Best B2B Facebook Pages and the Lessons That They Give
This is not the first time that we are talking about Facebook as a marketing channel. In our previous posts we have talked about effective Facebook marketing, some real effective ways to increase revenue through Facebook ads and so on. However, the way B2B businesses are utilizing Facebook to tap into the massively connected audience on it and showcase their brand; we felt the need to discuss about the best B2B Facebook pages and the special tactics they have been using to stand out in the crowd and make conversions.
With more than 1 billion users and 15 million brand pages, Facebook happens to be the world’s largest social network and has emerged as one of the most effective marketing channels as well. Like I said earlier, a number of B2B companies are making use of Facebook to connect with customers and eventually generate leads and make sales. Let’s, go through the best five of them (Based on Blue Ocean Market Intelligence’s ‘Fortune 100 Social Effectiveneess Index’) and find out the tactics that they have been using.Let’s learn how a Facebook page can work for B2B companies.
Honeywell
1
Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/honeywellsecurity
What they do?
The Honeywell Security Group page ranks first among all the company pages whether they are B2B or B2C, according to the Social Effectiveness Index. Honeywell interacts with and responds to their audience very frequently, and keeps them engaged through interesting industry related content.
The Honeywell Security Group page ranks first among all the company pages whether they are B2B or B2C, according to the Social Effectiveness Index. Honeywell interacts with and responds to their audience very frequently, and keeps them engaged through interesting industry related content.
Besides, their weekly post’ Fun Fact Friday’, through which they feature an industry-related statistic or an interesting and unusual fact, is a wonderful way to drive engagement with their audience.
What we Learn?
Do a market research and find out the industry related issues or the issues that you customers might be going through and provide resolution to them through your content. Use facts and figures for users to believe you and get engaged.
Do a market research and find out the industry related issues or the issues that you customers might be going through and provide resolution to them through your content. Use facts and figures for users to believe you and get engaged.
Ingram Micro
2
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/IngramMicro
What they do?
With rank 7 in Social Effectiveness list, Ingram Micro clearly illustrates its business objective through a very professional cover photo. Even, they do a wonderful job in engaging with the customers by posting an assortment of product announcements and common industry-related posts.
With rank 7 in Social Effectiveness list, Ingram Micro clearly illustrates its business objective through a very professional cover photo. Even, they do a wonderful job in engaging with the customers by posting an assortment of product announcements and common industry-related posts.
Besides, to increase interaction with the customer more, every week they post ‘WeeklyWonder’ that encourages the customers to answer an amusing and newsworthy question. Best thing is the consistency that they maintain by having a set day and time for the questions to make it more convenient for users to participate in it.
What we learn?
While valuable content really works, consistency is the key. So be consistent in your planning and implementations. Moreover, whether it is your cover photo or anything on your page, it should be very professional and clearly state your business objective through it.
While valuable content really works, consistency is the key. So be consistent in your planning and implementations. Moreover, whether it is your cover photo or anything on your page, it should be very professional and clearly state your business objective through it.
Oracle
3
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/OracleBusinessAnalytics
What they do?
With 9th rank in the Social Effectiveness list, the Oracle Business Analytics page is third best B2B Facebook page. Like Ingram, Oracle clearly states its business objective through its cover photo. It is evident from such a large number of likes how effective they are at creating engaging posts.
With 9th rank in the Social Effectiveness list, the Oracle Business Analytics page is third best B2B Facebook page. Like Ingram, Oracle clearly states its business objective through its cover photo. It is evident from such a large number of likes how effective they are at creating engaging posts.
Besides, they post blogs to Facebook and while doing so they offer large, crisp images that catch the eyes of the visitors and rouse every individual to notice the posts. Not just that, the images that they use happen to be quite interesting for instance, they have an Iron Man image on their Facebook page.
What we learn?
Images are a good way to draw individual attention to the content that you want them to read. Besides, stating business objective through different components of the page anyway matters.
[useful_banner_manager banners=24 count=1]Images are a good way to draw individual attention to the content that you want them to read. Besides, stating business objective through different components of the page anyway matters.
Cisco
4
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Cisco
What they do?
With 14th rank in the Social Effectiveness list, the Cisco page is famous for its insightful and share-friendly posts. They constantly post content based on newsworthy events to engage with customers.
With 14th rank in the Social Effectiveness list, the Cisco page is famous for its insightful and share-friendly posts. They constantly post content based on newsworthy events to engage with customers.
Besides, their ‘SuperFan’ program that they ran every month recognized one fan and highlighted him or her at the top of the page. This was a wonderful way of demonstrating how much they care about their customers and fans.
What we learn?
Posting content on newsworthy events or matters really works. Besides, make your customer feel special and tell them how much they matter to you by carrying out various innovative and interesting campaigns depending on your business and your target market.
Posting content on newsworthy events or matters really works. Besides, make your customer feel special and tell them how much they matter to you by carrying out various innovative and interesting campaigns depending on your business and your target market.
Intel
5
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Intel
What they do?
