By Asad Haroon, CEO and founder, InsideUp Inc.
My company uses a variety of marketing tactics to generate B2B leads. Our social media strategy has been to engage with small-business owners by providing relevant and educational content. About 45 percent of the U.S. labor force is employed by small businesses, which means that a high percentage of consumers who use social media such as Facebook and Twitter are people who either own a small business or influence purchasing decisions for their business.
Our mission has been to make our brand ubiquitous throughout social media channels, so that anyone who may be interested in services for their business is familiar with us and what we do, or at the very least has had the opportunity to view our educational content through these social media sites. Below is a brief overview of how we use major social media channels.
We have used Facebook a great deal to share our content (blog posts, videos, guides, etc.) as well as interesting content from other websites. We find that they key is to post interesting and engaging content and to avoid being repetitive. We try to vary the type of content that we post (shared links, videos, infographics, blog posts) in order to keep people engaged. We also post information and images of trade shows that we are participating in. Even though it is not a business-related platform, it is important to post on Facebook because it is where so many people spend most of their time online.
On Pinterest, we have been taking advantage of posting our original content. The majority of “pins” are reposted from other pages, so we strive to differentiate our presence on Pinterest by posting new content that users have not seen before. Since this is a graphics-based platform, we also share a lot of business-related infographics from others in each of our categories. Since these are proving to be very popular with business audiences, we are in the process of creating our own original infographics, which we will be releasing very soon.
On Twitter, we regularly share links to our content in addition to posting frequent, informative tweets on topics we think our followers will find useful. We engage often with other users and repost their content. We frequently repost content from our vendors and other business-related content that might be of interest to our followers.
We basically use Google+ like Facebook. We share a lot of our own content and repost from other pages as well. Many people overlook Google+, but it influences your search rankings, so it is important to use. Shares and +1’s (likes) of your posts count as social recommendations, and posts are indexed into search results.
Across all of the social channels we use, we make sure that we always provide value for other business users. This is a core principle that all businesses will do well to base their social media activity on. For us, it has drawn-and continues to draw-a loyal business following on several social networks.
As the CEO and founder of
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