We Reveal How to Use Social Media as an Effective B2B Customer Service Tool for Active Engagement and Brand Building

Did you know that 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others?

Not long ago, businesses would focus on newspapers and advertising through print. They still do, but clearly, digital media has taken over a major share of the branding budget in 2018. Now with smartphones and social media technology, businesses prefer to surf the tide of customer service using new-age marketing technologies. Social Media Marketing clearly demonstrates how technology amplifies brand messaging and meets new benchmarks in customer service benchmarks.

B2B marketing insights incorporated in social media are effective methods for traffic generation, interactive engagement and brand association.

• IBM Watson worked with the US open to deliver real-time insights on Instagram of new engagements and experiences for millions of online fans. Customers form associations with the event and the brand, thus being an effective real-time marketing scenario.
• A video is often named as the tool which has helped gain traffic in various areas of businesses. In the area of video marketing for B2B marketing efforts, 97% of marketers believe that videos have helped increase user understanding of a certain product/service.
• Real-time responsiveness plays a critical role in customer experience. A great example of this is the Facebook page of Bluehost. Bluehost is one of the leading web hosting services company and boasts of a strong social media presence. The unrelenting efforts of their social media team provide opportunities to the brand in coordinating with their audience on real-time concepts.

Also Read: Socialbakers Named a Leader in Social Media Marketing Suites, Analytics, Management and Monitoring

Customer centricity is the pillar of any B2B or B2C social media marketing concept. A consistent rhythm of working through engagement campaigns is what makes the B2B social media marketing sphere ever dynamic and progressive.

To-do list for a strong social media marketing campaign

A number of businesses use the wrong path while pursuing leads on social media. The marketing technique used here must be effective in analyzing the weak links and strengthening those that have the potential to be efficient and affordable. In order to execute a robust social media campaign, follow these specifics:

Dedicate time to understand the intricacies of social media

A number of social media marketing tips are prevalent online, but the key goal here is to experiment, understand, and then pursue the ultimate goal. Curiosity is the key here, folks.

Listen to your clients/customers for valuable information

Having certain leads for ongoing commentary/advice or recommendations on feeds, posts or campaigns is important. Customers shall leave in positive or negative responses, but analysis of both reactions are important.

Real-time conversations exist and must be utilized

In the current world of rapidly growing technology and speed; unhappy customers who wish to communicate must be given importance to. Responsive time management is crucial. An auto-reply response generated by social media platforms would be an added bonus here. This will help customers in having a waiting time allotted, after which a real-time conversation can smoothly flow.

Also Read: 81 Percent Of Small Business Owners Are Uncertain When It Comes To Their Social Media Marketing Efforts

Social media marketing management

Many marketers aim to target 4-5 social media platforms at once, and this causes friction between coordination and calculation of insights. The to-do list here would be to focus on one platform with the right content and then expand eventually, after achieving the desired target.

Measuring Targets

No social media campaign has been proclaimed as “effective” without measuring targets and analyzing social media growth. According to DMA, “56% are using engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares, and retweets) to measure the success of social media.”
The objective is the same and it applies to both small business and enterprises; build structured content and then present it to the right audience. This fuels the audience for active engagement and tracks performance accordingly. Social media marketing has become a prerequisite, one that is implemented by businesses for overall presence. It also impacts the effect social networks have on users.

Content for Social Media Marketing

Posting content for social media has to be productive and valuable. The concept of quality over quantity is a must. There are numerous ways of generating content which in return will create leads and direct traffic.

Infographics

The addition of digital Infographics to your social media marketing campaign is a fun and quick way of transcribing the message to an audience. Infographics are fluent to understand and can give the user a massive break from monotony. Do make sure that the content made available via the infographic is visually appealing and productive towards your target audience.

User Generated Content or UGC

Content created by unpaid contributors is explained as UGC. This method of capitalizing on engagement taps into psychological behavior by analyzing how consumers react to stimuli presented by the company. This helps the company understand KPIs in analyzing crowd response and user-generated ideas/thoughts.
A powerful example of UGC is Adobe. #AdobePerspective is used by the American MNC software company. The hashtag represents a way of expression for content creators, artist enthusiasts and creative entities that use Adobe Suite. With this UGC theme, Adobe got a chance to show their software skills on a large shared platform. Adobe doesn’t stop here! They created another hashtag in 2017 called #Adobe InColor which is the company’s Pride Month-themed UGC campaign. It generated 300 posts in the first few weeks of June 2017. Adobe’s examples of UGC are exceptional since it gives users a chance to portray their skills and also generates a consumer-centric experience which boosts their metric measurements.

GIFs

GIF translates to the Graphic Interchange Format. GIF is an image format in which visual files can be shared and viewed. The format supports both animated and static images. GIFs are gaining popularity in the social media platform and add interesting visual components to a company’s portfolio. Incorporating GIFs into a social media marketing strategy will be a relatively new feature. Yet it will be approved by the fresh urban crowd of today because of its quirky and fun-filled appeal.

Concept Visualization

Visualizing a single concept with self-explanatory graphs, charts and paragraphs will be easy to implement in a company’s social media strategy. Embedding such visuals shall boost a company’s website and social media game since digestible facts are easier to consume, in comparison to solid bricks that are difficult to chew! These graphics are also shareable and commentary received on interesting topics can help you leverage metrics on the decided social media campaign.

Social Media and Social Media Marketing Tools

Due to the rapidly developing internet hype, social media users have reached an all-time high! Most of the social media users excessively leverage specific social networking sites to distribute content and increase traffic/leads.

Apart from the common social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube— Marketers can also leverage other social media tools that can help blend content seamlessly and increase engagement.

Also Read: Hottest Trends in Social Media Marketing Technology For 2018

To hone language and improve the quality of content, below are 3 popular tools for social media marketers in the fields of calculating outreach, scaling images and video editing.

Percentage Calculator

Percentage Calculator is a free online tool which is used to calculate percentages. This is especially beneficial for social media marketers who find it time-consuming to analyze the increase and decrease of outreach for social media posts. With percentage calculator, the regular marketer can help turn raw data into definite percentages.  Instead of structuring correct mathematical formulas, the app can simplify a task by entering numbers into the calculator’s sentence based structure. It helps in doing the computation for you, significantly transforming the digital platform.

Landscape by Sprout Social

Landscape by Sprout Social efficiently scales the sizes of images for social media. Each social media network has different image sizes and coverage. For an image to fit all platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn; cropping, resizing and positioning are required. Landscape makes this easy by catering to needs of image editing by providing a platform fit for all. Landscape performs these edits with no compromises. After uploading the image to Landscape/SproutSocial, Landscape caters to different options for you. Landscape systematically resizes images meant for every platform, thus making your task simple and organized. It’s a free tool and comes with a download tab after edits, hence simplifying your social media managing platform.

Magisto

Magisto is a super-cool AI-powered video editing tool. Simply upload videos/movie clips or audio files from the desktop or smartphone app. Magisto will analyze faces, objects, camera motion or people; synching the music beats to the video footage. You can choose an edit amongst those provided either on the mobile app or website, and the results will be astonishing!

Social media is an efficacious medium for marketers and for business solutions. It fosters communication by augmenting social media marketing with key metrics is a definite way of calculating the effectiveness of strategy campaigns. The results are pure, rapid and valuable. With digitalization, social media marketing is the ideal way of connecting to an audience in a redefined driven innovation.

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