Way before social media became the necessity for B2B companies to pay attention, it was more about people just merely sharing their common interests and experiences from a personal level.

Today CSP’s need to utilize social media to help build on their brand awareness, increase their market coverage, and keep their customers informed and educated. Now that doesn’t happen overnight. You have to have a strategy, and you have to be willing to invest.

Being willing to commit isn’t just posting anything on social it’s about delivering the right content at the right time to the audience.

The simple part of social is probably the setting of your accounts, but that again needs to be done with thought as you want to make sure you follow the same branding guidelines as your website for example. You want to make sure you’re not trying to oversell within your profiles, but you want to include the appropriate right keywords (focus less I’m a gold partner for example), hashtags that are going to attract the customers to want to follow you.

Here comes the harder part, the gaining of followers, engagement and keeping those followers wanting more by delivering and sharing interesting content that makes them want more which in turn they see you as the trusted advisor.

Four easy steps to get you buzzing on social:

1. Consistent & Unique Content – Always a good start is building out a content/posting calendar, so you know when you are going to post and what you’re going to post. We can’t emphasize enough the importance of consistency of delivering new and regular content because not keeping them engaged; they will quickly turn off and lose interest. A rule a thumb that we have found regarding good social strategy is to be posting at least one message per day to both LinkedIn and Twitter. Twitter, you can even look to increase this as because the way the platform works.

Tip: From a content standpoint, we like to recommend that you have additional articles already created for the times when you are busy and are unable to create new content. But remember to replace when you pull from this bag.

2. Understand Your Audience – It’s vital to know your customers, so make sure you have completed your personas as these will help you be more active on social media by delivering the right content. Another critical aspect to social media is that you need to interact with your audience not just by post content but by asking the question, following up when they engage with you. There is nothing worse than not being timely with your response as with the tools available to you today you can set up notifications to help you, so you don’t have to sit there watching the networks.

Every month make sure you are reviewing your insights to see what is working and what is not so you can adjust as necessary. During pulling these insights, you will be able to gain more information about your customers. Cross-reference them in other tools. For example, you get a new follower on Twitter, research them on LinkedIn, and find out more about them, so you tune your content to them to keep them engaged.

3. Knowing Your Social Networks – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, they may be all social networks, but they are different, and when you use them to craft your messages, you need to treat them differently.

· LinkedIn – More of a B2B and professional network that allows for longer targeted messages

· Twitter – Typically quick and useful conversations with the audiences. The shorter window of opportunity of customers seeing your messages means you can look to post more often and repeat.

· Facebook – More causal and used more as a personal platform

· Instagram – Great for sharing photos to give a visual story but limited use in the B2B space, so you need to research your audience is here.

These are just some of the available platforms, but it’s always good to consider and research which platforms would best for your company and take advantage of those instead of trying to be everywhere.

When building your descriptions, make sure they are showcasing your value prop to your customers and also include appropriate keywords and hashtags as needed because first impressions count. Remember to keep these fresh and keep them aligned with your branding.

4. Less Selling, More Engagement – Social media is less about selling but more about education, sharing useful content that can help customers. So remember less about promoting your company. Now that does not say you can’t but don’t make it the focus as you want to find ways to build trust and hold their attention using content that is meaningful to their businesses. Asking questions of your audience and then following up with answers if that is within blogs is a great way to should that you value their opinions. Bottom line is you want to become the trusted advisor they believe in and when they are ready to buy they turn to you.

Make sure to treat social networks like networking in a face to face environment as we all know, relationships are essential. Bottomline social media keeps evolving, but the underlying one thing that makes you successful is being consistent, engaged, and of course, sharing the right content the audience wants to see and read.