How well does Social Media work for a B2B business?

I teach a number of classes and in every class I get asked how important is it to be on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

I advise students that they first need to work on organic search for their website – make sure that their website looks professional and then work on expanding into the social media outlets.  Many of my students worry about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and how they can manage so many sites and still run a business.  A recent report on Emarketer.com shows that in the B2B industries these mediums might not be as high on the list of sites to manage as making sure your own business website is bringing in organic traffic.

“While many business-to-business (B2B) companies have gotten turned on to the value of social media marketing and find it helpful for tasks like prospecting and lead generation, inbound social marketing for B2Bs may leave much to be desired.

A study by lead generation solutions provider LeadForce1 examined the behavior of visitors to B2B Websites who had been directed to the sites from social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wikipedia. Visitors from the top social sites were generally uninterested in product or contact pages, suggesting they were not in the market for the company’s products or services.”

My feeling is that you should have a presence in all of these sites, I certainly see traffic coming from both Twitter and LinkedIn to the Maia Internet Consulting website and know that they have brought us business, however the most traffic still comes from our organic search results.

Read the full article at Emarketer.com