Does Social Media work for Small B2B Businesses?

Do social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn etc, have a role to play in my marketing efforts? The sites are great success stories with lots of people using them, but how on earth can I use them in a B2B environment? Why should I bother even trying? Surely there are better ways I can spend my (very limited and precious) time?

Well I’m finding out right now and in the best tradition of always trying to help my clients save their time and money I’ll be reporting on all my findings here, in our new Advice Centre.

I’ve read several books so far on social media and how it can be successfully used in business environments, including “Facebook marketing, an hour a day”, “Inbound Marketing” and “Twitter Power”. They have all been useful to some extent and I will relay some of the pertinent messages I’ve learnt from them and my other further reading here.

I will build this Advice Centre little by little, whilst also running my company and making sure all my clients are getting excellent service, so please bear with me as I have limited time.

Some of the core lessons I've learned so far are:

1. Using social media to successfully promote your business takes time & planning.
2. The best way to succeed with social media marketing is to regularly post interesting content on subjects you know a lot about.
3. Where you should post your content to have maximum impact on your business and how to get the biggest return on your time invested is what I'm working on now.
4. One of the main roles of Social Media marketing is to act as signposts to your website, so your website needs to be fit for the job, up to date, interesting and useful.