Borenstein Group

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Social Media Marketing

B2B Social Media Industry Insights to Watch for in 2021

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It’s no secret that social media is a necessity for businesses to thrive in the 21st century. Many take the same unstructured approach to their business account as they do to their personal account, but social media is a science. As platforms and user practices evolve, it’s important to stay up to date so that your business can maximize its return from its social media efforts. Here are a few insider insights that illuminate the most important social media trends of 2021: There are basic practices every business should adopt;

  1. Every platform has an algorithm that determines who sees your social media content. The key to manipulating these algorithms in your favor is consistency and intentionality. Algorithms reward consistent posting. Create a posting schedule so that at least three days a week, you can post original content at the same time of day. Around 11:00 and 5:00 are best because social media traffic spikes around lunch and the end of the workday. Don’t post just for the sake of uploading content. User engagement is just as important to algorithms as consistency. Create content that makes users stop scrolling, read more, open a picture, watch a video, or click on something.
  2. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home protocols, social media usage spiked. Just over a year later, general usage has decreased but has stabilized at a higher level than ever before. Due to the radical shift in engagement, consumers are more likely to see ads on social media than any other traditional advertising method. An intelligent and structured social media presence is of paramount importance in 2021.
  3. More people are spending more time on social media than ever before. However, Americans distrust social media more than any other group in the world. Building brand trust (backlink to brand trust blog) is always challenge businesses face, but this is only amplified on social media. Your content needs to exude reliability, show that you listen to what consumers want, and demonstrate that your business tailors its actions towards their feedback.
  4. Social Media is beginning to rival search engines and ads seen on television as the most common source of brand discovery. Even though it is not the first, social media carries the most weight. Ads seen on social media are the most actionable to consumers, have the highest conversion rates, and conveniently give advertisers the most bang for their buck. They are an extremely cheap alternative to traditional advertising methods and certain platforms, like Facebook, have tools to target your ads towards very specific demographics by geographic location, age, etc.
  5. While it can be easy to use social media as a megaphone to describe why all of your products and services are the best, users don’t want to be sold something. A business’s social media presence is oxymoronic in that way. Users are most likely to engage with content that appeals to their emotions or sense of humor. The best way to attract potential consumers to your page is to creatively communicate your brand narrative in an eye-catching way.
  6. Effective strategies include cashing in on meme culture and responding directly to individuals. Memes demonstrate your understanding of your consumers and are simple and free to make. Gucci is widely known for its meme strategy of “making luxury relatable.” Responding to individuals also demonstrates a heightened level of consumer care. Netflix is perhaps the most notorious response account. Even when they are not tagged, Netflix often responds comedically to community conversations about their shows and movies.
  7. Influencers are frequently associated with vanity, beauty, and luxury, but new research shows that users are taking interest in far more lucrative categories. Influencer segments that are currently booming include travel, personal healthcare, fitness/exercise, wildlife/nature, DIY/home improvements, fashion, beauty/cosmetics, and charities/volunteering. Paid promotion through relevant influencers could be a useful strategy you never considered, so be sure to research which internet voices are the loudest related to your industry.
  8. Modern-day users expect demonstrated social responsibility from business accounts in a wide range of ways. Research shows that users favor business accounts that show care for employees, the environment, humanitarian efforts, and current social issues. They are expected to make statements regarding injustices in the news and tailor their content towards calendar celebrations (i.e. Black History, Pride, AAPI awareness months). Many businesses worry about alienating customers by taking political stances, but silence in the wrong situation can be just as damaging to a brand’s reputation. Keep in mind that when addressing these topics, users are looking for acknowledgment and accountability, not for a 280-character post to change the world.
  9. Facebook is the most obvious social media platform to prioritize, and as the most-used platform in the world, it should be a substantial part of your social media plan. However, this cannot be your sole online presence. Consider expanding to Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Frequently, the same posts can be uploaded on all four platforms with only minor modifications needed. An underutilized but extremely lucrative platform is Pinterest. It is known in the industry as a marketplace of “aspirational shoppers” because users turn to Pinterest for inspiration in the home décor/design, recipes/food/meal ideas, style/clothing/beauty, health/fitness, travel, and wedding/party/events categories. Often, when consumers take to Pinterest for inspiration, they are already dedicated to making some kind of related purchase in the near future.
  10. Social media platforms are beginning to incorporate e-commerce into their sites. Something like the Facebook marketplace is not particularly useful to a business as it is for local buying and selling between individuals. Conversely, platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok have created in-app e-commerce features where products can be sold without leaving the platform. They also offer services that let businesses tag their products in the foreground or background of a photo or video. That way, if a user sees something they like displayed in context, they can tap the item and be directed to an e-commerce page selling it. Don’t rely solely on the e-commerce integrated into your website. Use all of the tools available to sell your product or service.

How to Reach Engineers Via Social Media

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If you are a professional B2B or B2G marketer, you already know: social media has been one of the most promoted strategies, with possibly the lowest engagement outcomes. It is tough to justify the use of social media to the C-Suite who wants to see the Return on Investment. So is social media a waste of your marketing time and resources? Not at all.

