Social media is used globally to communicate between friends, colleagues and businesses alike. Doing your research and having a solid education of the best social media tactics for your business can be the best thing you can do for your company.

Knowing Your Audience: How to Build Relationships with Potential Customers

Understanding the people who flock to your idea or company is crucial to positive social media performance. Sending mixed messages or unrelatable content can be a fatal mistake to the health of your business.

There are many tools you can use to measure and understand your audience. Google Analytics is a superb tool that breaks down your demographics in an easy to understand chart. Many factors are integral to understanding the data and applying them to your business.

What age range are your clients? Are they mostly male, female or evenly split? Where do they live? These are all pieces of information that you can attain from analyzing your company’s statistics. Facebook Insights is also a great tool toward understanding your audience. The program also aggregates your company’s information, followers and engagement statistics to create an intuitive view into your business’ collection of fans.

Remember, not everyone on social is your customer. It’s most efficient to build relationships with people who could be your customer.

Top 10 Best Practices for B2B Social Media Marketing

Social media can open the doors to a diverse set of opportunities. For B2B companies, social media can offer the following benefits:

  • Position the brand and industry leaders as experts
  • Stay top of mind during a long buying cycle
  • Gain press mentions
  • Acquire new talent
  • Drive traffic to white papers and articles
  • Increase visibility for trade publications and audiences
  • Build a brand rather than a commodity
  • Improve search rankings
  • Source quality suppliers

Tips & Tricks for Awesome Social Marketing

While the best social media platforms vary by industry, two huge leaders are LinkedIn and Twitter. Both allow the opportunity for relationship building and brand development as well as direct communication to potential strategic referral partners and customers.

On LinkedIn, we’ve found a few new apps to generate lead conversion, relationship building and online PR. One of the latest is LinkedIn Pulse. It’s similar to the Flipboard app of easy to read news and opinion articles, yet it also syncs to your LinkedIn account and allows your connections to see when one of your expert articles or company name is mentioned.

Much of getting posted on LinkedIn is writing about interesting and engaging topics. Other items to consider are keywords, article title and content formatting. Also remember to consider the time and day you post your expert article. Utilizing these best practices can aid in your chances of getting picked up by LinkedIn Pulse, one of the internet’s hottest new apps.

Another fascinating and useful tool is the LinkedIn Connect App. Using this app will give you insights way beyond the basics. Stay ahead of your colleagues’ important milestones and get automated, intuitive information ahead of meetings such as mentions in the press, job advancements and more.

Lastly, as with many social media platforms, capitalizing on niche groups is a great way to build connections and learn about your target audience. Remember that it’s a marketing red flag to self-promote heavily in groups. Be there to offer valuable insight and content to the group. Reach out to valuable connections for in-person meetings. Don’t overpost or only post promotional materials. It’s a sure way to get the online boot.