential customers’ chatter on social networks and channels.

According to the BtoB magazine survey mentioned above, only one quarter of business to business marketers monitor and use social channels to help choose keywords, meaning that companies are passing up opportunities to see how their customers are talking about their products and services. Organic keywords, those keywords that are being used in social networking channels, produce high quality SEO results. The only way to find these organic keywords is to monitor social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to see what terms the average, every day customer and consumer uses on a daily basis. This method is much more productive than businesses using keywords which are only useful to business or industry experts.

Ultimately, business to business marketers are using social media marketing methods as well as SEO more effectively to meet their marketing goals, which is beginning to include improved searches.

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