How B2B Marketers Use Social Media: New Research
Do you primarily market to other businesses?
Are you wondering, “How does social media work differently for B2B businesses?”
In the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Mike Stelzner asked marketers how they’re using social media.
More than 1900 business-to-business (B2B) marketers shared their insights on what’s working with social media marketing and where they’d like to improve.
In this article I’m going to focus on those areas where B2B marketers have significantly different experiences than their consumer-focused counterparts.
Let’s dig in. 
LinkedIn Group Search: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
LinkedIn Rolls Out New Group Search: LinkedIn’s Group Search helps you search across all of the groups on LinkedIn to find the right one for you. You’ll find this search now gives you better results.
New Group Search results show your connections who may be in a particular group.
5 Easy Steps to a Winning Social Media Plan
So you’ve set up your social media empire using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and you’re blogging too.
But how do you make it all work together? You want to reach potential clients and establish your authority online, but what’s your plan?
This article delivers five foolproof steps to get you on your way to finding, formulating and distributing content that will get you noticed. Content could include your own blog posts or links to others people’s work posted on your social networks.
#1: Find Your Target Audience.
The first step in social media planning is largely the first step in identifying your brand—determine who you are and who your customers are.
What unique aspect of your product or service attracts your target population?
Socialnomics: It’s a People-Driven Economy
An Illinois senator who was virtually unknown in 2004 defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008 to win the Democratic U.S. presidential nomination.
And he used social media to do it.
His YouTube videos got 110 million views, estimated to be 14.5 million hours of viewing. Mass media advertising to reach that many viewers would have cost $47 million.
A famous rapper made a promotional video that gave him even more free publicity.
At the time of the election, he had five million fans on Facebook — over four million more than his opponent. On MySpace, the numbers were approximately 800,000 and 200,000, respectively. On Twitter, he had over 100,000 followers and his opponent had about 5,000.
And he rode that social media train all the way to the White House.
5 Simple Steps to Getting Your Business on Twitter
According to the 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, Twitter is one of the social media tools most businesses want to learn more about.
If your business is not yet on Twitter, this article is for you. Creating a Twitter profile is quick and easy to do; however, you want to make sure you take the right steps when setting up your Twitter accounts.
This is the first of a two-part series of tips for creating Twitter profiles to both facilitate engagement with your Twitter audience and build a strong brand online.
2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report
Have any of these questions crossed your mind? “How much time do my peers invest in social media marketing? What benefits are they achieving? Where will they focus their efforts in the future?”
If you’ve pondered any of these thoughts, look no further. All the answers are right here in this free report.
Watch the above video for a quick summary.
NOTE: Click here to see the 2011 version of this report.
