Social media has clearly transformed the business world over the past two decades. Social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are now some of the most powerful business to business marketing tools available.

However, in this article, we want to examine a challenge a lot of digital marketers face. The tension between using social media to reach your audience versus committing your resources to build your own online platform. There’s a fine line, and sometimes a conflict, between social platforms serving your business and your business serving social media platforms.

The Business of Social Media

Popular social media platforms attract a large audience and have the sophisticated tools your marketing teams need to target and reach exactly the right people within that audience. However, your priorities as a business are often in conflict with those of the social platform.

It is critical to realise that, for social media companies, you are an asset, not a partner. Their goal is to generate revenue for themselves (from ads, by selling your information, etc). They want you to use their platform, so their analytics will always be presented in a way that makes their services look good.

Instead of relying on another company’s performance metrics, you need strategies for lead capture. Rope your platform into theirs so that you can learn more about your followers, nurture them into hard leads, and convert them to sales. If your focus is not on that, all you are doing is feeding the social platform’s algorithm and advertising revenues.

Without a connection between your social media activity and your customer database, you do not know the value of the attention and engagement you are generating. You are not gathering data. You have no way to know how to nurture leads, or building intelligence for your business's future.

The Danger of Relying on Someone Else’s Platform

Social media — and specifically LinkedIn — can do great things for your brand. It should form an important part of your B2B marketing campaigns. However, using it as your sole channel is a mistake. Simply put, you should not be over-reliant on a platform you do not own for your business marketing.

Using social networks as the foundation of your online marketing is akin to building a house on borrowed land. No matter how big your social following is, or how much money you have spent on the platform, you are subject to the whims of social media trends and those of the parent company.

For example, social media companies are constantly instituting algorithm changes, which can wipe out your reach/engagement overnight. Or what happens if a network ceases to exist — either because they get bought out by a larger company or due to their poor business decisions? It is hard to imagine Facebook no longer being the behemoth it currently is… but where is MySpace now?

Moreover, there is also a security issue. Businesses can have their accounts hacked and suspended. If your entire online presence is built on one of these platforms, the results of losing access to your account could be catastrophic.

Who’s Helping Whom?

Social media business models depend on building detailed profiles of their visitors. Professional services businesses don’t always realise it, but so does theirs. This creates a tension.

For example, if you use LinkedIn’s excellent live events features to organise a webinar, LinkedIn collects detailed information for itself about who has signed up and attended, and that tells them more about their users’ interests which is added to all of the other career and behavioural insight they collect about each person on their platform.

LinkedIn provides some reports about attendees to event organisers, but that level of information is very thin compared with what businesses would have if the sign-up were on their own website with a marketing automation platform. All of the lead capture and tracking and messaging is through LinkedIn. If you’re not careful, your own event attendees don’t even end up on your own CRM which means that there’s limited opportunity for follow-up outside of LinkedIn’s own advertising and messaging services.

With a marketing automation platform integrated in your site, you could capture registrant and attendee information directly to your CRM. With permission, you would be able to email them. You would learn more about each person’s interests because the marketing automation platform would help you to understand which pages on your site each visitor accesses. In this way you are building a detailed profile of your own visitors which you can use in relationship management, as the basis for building marketing segments for email or remarketing, or in planning content, the next iteration of your company web site, or perhaps even identifying opportunities to innovate products and services based on user insight.

This conflict is hard to reconcile but it can’t be ignored. Going all-in on LinkedIn may give you more potential attendees, but very limited opportunity for lead capture or insight. Using your own platforms may result in fewer attendees but you’ll have much more insight about them and you’ll be able easily to stay in contact. Our view is that most professional services and B2B firms would benefit more from having better information and higher potential for relationship building with fewer people than from having poor information and lower relationship potential with more people.

Building a Bridge Between Social and Your Own Platform

By all means, connect with B2B buyers on the social media platform they use and love. But don’t limit your business by making social your only means of engaging with your target audience. Social media should be just one piece of your marketing strategy — alongside your website, email marketing, paid advertising, etc. The trick is creating a bridge between your social media presence and your own platform.

Step 1: Establish a Relationship

It is important to realise that a majority of social media followers will be soft leads at best. They might follow your account, share your posts, etc, but these types of actions are not solid indications that someone is ready to purchase your products and services. However, you can use lower commitment tactics on social media to start qualifying and funnelling potential customers into your lead nurturing stream.

First, you need to create engaging content that is as native to the platform as possible. Understand your target audiences' interests, requirements and pain points, and create content to address them. You also want to establish a consistent posting schedule, use retargeting to stay top of mind, and respond quickly to customer service queries.

The goal is to build a long term rapport and convince decision makers that they can trust and believe in your brand. Even if they themselves might not be an active customer in the short term, when followers believe in a brand, they can potentially generate referrals.

Step 2: Guide Them to Your Own Platform

Next is providing numerous opportunities for micro-conversions to guide followers from social to your own platform. For example, using lead capture ads on LinkedIn, creating free downloads like a relevant case study, promoting webinar sign-ups, etc.

You want to make it easy for people to subscribe to your email list via social. Just remember that lead magnets should be partially gated so that you can capture the social follower’s contact information. This is especially important for platforms like Twitter that do not necessarily display the person’s real name.

When encouraging someone to sign up, create targeted landing pages that give social followers one job to do rather than funnelling them to your home page. Make it easy to sign up for the webinar, download the ebook, or make a purchase. Don't make them work to become leads.

In this vein, most people browse social on their phones, so make sure all of your links and landing pages are mobile-friendly. If you send them to a non-mobile optimised site, they will almost certainly bounce off immediately. Mobile-first design is an important factor for optimising your site for search engines, so you can kill two birds with one stone.

Step 3: Measure the Results

Since you are guiding people from one channel to another, you will want to use integrated marketing automation to track all interactions with leads across channels. This will allow you to measure the results of your social media lead generation campaigns, create more accurate buyer personas, and better optimise your entire buyers' journey.

You will also be able to analyse different types of social media to uncover how they contribute (or fail to contribute) to your marketing goals. For example, you might find that Instagram generates the most brand awareness, while LinkedIn is better for convincing prospects to make purchase decisions. Doing so helps you to determine the role each social network plays in your overall marketing strategy and the amount of time and resources you should allocate to each.

Diverse B2B Marketing Strategy, Simplified.

1827 Marketing helps B2B companies build effective, omnichannel marketing solutions that span the gap between social media and their own marketing platform.

With our automation tools, you are able to easily engage prospects and manage your entire lead nurturing stream. You can automatically personalise social messages, landing pages, and emails with dynamic lists. You can track people’s behaviour and interactions with your brand and deliver content based on seniority, role or even for specific accounts (for account-based marketing campaigns). You also measure performance across each of your marketing channels — social platforms, websites, landing pages, emails, forms, etc — to understand how each one contributing to your overall marketing strategy.

Contact us today to book your free demo!