I read with interest this guest post on the Small Business Blog by Jean Van Rensselar, owner of Chicago-based Smart PR Communications. She cites the recent finding that close to two-thirds of Twitter users abandon the service after the first month and her experience with clients to argue that social networking sites should not be part of the B2B marketing equation.
The ROI does not measure up to the hype around them, she says.
Other marketing experts disagree, making the case that Van Rensselar says is bogus – that adding your firm's presence to one or more key social networking platforms, while requiring a time commitment as part of an integrated marketing strategy with clear goals, can deliver ROI in the form of getting on the radar screen of many more like-minded folks.
John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing (a great example of B2B social media marketing done right) expresses this view often. His latest blog post from today is all about this. He says that some of the same naysayers of the value of social media are those who dismissed websites as sales tools when they first became popular, and later blogs.
I tend to side with Jantsch, as well as other social media marketing visionaries including Becky McCray of Small Biz Survival, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, and Chris Brogan of New Marketing Labs.
Why? Because I've seen the power of these sites on our visibility and sales firsthand. Winning Workplaces is very small – we only have six full-time staff members – and so to compete with our peers we need to be present where people are meeting up and talking about things that we care about, such as workplace team building and employee engagement best practices.
I'm the lone, on-staff marketing person and I probably devote 10 hours per week to our five social networking platforms:
That sounds like a lot of time and it is, when you factor in writing multiple daily blog posts here, starting and responding to discussions on all platforms, and doing ongoing strategy work to identify and pursue best practices and address weaknesses.
But, to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I've seen the promised land. Our traffic growth last year on our platforms ranged from 133% (blogs) to 693% (Twitter). We're doing even better across the board this year, and I'm now able to see which platforms are having the most impact for the moment when we draw a participatory line in the sand based on our answer to the question, "Where does it make the most sense for us to spend our time?"
This time and effort in the social media space has had a real impact on our website traffic – key to our growth since a pillar of our offerings has always been a free clearinghouse of workplace best practices for small businesses. Traffic from the blogs alone has boosted visits to our site overall by 8%, and some key pages by as much as 40%. Naturally, this has prompted more one-on-one contact with people we want to reach than ever before, and a better read on how what we offer is helping owners, leaders and HR folks to implement stronger team building and employee engagement activities that result in lower turnover and greater productivity and profitability.
So I really think that small firms, especially, stand to benefit by getting involved in, or strategically increasing their efforts in, B2B social media marketing.
What's your position?
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