In an interesting article “Small Business Social Media Adoption Doubles Since 2009” Steven Fisher writes that according the research done by the University of Maryland and Network Solutions currently 24% of small businesses in US actively employs social media, such as Tweeter or Facebook, for branding and attracting new customers.
In the current prolonged downturn, small companies have to push the limits and become more innovative in their customer engagement, acquisition and retention strategies. Social media, if properly used, can become an efficient and low-cost marketing channel for small businesses offering consumer goods and services. There are numerous success stories proving this.
However, it is still unclear if the same applies to startups and small-to-medium sized enterprises offering B2B (business-to-business) services, products and solutions in IT, Telecom, Wireless and other high-tech industry verticals. Can they effectively leverage on social media to increase their brand awareness and generate new sales, and what tools and applications shall they use?
After speaking to nearly 100 smaller suppliers at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona in February this year, I noticed that the interest in using social media for B2B marketing for high-tech companies is growing. Several companies I met are already using social media channels. However, a vast majority have no clear social media strategy and do not really know how best to use it to reach their service provider customers. Traditional B2B marketing with expensive trade shows, conference sponsoring, paid ads and PR agencies still rules.
Research recently conducted by Azouk Network has shown that only about 10% of 3000 small and medium Telecom suppliers offer RSS feeds on their websites. Very few have company blogs and most of valuable content they produce including conference presentations, customer cases studies or product descriptions is not even published on their websites and you will have a really hard time finding them on social media sites.
One of the main problems is the lack of knowledge and tools that can transform social media services into efficient B2B marketing channels. The most popular services like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are not really meant for B2B applications. They are primarily geared towards individuals rather than companies and industry verticals. That’s why many marketers I talked to at the MWC said that they had thought about using social media but did not really know how to proceed. Well, simply creating your company profile on LinkedIn or Facebook is definitely not enough.
This is one of the main reasons why we created Azouk (www.azouk.com). Azouk is an online service 100% focused on professional content sharing and discovery. Azouk allows Telecom professionals to find the best and most highly rated papers, presentations, product descriptions and other types of content in their field of expertise.
Azouk can help you to quickly create a new B2B online marketing channel providing an innovative and smart way to reach the right groups of customers and decision makers within your market segment. The Azouk Company Channel service enables you to aggregate new and existing information about your products, services and solutions and optimize it for social media and search engine exposure. To learn more about our new service, please click on Azouk Company Channel.
