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.
A lot is discussed about social media and marketing to consumers, but what about the connections with other businesses? Whether you have a company you work with for printing or a few sponsors for an event, business-to-business relationships are just as crucial as the ones you create with your customers. Social media is an excellent tool to help you appreciate and enhance B2B relationships. Using these connections online can help you grow a stronger network with partners who share your content, which can result in more business for both you and them. Isn’t it great when everyone benefits?
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 worked with a certain person or brand (or want to), they probably have content that appeals to your audience. Share their related posts with your network. This will diversify your own content, and hopefully, they’ll notice and share some of yours as well.
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.