You just need to exercise strategic judgment to align the right messaging with the right audience demographics that you seek to engage with and the medium where you choose to post your content.

The conventional wisdom is telling us that the lines blur between professional trade media and consumer-oriented social media; it is now harder to distinguish which is the proper medium to reach engineers where they congregate. However, a recent study, released by IEEE, makes it easier for us to prioritize.

Therefore, engineers are most likely to see your postings where they maintain an account. Be mindful that their account might connect to their personal Gmail, Outlook , or Yahoo account and not their corporate email account.

According to the recent study, here are the top choices by the numbers:

  1. LinkedIn is the king when it comes to finding targeted groups of engineers. No matter what age group you are pursuing, from Millennials to Generation Xers, this medium achieved the highest professional reach between 63%-82%. The more senior the decision maker, the more likely that LinkedIn is your right place.
  1. Facebook comes second as a place where engineers tend to congregate and consume content. It demonstrates that engineers are increasingly expanding their traditional-introverted persona to sharing social postings with their friends and family. By using Facebook’s analytics and audience criteria selection, you could now target them by the profession and age group.
  1. YouTube, Google’s video platform, resonates well with engineers as it allows instant access to How-To Manuals, Screen demonstrations, and product reviews where you can visualize what’s being sold. With the dramatic increase of mobile-based access to videos, expect this trend to grow in the coming months.

Surprisingly, what the recent data shows is that the big losers, for now, are Twitter and Instagram, who have not figured out how to attract engineers with meaningful content. The only social media content that works well on these platforms is communicating with journalists and media for public relations and recruitment communications, such as job postings.


(Source: IEEE Engineering360 Media Solutions’ research report, “Social Media Use in the Industrial Sector,”)

The bottom line: before you go ‘All In’ on social media, consider your audience’s preferences. It is not about YOU; it’s about THEM and where they feel comfortable consuming and processing the information you wish to promote.

 

 

 

 

Top 10 Strategic Imperatives for Social Media Success in 2016

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As 2016 rolls in, social media is no longer the stepchild or shiny object in your communications strategy. It plays a pivotal part in allowing your organization to spread the word strategically, protect and improve your brand’s reputation, inspire your fans and customers, and align with the overall corporate mission, objectives, and goals of your organization. If you are a corporate communicator, this is your time, to seize the day and the big data and embrace the opportunity to apply strategic imperatives to your social media strategy and ensure your critical messages do not remain a lone tree in the forest that no one can appreciate. Here are Borenstein Group’s 10 Strategic Imperatives for Social Media Success in 2016 as featured in Communication World Magazine. 

  1. Go Mobile or Go Home.

In the past, most corporations could get away by posting links from their Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn accounts to their corporate websites that were not responsive and compatible with smartphones and tablets. In 2016, most studies are showing that if your corporate website is not mobile-friendly, your social media nuggets of gold will be rendered useless as prospects will leave your site quicker than you can click ‘delete’ on your keyboard. Bottom line: before you deploy any social media campaign, ensure that your organization has upgraded to a mobile friendly and responsive design. If you are not sure, just take your CEO to a conference room, open up your homepage on your tablet and ask him to find his profile. That works really well to get executive buy-in if all else fails.

  1. Integrate SoMo Strategy unto Your Multichannel Marketing Plan.

Your Social media strategy plan cannot succeed if it is disconnected or misaligned from the rest of your online multi-channel marketing plan. At all times, you must stay true to your corporate brand and use the social media tools available as an extension of them. Be creative, but stay consistent with your brand voice. Second, before you begin planning your multichannel marketing strategy, be sure to map out your company’s or organization’s goals in advance. Goals could include creating brand awareness, building relationships, generating leads, growing authority, improving interactions, promoting a product or increasing sales.

  1. Align Your C-Suite’s Mission, Goals & Objectives with The Analytics & Metrics They Care About.

Let’s be real: when was the last time your corporate boss said “I LOVE our social media’s return-on-investment! This really helped us GROW this quarter!” If you are being honest with yourself, chances are the answer is slim to none. The majority of us have never experienced joy when it comes to explaining social media ROI metrics to a corporate executive like a CEO, CFO or CIO. While, in the past, one could claim that there were very few tested marketing and social media automation systems that allowed you to capture meaningful analytics and metrics, 2016 is changing the game. You can now use Big Data analytics to measure anything about which your corporate c-suite is skeptical.

From levels of digital engagement to potency to velocity to repeat visits and downloads of the CEO’s white papers or links to influential third-party validation sites, there are no excuses in 2016 not to measure. What should you measure first, second and third? Measure what your corporate management cares about, not what’s cool in the digital water cooler. Most importantly, if you finished your social media plan and you cannot identify anything that’s relatable to sales, marketing, recruitment and corporate social responsibility, consider a re-do. You are not done yet. Remember, nothing could be more frustrating than having a big win in social media engagement than having your boss say ‘so what, that is not our target audience, irrelevant.’

