How to Build and Strengthen B2B Relationships with Social Media Marketing

You know social media is a great tool for growing your business and connecting with customers, but social media can be a great way to establish or strengthen your business to business relationships as well.

I feel a lot is said about social media and marketing to consumers, but what about the relationships you have with other businesses? Wether you have a company you partner with for your printing needs, or a few sponsors for an event, business to business relationships are just as important as relationships you build with your customers. Social media is a great tool to help you show love and strengthen B2B relationships. Leveraging these relationships online can help you build a stronger network with partners that share your content, which can lead to more business for you (and them). Don’t you love when everyone wins?

Here are a few simple ways you can strengthen B2B relationships with social media:

Connect with and follow any (existing or potential) partners or event sponsors.

Find the companies, businesses and people you collaborate with, follow their social media accounts and interact with posts. If they have employees or members that are active online you can follow them also. Same goes for people you’d like to work with. Find them, interact, and introduce yourself!

Share content that your partners publish.

If you’ve collaborated (or want to collaborate) with a specific person or brand, they most likely have content that is geared towards your audience. Share their relevant posts with your network. This will break up your own content, and hopefully they’ll take notice and share some of your content too.

Use Twitter Lists.

Twitter Lists are great for interacting without having to follow users. When you add someone to a list they get a notification letting them know what list they’ve been added to. Lists will only display tweets from the users you’ve added to them and other Twitter users can follow your lists. I love using lists for events – particularly lists of event speakers and sponsors. I’d then let followers know to follow the list – which gives them a nice compilation of tweets from list members. Lists can be used to showcase reporters who work with your publication, a restaurant may showcase other local businesses (name the list something like “We Love Our Neighbors”), you can even compile a favorite resource or publication list to drive engagement and catch someone’s attention.

Exchange Posts/Collaborate on Content.

This works well when you have event sponsors – simply ask the person in charge if you can exchange some social media posts leading to content regarding your event for a post about them on your social channels. Take this a step further and collaborate with your event sponsors on content you can both promote. This exposes both sides to fresh eyes, and strengthens the relationship

Create Content Based on Your Partners/Event Sponsors.

Announce your new collab, create an image with a quote from a reporter on your team, any content related to the person, business, or brand you’ve partnered with (and tag them correctly so that they see it). Create something that shows your partner you value them (yes, we are still talking about social media marketing here). The point is your collaborator will most likely share something that’s about them.

Social media is all about building relationships and B2B brands should take the opportunity to interact with one another, reach their niches, and showcase their collaborative efforts – potentially exposing them fresh eyes and opening doors to new partnerships. As you can see, building and strengthening B2B relationships with social media can be fairly simple if you’re willing to put in time to interacting.

This post was originally published here.