B2B Social Media

[BeckyKey]

Hi,

Wondered if anyone has any useful articles or tips for social media for a B2B generalist ecommerce site.

We have started thinking about LinkedIn, but I know we need a lot more work & potentially to look at other channels/building a brand/personality online.

I've read a few articles, about finding the unboring angle of your business - I'm just wondering how we can achieve this if we have thousands of products & potential customers - it's hard to know where to start & to get the buy in

It's something I want to push, so any tips would be great

[RayflexGroup]

We are a PVC strip curtain manufacturer, so on social media, we try and find angles that will interest our customers without being too much about sales all the time. Twitter and LinkedIn work best for us at the moment but we do have a platform on Facebook and Google+, it's a good idea to get involved with people in a similar field who aren't competitors as we try to speak to other UK manufacturers to try and build followers. On Twitter, try and get involved in the # hours (#madeinbritainhour, #ukbizlunch, #ukmanufacturinghour etc) as a way to introduce your business to the community. What we find works best for us, as we are limited on the products we can talk about, is focus on creating content (most recently we posted an article about preparing your pub for summer - including PVC strip curtains in the article) and targeting whoever posts #pub / groups on LinkedIn that are in that field.

https://www.diygenius.com/10-free-online-courses-in-social-media-and-inbound-marketing/
Take a look at this guide and see if any of these courses help you kick start your social media profiles!

[SergioB1717]

Hello! You can check this article

https://sproutsocial.com/insights/b2b-social-media-strategy/

[BeckyKey]

This is really helpful thank you.

Do you find it's helped your traffic & SEO as well? How many people do you have managing your channels or do you use an agency?

I love the angle for the content you create, do you get your inspiration from anywhere?

[BeckyKey]

Perfect thank you!

[RayflexGroup]

It has definitely helped our traffic, we receive a few more visits on the back of articles we've promoted from businesses who are informed about the products but maybe hadn't considered before. We just have the one person managing our social media - scheduling apps/websites will be a great help if there's only yourself managing it. We personally use Hootsuite, you can schedule your social media posts for the week if you're struggling to manage to post at particular times/consistently throughout the week. Another key thing about Twitter is, Theo Paphitis has a competition every Sunday where he will RT 6 businesses which expose your business to his 505k followers and offers a link on his website (DA 48). Just something to consider - we haven't yet won it but we speak to a few businesses that have! 
http://www.theopaphitissbs.com/, definitely worth a look in as I've heard people do receive a lot of traffic and exposure to new customers by this!

Thank you! We exhausted our options for writing about our products and we found we didn't get as much traffic from our product posts so we decided to consider what our customers would like to read and what content would help us get more links. Inspiration came from looking at the type of content that our customers wrote and finding out how we can adapt it to feature our products. For example, the pub's post mentioned previously, I found an article which talked about health and safety in pubs during summer and adapted this to be overall preparing pubs for summer where we can feature our PVC strip curtains but also link back to the article that originally inspired the blog!

We aim to think outside the box to distance ourselves from competitors but also offer helpful information - it takes quite a lot of research on the sectors but is generally well received on social media!

[BeckyKey]

This is really good to know, so thank you for all the information!

Really interesting about the Theo Paphitis competition I hadn't heard of this, but amazing promotion!

How many people do  you have helping with content? Does everyone pitch in or do you have a content team?

It's not so much managing the posts, but getting the resource to produce good content. I can do some but probably not enough to post regularly.

How do you find LinkedIn?

[RayflexGroup]

No problem at all! 
It's a really great promotion - we simply schedule our post for the designated time on a Sunday and we'll keep going until we are chosen! 
Just the one person managing content and social media - we try to get as much content out as we can, but sometimes we are limited on ideas so what we tend to do is find an old post (generally our late 2015/early 2016 blog posts) and completely re-do them and promote. Although I usually find that if you can talk about what's trending at the moment, it generally is well received and makes conversation - this is how we managed to speak to people in the UK manufacturing community, building relationships with people on social media will help a lot in terms of getting your name out there and building followers.

I don't know if you've ever heard of Brian Dean from Backlinko but we tend to follow a lot of his advice. He has less than 50 blog posts, he simply adds to his existing posts and promotes constantly, He's got some great advice and a great youtube channel - for content/link building I'd definitely consider taking a look - http://backlinko.com/.

LinkedIn is great - we have our company page which we post content on but I find my personal account works best by adding potential customers and sharing the posts. It's great for joining communities too - I'm part of an SEO/Link building group that offer tips but also UK manufacturing and UK plastics group which are more catered to our business. It's really handy to have but I find I use my personal page for conversations and sharing posts/information. LinkedIn also offers really great training videos - if you trial premium you can get these free for 30 days & in that time I took a web designer course but they have plenty of great courses if you felt you needed training in a particular area!

[vias996]

There is an easy way to manage your social now. Tools like RecurPost (a social media scheduler with repeating schedules) allow you to automatically share your content on your social channels in a recurring manner. Just put content into different libraries and suggest how frequently a library should post content. That is all, it will start at the top of a library and once everything has been posted once it will restart at the beginning.