B2B Social Media: Breaking Out of the Noise

As social media marketing is the preferred method for 2009, it has leapt out of novelty and into a noisy market. Everyone is on Twitter. Everyone is creating fan pages. Everyone has a blog. Everyone is on YouTube. Everyone! It is not easier today to get your message out than it was in 2008 when you had budget. In fact, it is harder.  Social media made it harder.

The reality is that even if you use your social media marketing vehicles to push out content or have active communities, you can’t rely on a single tactic of social media confined to your B2B website and brand. You have to find your market and move up through various avenues to surround your market. Simply creating a more interactive website that is socially inclined and pointing to it through paid search and SEO will only get you so far. You need to act socially as well.

I started this blog at the end of January as a way to talk about my thoughts on marketing, which then seemed to morph into a discussion on social media marketing. I didn’t have any real objective other than trying to connect with others and expanding the conversation. But, I am an analytic marketer by nature and so I track everything I can to see how things are progressing. This past week I watched several things happen that created the tipping point I’d been wondering would happen. I achieved a Google page rank of 4 and when my technorati tool is working I see I have an authority of 14. Yahoo has almost 16,000 links to me and I’ve seen my Twitter followers organically increase - I don’t promote outside my blog. The result, deep reach in traffic from long tail search. Search traffic is above referral traffic for the first time ever and set a new steady state that equals my steady state of referrals. Naturally, I wanted to know why.

There are a lot of blogs out there that give SEO how-tos. I’ve read most of them and tried most everything in the last couple of months. They all talk about the necessity of heavy linking in you blog posts to grab the long tail. They talk about actively posting comments across other blogs that point back to you. They talk about reciprocating links. They say that where you have your tags on your sites and blogs make a difference. Your are encouraged to blog often. This might work for your company website. I say, it helps, but for social media, that isn’t it. I’ve done these things from the beginning. Linking still seems to be the trick but it is tied to social media participation rather than links that act like banners.

This is what I found…

The biggest way to break through the noise in social media marketing is to participate in social media.

1. Participate in non-company communities. Learn from your customers as much as you educate them.
2. Become a featured blogger. Become a thought leader.
3. Use Twitter to promote other’s content as much as you promote your own (RT). Pay it forward.
4. Blog often, but blog with relevance. If you have nothing to say, don’t say anything.
5. Don’t be snarky. Encourage and educate rather than berate.

Now that you are using social media in marketing, try participating to get that extra boost and break through the noise.