Package your message for a social media audience.
Think it’s difficult for your company to leverage social media because you’re strictly business-to-business? Try this: Imagine you are your company and consider how you interact with your friends on social media. In other words, when you think of yourself as a “brand,” the Facebook posts about the clever video mashup, the re-tweets of a celebrity quip and the cool photo added to your Pinterest board are examples of you sharing content that solidifies your “brand” position to “consumers” — in this case, your friends. When your friends share your content among their social media connections, it extends the reach of your brand to new consumers.
The hottest buzzword in content marketing right now is “curating.” Essentially you find interesting content related to your business from multiple sources, filter that content through the lens of your business and then surface the content in a blog or social media feed—all while supporting your business’ value proposition.
Curated content, when combined with fresh custom content, increases the chance for search engines to index your pages more often. With the obvious appeal of this strategy for online marketing, we suggest these tips to get started with content curation:
Visuals can make all the difference.
Accepted research says, cognitively, it takes us between 2 to 10 seconds to make a judgment, and this judgment is based primarily on visual impression. With Facebook’s announcement last week about the rollout of Timeline for business pages, companies now have a new opportunity to make that very first visual impression. Marketers have until March 30 to brand or rebrand their company’s Facebook page to the new Timeline, or Facebook will force their existing content into the format.
The numbers are in for the Super Bowl 2012 ad-stravaganza, and by all reports, it was a media success. M&M’s came in as the OnMessage office favorite. But statistics we've read aren’t just measuring ad viewership; they are also measuring online chatter.
According to the Brand Bowl report, for example, the Doritos cat-burying dog spot garnered the earliest post-game, morning-after tweets — 48,536. The David Beckham ad had more than 109,000 combined social media comments. This is the buzz that advertisers want, but does it impact the brand perception?
Come on in, the water's fine!
Although more B2B companies are acknowledging the value of social media, there still seems to be some hesitancy to adopt it. A recent eMarketer article indicates that while two-thirds of B2B marketing executives surveyed view social media as very important, only 7% are using it heavily and 9% are neglecting it altogether.
Among the barriers faced by B2B companies, uncertainty may play a major role.
