Three Ideas Beyond Facebook For B2B Social Media Communication

All businesses want to create or manage their reputation, and online media or “digital marketing” plays an important role in achieving this objective. According to a report by E&Y on social media, top social media platforms used by businesses in India, today, are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin and blogs. However, most B2B brand owners feel that these platforms are not suitable for them. Here are a few alternatives beyond the Usual Social Media Suspects for B2B businesses.

1. Thought Leadership Through Online Communities

What makes the CEO of a B2B firm excited is the sight of a live, healthy discussion about the brand. He envisages a platform where an online community can talk about its brand news, thought leadership, customer acquisition/retention, lead generation/management and create positive word of mouth. Long gone are the days where creating brand awareness used to be the priority. Although online platforms like Facebook and Youtube do the job of creating positive brand awareness, let us agree that they incline more towards the individual, personal or consumer end of the spectrum. Today, everything is about effective use of content and creating a knowledge pool that can be used and shared by many. We came across few online communities, if you know about more do share it with us.

2. Document Discovery via Slideshare and Scribd

While traditional popular social media has been explored to the T, there are several emerging avenues to facilitate this endeavour. For instance, platforms like Slideshare and Scribd with almost 60+ mn visitors/day and 75+ mn visitors/day respectively are changing the face of online marketing. Professionals from various industries are always in search of relevant content and this gives an opportunity to the brand to create a knowledge pool wherein they can highlight their strength, and thus automatically create positive word of mouth. It also provides a facility werein user can embed the document within their website and you can also do the same. Brand can also tag their document in different ways – technology, branding, corporate practice etc, increasing the chance of being found. We are planning to share our marketing collaterals on these platforms, what do you think about privacy issues?

3. Build Loyalty Through Private Communities

Another interesting platform which is on rise is Private Communities. These communities are strictly invite only and are used by brands to discuss about their B2B brand propositions. These are also used by different brands within their organizations to promote brand culture and news. For instance, Dell Idea Storm – used the private community comprising of its distributors to drive tremendous business value. Are you a part of one of these communities?

While there are many tools available today, but in our view these seem to have the most promise. Would love to hear some case studies (both success and challenges) in these domains.

By
Vibhor Singhal,
Sr Manager, 

Integrated Corporate Practice,

DY Works