Thanks to all those who joined us for the B2B Social Media Workshop this week. We covered an awful lot of ground in the first session. In case you missed anything here are links to the platforms, tools and resources we mentioned (and some others) you should look out for:
Social platforms to start using everyday:
Twitter – the largest micro blogging platform
Google+ – for those serious about social media marketing
Linkedin – so much more than a tool to find a new job
Delicious – the king of social bookmarking
There are of course many more e.g. facebook, but that’s enough to get you started with for a B2B perspective.
Other platforms to use for clients:
Content curation:
Paper.li – creating newspapers based around content on twitter
Scoop.it – for creating custom news feeds with content from multiple social platforms
Storify – similar to scoop it, great for wrapping up social activity around events or campaigns
Content led marketing:
Slideshare – for sharing presentations after an event or generally as part of a content plan
Tumblr – an easy yet effective blogging platform
WordPress – the most used and customisable blogging platform
Vimeo – hands down the best value video hosting website for businesses
YouTube – needs no introduction, often cited as the world’s second largest search engine
Flickr – elegant, effective and easy to use photo sharing
Quora – for demonstrating knowledge and owning a topic area on the social web
BrightTalk – a solid webinar platform with good links to social media
Social bookmarking:
Delicious – mentioned twice because of the search engine optimisation value
Stumbleupon – for finding and sharing content
Reddit – similar to stumbleupon, but includes powerful community based voting
Tools to help with influencer identification:
SocialMention – cheap, easy, quick and very friendly
Klout – shows you roughly how influential you are online
Kred – another measure of online influence
PeerIndex – same again, but with a slightly different scoring framework
NodeXL – the Excel plugin for establishing network connections
Social Monitoring tools (more expensive and much more accurate options)
Radian6 – part of salesforce.com and the industry leader, but it’s not cheap.
Brandwatch – a Brighton based monitoring outfit well worth talking to
Sysomos – another very find monitoring platform
Nod3x – the newest kid on the block with some powerful features
Tools to use for tracking and measuring:
Bit.ly – shortening links and more importantly, tracking click volumes for basic measurement
Google Analytics – a fantastic free resource for tracking and analysing web traffic across a website
Google URL Builder – for creating those all important tracking URLs to use for measuring the impact of your campaigns
Crazy Egg – if you want to see where on your site people are looking and clicking, look no further
For event marketers:
Lanyrd – to promote your event socially and connect with online communities
Plancast – another social promotion tool
Linkedin events – for finding and promoting events
For the uber keen, here’s some additional reading and resources too:
B2B Social Media Marketing Linkedin group
B2B Marketing Magazine’s knowledge bank
Mark Shaefer’s Social Media Measurement Smackdown
Dell’s Social Media Policy
Chris Barger’s Social Media Report blog on Forbes
The importance of social bookmarking from the Social Amateur blog
Michael Brenner’s Top 9 Social Networks for Business
Review Mashable’s Top 15 Corporate blogs for some inspiration
Avinash Kaushik’s blog Occam’s Razor is always worth reading for digital marketers
Comments (17)
John McCullum -
August 11, 2012 at 6:16 am
Social media plays a significant role in business to business marketing. I always prefer to use one of the top sites like facebook, Google+ or twitter, they are very effective platforms for online marketing.
solfanger -
August 14, 2012 at 6:46 am
Social Media is like the heart on the internet world. It is your way to interact with any other people you know and whom you don’t know. But, this is a great advantage as this can be use as your source of income and will let you aware of the newly technologies and currents events in the world.
Dan C -
August 29, 2012 at 12:33 pm
“If you build it, they will come!” If you build a strong image of yourself and post quality content, people will share and tweet your articles, thus bringing other people along. Takes time.
rushabh doshi -
August 20, 2012 at 9:12 am
really nice information you have given. I just wanted to know how to increase my fan following on twitter and on my facebook fan page.
Andy Bargery -
August 23, 2012 at 2:00 pm
Hi Rushabh, there’s no easy answer to that question.
However if you think about basing your twitter and facebook page on quality, value adding content (i.e. create a content plan that aligns to the wants / needs of your target audience) and then make sure you manage any engagement, you’ll be heading in the right direction.
Andy
Maja -
August 20, 2012 at 3:14 pm
Thanks for this post, really great information!
Alex -
August 21, 2012 at 4:01 pm
Thanks for sharing this valuable social media website list.
Di -
August 21, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Amazing list — I just recently started using Paper.li which has made my morning bus commute all the more enjoyable
Andy Bargery -
August 23, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Paper.li is great. Enjoy and glad to have helped improve your commute.
Daniel James -
August 22, 2012 at 1:17 am
Having just finished Uni with a prospect of pursuing a career in Marketing and PR this blog has been very useful to me. I was blissfully unaware of sites such as Google+ and Reddit. Oh how I look forward to the future! =)
Andy Bargery -
August 23, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Good luck with your future career in marketing Daniel.
Come back anytime if you want to ask questions or get some ideas / advice.
Clint -
August 24, 2012 at 5:38 am
Thank you for this amazing information shared. I love this.
Omar Khan -
August 24, 2012 at 7:07 am
Amazing list. Just that some of them have lost charm in the last couple of years – like Stumbleupon and Delicious, while others have gained considerably. So, it might just be better to focus on a select few rather than wasting time on all of them. Wasting too much time on such sites can distract us from focussing on content generation, product creation, etc – more important tasks
Rock Pandey -
August 28, 2012 at 7:04 am
Thanks for such a great post.
You included everything here else I had to search again and again on google.
jasmine -
August 31, 2012 at 3:15 am
I was actually looking for this resource a few weeks back. Great post! Thank you!
Kim @ Solceller -
October 13, 2012 at 3:28 pm
Good list of tool. I have used most of the tools myself, but there are some i didn´t know :)
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