Ranked 22 on the list, the company posted content providing resolutions to the common and related issues. They made it more interesting and eye-catching by employing occasional quiz questions and using stunning images respectively.
Ranked 22 on the list, the company posted content providing resolutions to the common and related issues. They made it more interesting and eye-catching by employing occasional quiz questions and using stunning images respectively.
Besides, their’ Museum of Me’ feature that requires permission to access a user’s Facebook data, takes users on a walk of more than 2 minutes through a collection of their posts, photos, videos, links and portraits of friends. This feature allows the company to gain a better understanding of its customers by allowing them to access user’s Facebook information and not just provides users with a fun experience.
What we learn?
People are there on social media to revitalize and recreate themselves. Doing anything that would provide them with fun experience will certainly boost customer engagement with you.
People are there on social media to revitalize and recreate themselves. Doing anything that would provide them with fun experience will certainly boost customer engagement with you.
So up till now in this article we have read what exactly are various B2B companies doing to make their Facebook campaign more happening and triumphant, and we have also learnt a few lessons from them. However, if we boil down the things to a single point and take out the gist, we will certainly find that it is the relevant or say the industry related content that remains common in all the cases. Besides, being a company you need to be as innovative as possible and find out what will work best for you – a quiz, a newsworthy and funny question or dazzling images to catch the eyes of the audiences. So you make use of these ideas and make your company’s page better and more productive.
Try developing a voice in social media as if you are a real person managing things on social media so that people can relate to you easily. Share everything whether these are your mistakes, foibles, sense of humor or simply anything that would make your audience feel that you are not fake.
If people are already in to some kind of discussion and are enjoying it, try being a part of it instead of interrupting them and talking about you. Sometimes it good to have fun with them as it helps you develop a healthier relation in between.
Try sharing something interesting and helpful, and let your audiences to talk about it. It could be done in many ways. You can ask for their opinions on the content you have compiled in an eBook or can ask for their feedback on it. You can end your blog post by asking for feedback or can ask open ended questions.
May be the traffic coming to your site is from twitter and you are concentrating more on Facebook. It is obvious that results are not going to be as expected. So boost your presence more where your target market is.
Usually marketers are notorious for making innumerable promises and not keeping them, which thwarts trust building with the customers. So, you better not make promises that are hard to keep or if have made one keep it and try building trust in between.
There is a big difference between pretending to care about your visitors and actually caring about them. So, never forget to acknowledge your customers distinguished actions whether it is a comment that they have left to your post, question that they have asked, some problem they are going through or anything as such. It will help you build your community.
Think about the ongoing industry issues or the issues that your audiences are going through and
Planning plays a very important role in any kind of marketing and same goes with social media as well. Planning doesn’t only mean to make the plan once; you constantly need to update your plan as things change. You never know with social media, what might happen when. You might get off putting comments as well and you have to be prepared to deal with it prudently. So plan everything.
When someone shares or likes your post, it impacts your organic search presence positively. The more people promote your content, the better your search engine visibility becomes. This is why we ask you to make your posts more valuable for people to like and share it, by adding valuable content like eBooks, case studies, blog posts, testimonials and other interesting contents to it.
There are millions of people present of social media sites and if you showcase your brand at such platforms, you get the opportunity to reach the right segment of the audience, which increases your brand awareness at a rapid pace.
There are innumerable ways you can drive traffic to your website through social media such as by sharing a valuable content that contains link to your web pages, through social media ads, through informative videos and so on. Besides, social media also boost the traffic coming to website by boosting your organic search presence.
Things easily get viral on social media. Good or bad, whether people like or dislike your post, they share it with their friends and followers if feel the need to do so. An offer that you have or a content that is valuable are likely to get shared by people if they like it, and get viral.
It is a common tendency that what you see very frequently and what you see everywhere is what you recall. The same goes with shopping as well. When you go shopping or do any kind of marketing, you are likely to buy from the brand you recall easily. Social media helps you improve your brand recall value and eventually make a sale. If the consumers are following your brand on social media, they will recall your brand while making a purchase easily and chances of them buying from you goes higher. Even if their friends are following you on social network, they consider your brand more than those they don’t know well.
People love to follow the brands they buy product from and they love to buy product from the brands they follow on social networks. They simply love being a part of your community on the social network if they are your customers and they follow you on your fan pages, which further increases your brand loyalty.
Your fan and followers have their own friends and followers and they are more likely to share the good or bad things that happen on social media networks. So, here you get a chance to do a social media campaigning optimized for positive word of mouth from your fans and followers and there it goes bringing you some wonderful results.
First thing first know what the various types of Facebook advertising are. Basically, facebook advertising is classified in to two types that are Off Facebook advertising and On Facebook advertising. Off Facebook ads takes you to an external URL while On Facebook ads take you to the Facebook page of the respective Business. So if you have a landing page, you should opt for the Off FB ads or else if you have a Facebook page, opt for the On FB ads in order to collect maximum number of likes as that in turn will let your content appear more frequently in the timeline of the Facebook users who have liked your page. Besides, your Facebook likes can act as your social email lead list.
