Building Your Company’s Social Presence

 

Building Your Company’s Social Presence
On this blog last month, I shared some of the take-aways from my presentation at the 2012 International Customer Reference Program Conference. The title of my talk at that event was: The Influence of Social Media on the Sales Process. I thought it would be helpful to follow up that post with a few additional tips.

If you’re building out a social presence and you don’t have the resources to take as thoughtful of an approach as I described in my previous post, here are a few best practices that will get you moving in the right direction:

Focus on building relationships, not just increasing followers
It’s not about the number of followers that you have. It’s about the number of the right kinds of followers you have. The content you create and the dialogue you drive dictates the breadth and composition of your follower base. Making your content speak to what your audience cares about and listening for opportunities to engage is a great way to nurture and grow your social presence over time.

Avoid defining social too narrowly
It’s a lot sexier to talk about Facebook and Twitter, but the fact is we have to consider our target audience’s online experience as an ecosystem. You can’t just nurture one aspect of the ecosystem and expect to influence sales in a significant way. Sure, you can lower cost through customer service and support with a siloed social strategy, but that approach is not likely to help you generate meaningful revenue.

Optimize for search AND social
Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger influencer of what ranks in search and 97 percent of B2B technology buyers use search engines to research purchases. It’s crucial to have search in mind when building out a social strategy.

I’m interested to hear what you think. Leave a comment here or find me on Twitter if you want to talk some more about how to build your company’s social presence.