Posts in B2B Social Media

Including hashtags in your tweets is a powerful way to extend the reach of your activity on Twitter. While people can follow other Twitter users, they can also follow hashtags. Tools like TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and HootSuite are great for monitoring hashtag streams.

When you include a hashtag in your tweet, your tweet will get seen not only by those who follow you, but also by those who follow the hashtag you include.

But which hashtags should you use? What’s your hashtag strategy? Do you have one? (more…)

Thanks to all the B2B marketing and sales experts who continually blog, sharing your insights and adding to the collective knowledge or the broader B2B community.

Since we originally posted the list on our site, we’ve continued to update it periodically. Now, we’ve completed a comprehensive revision to The List of Top B2B Blogs. (more…)

Whether you’re just starting a B2B blog or have been blogging for a long time, you should be hungry to see results. After all, a lot of time and effort is going into creating new content, and it’s hard to continually feed the content marketing dragon. But if you’re looking to traditional consumer blog metrics to evaluate your success and impact, you might be disappointed. (more…)

There seem to be so many social media sharing options today at the bottom of blog posts, web pages and other content marketing assets. I’ve seen some blog posts that include as many as twenty different social sharing options at the end of the post. I’m afraid when there are that many choices, people will just glaze over and opt not to share the content. In my opinion, especially for B2B marketing, it is much better to have a few very focused choices. (more…)

It’s a common practice on Twitter to mention the source of cited content, most often by including a “mention”, the inclusion of the person’s Twitter name, i.e., @twittername.

It’s a great thing to do. You get a chance to not only share great content, but to mention the author or contributor. Doing so potentially helps build the author’s Twitter following and let’s that person know you tweeted something that referenced her. (more…)

If they’re not, they should be.

White papers, eBooks, case studies, best practice guides…when done right, these B2B content marketing assets can be powerful lead generation and lead nurturing tools.

At the same time, they’re expensive to create. They’re also hard to get into the hands of the right people. Further, in the B2B market, you may get one of these assets into the hands of one of your contacts, but there are many other people at the prospect’s company who will influence the purchase decision.

So why are you making it hard to share these PDFs? Why not give B2B prospects quick and easy ways share them with a colleague through email or with broader groups via social media on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook? If your stuff’s good, it will get shared. (more…)

We continue to find more B2B blogs and receive suggested additions for the the Big List of B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs.

This month we’ve got 6 more great blogs to add. Be sure to check them out.

Congratulations to all the new additions! (more…)

With all the micro-blogging, I’ve often wondered whether the number of bloggers who actually create original, substantial content is decreasing. Don’t get me wrong, you can create meaningful thought in 140 characters, but it’s a lot easier to write 140 characters (no matter how well crafted) than it is to consistently create original content for a blog. And that ease may have driven many to abandon blogging or not even consider blogging when there is a relatively easy way to start “blogging” on Twitter.

It’s been more than two years since anyone had tried to pull together a list of B2B marketing and sales blogs. Jon Miller of Marketo did it in early 2007. When we reviewed that list, we found a lot of those blogs were no longer active.

So we went searching…

And we found some really great B2B blogs. More than 200 of them. Hats off to all who made the list! Thanks for your continuing contribution. (more…)

Michael Stelzner of White Paper Source recently released a study on how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. Nearly 900 marketers were surveyed.

One of the great questions in the study was an open ended question that simply asked, “What question about marketing with social media do you most want answered?” The question only allowed one answer and was designed to reveal the most pressing concern people had on their minds regarding social media. The 685 responses were then clustered into groups and ranked. The responses likely mirror some of you own questions regarding social media and reflect people wresting with selecting the right tactics, measuring the effectiveness of this new media, and how to effectively use it.

The remainder of the report attempts to answer some of those questions by presenting other findings from the survey. While the report is not specifically focused on B2B marketing, it’s filled with  great information of significant relevance to B2B marketers. Here’s just a few of the findings  in the report: (more…)

What are you afraid of? Launch a blog; people go negative on you, and you could lose some business, right? Why even give your critics a platform to be critical, or worse, bad mouth your company, brand, products, or services? Hey, doesn’t this fly in the face of everything we know about marketing, building brands, and protecting brand equity?  Why concede an inch of space to detractors? (more…)