As the new kid on the B2B marketing block, you’re all ready to set the business world on fire with some big new ideas and creative campaigns, but there’s just one little problem: right now the only people reading your content are some college buddies, a handful of spambots, and your mother.
Clients are going to depend on you to get their content into the hands of thousands of social media users, and you can take a major shortcut by adding a middleman to the process: the influencer. Social media influencers are essentially experts in their field of choice, with lots of followers, and more importantly: a good deal of authority in their endorsements and opinions. Influencers are necessary for any social media marketing campaign, and we’re going to show you how to court them on three of the biggest social networks for B2B interactions:
Success On LinkedIn Means Speaking About Business In Its Own Language
LinkedIn is the social network for people who never really unplug from their career or business. Useful for bridging the gap between talented professionals and the company where their skill set would be best utilized, LinkedIn is also a great haven for insights from successful executives to post blogs and articles about the latest trends and strategies.
These individuals are where you can hope to reach the most people, because they have an audience of readers interested in emulating their success. Whether it’s introduction to new content that they might be able to share with their followers or a fresh voice to make tired concepts more interesting, connecting with LinkedIn influencers is all about giving them something they can pass along to keep their followers engaged and keep them at the forefront of exciting new workplace ideas.
Offer Something To Be Retweeted, Again and Again
Twitter was designed from the ground up to be fast and easy to skim through, perfect for mobile phone users. Many tools like Klout, InkyBee, and Simply Measured are available to find influencers in any niche, and often networking with the right Twitter users means finding the people who take a subject far beyond simply what’s trending right now.
Twitter can support conversations, but isn’t really designed for users to easily pick up on lengthy discussions, so strong Twitter content that influencers will pick up on is something that can be shared and described in less than 140 characters with no need for further explanation. Ideally, these influencers want that content to be retweeted and shared with their information attached, so more room should be given to allow for that. Making a connection with a Twitter influencer as a provider of shareable content will make your marketing visible to thousands more people almost instantly, and is worth the effort.
Google+ Gives Marketers a Whole Toolbox of Options
The great migration toward Google+ continues, and as it does so, businesses are finding the network a great source of potential new followers. Google+ offers all the long-form communication of Facebook with the back-end perks of a service like Twitter to create content that is made exponentially more visible as it is shared and discussed by users.
One service marketers have at their disposal is Google+ Ripples, which provides a simple, easy-to-understand picture of not just what content is being shared effectively, but who specifically is sharing it. This allows a marketer to determine specific influencers and how successful they are at putting your content in others’ hands, allowing you to target your content and strategies to engage them more directly, letting them do the heavy lifting for your marketing strategy.
Influencers Are the VIPs You Need To Make Yourself Important
