Small Business B2B Marketing Blog

Build an engaged fan base to supercharge your own small business social media efforts.

Previously, we discussed the fundamentals of social media in Social Media Basics for Small Business Marketing. Now, we are going to detail some strategies that companies have used to successfully boost their social media engagement.

As a small business it is important to adopt these social media best practices in order to build a fan base. A fan base is comprised of those interested and motivated persons who choose to build an online relationship with your small business. By doing so, they accelerate your social media efforts and create more opportunities to propagate your brand awareness, establish your online reputation and improve revenue over time.

Even though social media is not marketing, but a potent online communications channel, you still need a well thought out a social media strategy.

The Wildfire Study

Wildfire is a division of Google which provides social media services. They recently completed a study that reviewed over 10,000 Facebook campaigns. Their goal was to study which types of campaigns and interactions were the most instrumental in building an engaged fan base. Since social media is best built on word-of-mouth interactions, the study was attentive in learning which types of campaigns actually facilitated social media success.

According to the Wildfire study, they identified three categories of fan base described as follows:

Social media small business marketing, the first thing you need to understand is social media is not marketing. It is a communications channel just like email, your website, and direct mail among other communications channels available to distribute your marketing messages.

The next important point for small B2B businesses to appreciate about utilizing social media in your marketing channel mix is that its primary benefit is brand building, and ultimately can impact your revenue over time. So, don't look for instant success in generating new business-to-business sales leads with social media this will take time.