Facebook presents you with many advertising options such as Marketplace Ads, Page Post Ads, Promoted Posts, Sponsored Stories and Sponsored Results. Some of them direct the users to respective Facebook page and some to an external URL. Now there would be some demographics which are more comfortable staying on the Facebook page while some will prefer to interact with a real website. Like this there are several other factors that decide the fate of your ads. So you will need to constantly test your ads and make changes accordingly and see what type of ads are giving you the best ROI.
While advertising your ads on Facebook you have a myriad of options to target ads such as according to the user’s gender, age, relationship status, interests, city, country and more. Suppose you are selling women apparel in Arizona and you want your ads to appear on the pages of those females who are between 26-56 years of age and living in Arizona. You can do that easily through Facebook advertising and as a matter of fact this type of accurate targeting is not possible with other channels. So make use of features you have been gifted with to get most out of what you are putting in.
You might be selling one product but targeting two different audiences. In such case you must keep the persona of the both the audiences in mind and design ads respectively. Make sure the creatives of your ads go well with the persona of the audience you are going to display ads to. And the most important don’t forget to test your ads anyway.
The best thing with Facebook advertising is that you can start with even $50 ad spend. So we will recommend starting with a smaller budget and then optimizing your ads keeping ROI in mind before you do any big ad spends. Test your segmentation, creatives, and everything that’s possible, see which ads are giving you good results and make changes respectively.
Linked Answers is one of the most wonderful tools that help you establish yourself as thought leader and generate potential leads. In this section, people ask industry related questions and get counsel. You being the industry insider possess a lot of helpful knowledge about the industry that you can share with them. This is the way you can also kind of promote your blog posts or other content giving helpful information to the users who are looking for it. The only thing you will need to ensure here is that all your educational contents are optimized for lead generation and are linked to your answers.
LinkedIn Applications is a place where you can find and add various interesting apps that will help you improve the user experience on your LinkedIn page. Besides, you can also setup simple polls in order to find out about the opinion of your audience on a certain topic. You can add an app that draws your recent blog posts onto your LinkedIn page as that will help you generate more business leads.
Joining Groups on LinkedIn should not be confined to your industry as joining outside your industry will let you expand your reach and grow your business. It helps you in generating potential leads not only within your industry but even outside it.
It is an amazing tool for sales people, people looking for jobs and B2B owners. There is a search box at the top that says advanced you only need to conduct a search for your target company. After you get the search results, click on the company you are interested in. You will see a box at the right hand side that will show you your first connections and your second connections. Leave the first connection and click on the second connection link. Now you will get a list of names of people at your target company. You will find a list of your shared connection at the bottom of the profile. It is an easy task from there on. You just have to ask your friends to introduce you to the people you want.
You can drive prospects to various destinations such as your landing pages, LinkedIn groups and so on through LinkedIn direct ads, which is an advertising program by LinkedIn. It basically works the same way as Google paid search ads work. You create ads and follow all the process the way you do it in case of Google Adwords then you bid on how much you will pay LinkedIn if someone clicks on your ad.
Participating in a relevant chat by an industry expert will give you a fair idea about what’s hot and what the masses are curious about. Take a note of the questions people ask in the chat as they are more or less similar to that of your customers. Suppose you are in digital marketing industry and need to gather ideas to create content related with digital marketing that would hold the interest of your customers. You don’t even need to host a chat on twitter; simply participating in a chat related with your industry will help with new insights and fascinating quotes to shape your content. That’s not all; you get to learn about so many new things that tend to make you a more different content creator.
Let’s make it easier and instead of following a complicated path to gather ideas for an ultimate content try asking straight up questions to your followers. You can make use of ‘TwtPoll’, a survey tool offered by twitter that allows you to create a survey, for it. Send out the survey containing your questions to your followers. Now when you will write content on the responses that you will receive from your followers or say your target audience, you will actually be answering the questions that they want answers for. Obviously, they are going to find your content interesting and helpful.
There is a website called ‘FollowerWonk’, where you can find industry influencers. Try fostering relationship with them so that later on when you need you can contact them for co-marketing opportunities or quotes. You can ask the subject matter experts for tips and advice in your content. You can even crowdsource entire pieces of content. Afterwards, you can promote the content through various means such as expert’s network or your network making the content to reach as far as possible.
Your customers are valuable for you and it will be a good idea to include them in your contents sometimes and let them know how much they mean to you. Conduct some interviews of your top customers and mould their experience in to a message that you can put across your audience and prospects. Talk about the challenges that your customers were facing and how they overcome it. It’s kind of a case study you can say. You can often make use of these tweets as an element of social proof in your content and can gain more credibility.
You can easily identify content topics with the help of twitter search by searching for common challenges and issues that your customers and prospects are experiencing. So if you search by the relevant terms you are most likely to get tons of blog titles. Try making use of social mention to search twitter for conversation that are related to your keywords.