The Social Media Payoff

The last year has especially seen an explosion in consumer marketers investing in social media, and the degree of sophistication continues to increase. Netbase provides a very sophisticated service designed to monitor, analyze and quantify social media conversations into consumer trends. Why shouldn't the same discipline apply to B2B and especially technology products?

B2B marketers are at the embryonic stage of leveraging social media, similar to where consumer marketers were years ago. We count our Twitter followers, create LinkedIn groups, comment on blogs or attempt to join the conversation of online technology communities. Maybe we use HubSpot to track the effectiveness of this from a lead perspective, but we need to do more to make social media strategic and that means using it to drive revenue in new and existing markets.

Social media is fertile ground to monitor how people use products and what they need from them. The opportunities are endless - from new product ideas to user application interaction to customer satisfaction. Monitoring and analyzing a particular market's trends and the pain points of users may yield an entirely different way to build a product that achieves much more rapid adoption. Good SaaS companies, for example, already have online communities to get feedback on their products from customers. But that's the point, the feedback is from the customer who wants a specific piece of functionality. It is feature-driven. Feedback from a far broader cross-section of a market is much more strategic with greater value implications. Plus, it provides a new way in which to engage that market. Think about all the content from this information that can then be created and used to market to that community.

It's time to move the use of social media in B2B beyond the concept of a market channel. Leverage it so you can become much more market centric as you go-to-market.