Social networking is becoming omnipresent in the business world. In fact, 54% of B2B marketers said they have generated leads from social media and 42% of companies have acquired a customer via Twitter. Read more...

B2B marketers don’t want to just extend their brand. They want to generate leads, activate them through the pipeline and convert them to customers at the lowest possible cost.

Here are five ways to attract leads and engage prospects through social media:

1. Have a plan. Define the goal of what your social networking effort is going to accomplish. Then build a plan. The plan should include a communication schedule. Goals and plans ensure all efforts center on a specific result. And that results are tracked against goals.

2. Go where your customers are. Just because Facebook receives a lot of attention doesn’t mean that’s the right choice for you in the B2B space. Pick the channels that work best for your business by taking into account your buyer personas. 

LinkedIn is great for B2B or for communicating with customers in another industry or role, and you can elevate that communication by providing useful insights to people thinking about their work. If the target audience is young or enjoys research, Twitter is a good option.

SlideShare is becoming the YouTube for B2B marketing. SlideShare is emerging as a key social network for business to find and share bite-sized pieces of content. Good presentations with long-lasting, evergreen content drive page views and leads and juice SEO.

3. Drive engagement with value. As with all content marketing, communicate from the perspective of your customer. This approach is critical and often overlooked. Include links to your site, content or blog to let the search engines know who you are.

Social content that highlights the customer’s needs or contains pertinent information or statistics will engage your followers and extend your audience. This in turn can result in retweets, sharing and likes, which expands your audience. 

Google’s most recent algorithm update has placed more influence on social shares. Social shares can now influence SEO ranking, which drives even more organic visits to your website.

4. Grow your reach. Optimize your Web pages for SEO. Use a few keywords to reflect your business in an accurate way to help you improve search visibility. Leverage the network of your employees to increase your audience scope. Include your social accounts on your website and blog posts to encourage your advocates to communicate about you. Don’t include social media buttons on landing pages or other conversion pages as you don’t want to redirect traffic away from an engaged lead.

5. Evaluate your results. Track your results to determine which channels and messages are working and which to optimize to improve performance. While it’s difficult to directly attribute sales to social effort, marketers need to extend tracking beyond likes and the number of followers. Social metrics should include growth in followers, Web traffic, reach, engagement and sharing trends. 

Social media is considered by many B2B marketers to be the lowest cost lead generation channel. Having been solely the domain of B2C marketers in the past, social media marketing is continually gaining recognition in the B2B space.

Making a personal connection is more vital than ever. Social media is the conduit to get personal while building brand, enhancing influence, uncovering leads, and engaging prospects.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. Platinum partners:

If you are new to social marketing or are engaged and looking for new content, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. provide a wealth of SEO-optimized, engaging social content in the Social Media Kits, available in Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.’s Content Marketing Zone. Posting this content can easily help you amplify your social presence and brand you as a thought leader for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. solutions. If you need help getting your hands on this dynamic content, give us a call or send an email. We will be happy to help you find it. Follow us on twitter @PartnerDemand