  1. Develop & Implement a Scoring System for Social Media Postings Aligned with Your Organization’s Business Objectives.

Let’s face it: not all metrics are created equal and not every social media posting on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn or vine is going to be important to you or your company. In order to avoid meaningless reports of the number of “mentions” and “retweets”, without assigning a level of importance, you can create a simplified scoring scale from 0-10 in what you’d consider successful and impactful for your organization on social media. For example, your can determine the top three impact data points that your CEO, CFO, and CMO agree and align with, that are worth the company’s time. Remember, you do not want to be the professional that floods your management reports with meaningless metrics of “apparent success.” Analytics is here to help, but please don’t lie with statistics but asking the wrong questions.

  1. Promote Your Corporate Social Responsibility Brand: Doing Good Works Well on Social Media

Because of the viral nature of social media and the capacity to share moments of joy, one of the most critical investments you could make is to ensure your corporate social responsibility initiatives are not happening on a desolate island or being posted only after an event has already happened. They say that no good deed goes unpunished, but what if – by the power of social media – a company’s good deeds could instead be rewarded? Bad news may travel fast, but through the power of social media, these days, good news travels even faster.

For example, AARP, not your average millennial social media membership profile, has managed to garner tremendous national publicity via social media by actually promoting their partnership with Outreach Program, a non-profit 501 (c)(3) corporation that organizes food packaging events around the country. With more than 300 million meals packaged to date, the organization’s mission is to provide food, safe water, education, and medical care to those in need at home and abroad. More than 5,000 AARP volunteers and employee’s packaged over 1.2 million Outreach Program Rice and Bean Casserole meals in Washington, DC on Friday, September 11, 2015, to help feed hungry seniors and veterans in the DC area.

In essence, going viral, or even having a healthy social media community, is more than just scheduling a few tweets or posting photos on Facebook. Curating content, looking for opportunities, and effectively communicating your story is key.

  1. Stay Strategically Relevant: Connect Your Brand to Real-Time News Narratives.

In yesteryear, the right thing to do was to stay within the lines of your dogmatic brand guidelines to avoid conflict and to get any attention that isn’t in the ‘interest of the corporation’. It allowed corporations to communicate with little to no emotional connection to what is really going on the world. However, in 2016, social media is where the buzz is inspiring people to learn about your company in real-time. For example, when a major refugees’ crisis became the dominating headline, did your company have an internal tag-team to consider how to leverage your brand in social media? I am not advocating taking political positions as much as making it clear that your corporate social media strategy includes being attuned to what would make a positive impact to your company’s image online.

  1. Validate That Your Leadership’s Personal SoMo Accounts Aren’t in Conflict with Your Corporate Accounts

Truth be told, not every organization has a pithy, enthusiastic, social-media friendly CEO. Conversely, many organizations have CEOs that are tweeting their opinions from personal accounts without regards to the company’s social media brand perception, creating chaos and inconsistency between the brand you want to present to the world, and the brand that is being hijacked by personal political views to major misspellings that go worldwide in seconds. Because the distinction between Personal & Corporate social media is inherently gone, your 2016 social media strategy must fully align with the corporate interests of your organization. For example, it doesn’t matter how good you do with the corporate account if unflattering pictures of your CEO on a beach vacation, drunk at a local watering hole, make the ‘Twitter machine’ explode with expletives of #WTF.

  1. Be Ready: Develop a Social Media Disaster Preparedness Plan

It is not a question of if, but when. Whether it is a security breach that affects millions of your customers, or a negative recorded customer service experience that went viral on the web, natural or man-made brand disasters will strike your corporation, and your corporate brand that stood for trusted & reliable will unravel before your very eyes. Unless you are prepared to handle crisis communications in the digital age of instant citizen journalism and social media rumors that travel the world faster than you can type, you are already behind on digital emergency preparedness.

Within hours of any public event that get publicity, whether it’s a security breach exposing credit cards at a healthcare insurance company, or a bad customer service call of a cable provider that goes viral in a bad way, social media was filled with livid postings by customers that already blame your brand for slow response on social media, while internet trolls are posting more disparaging remarks about your brand in real-time. The biggest takeaway is that, unlike in the past, when we would all be waiting to see what CNN or Fox would be reporting, your corporate brand is no longer owned by a controlled narrative. It is owned by anyone with a social media account, qualified or not, that can vilify or defend your trusted brand. It is clear that being ready isn’t optional anymore.

What does it mean to be ready? It is called Digital Preparedness. You cannot control social media brand disasters before they happen, but here are proactive strategies you can enact right now to mitigate potential hazards lurking in the distance. At the minimum, since most social media explosions go from zero to 100 really quick, establish a Virtual Command Control Center for Emergency Communications Between the C-Suite, Social Media & Corporate Communications. Often, in times of crisis, executives rely on or hide behind their communications directors to take care of the outside noise from media.

However, without access to the certain leaders in charge of the crisis, whether it is information security breach or catastrophic failure, communications professionals cannot help you unless they got some facts about the who, why, what and where. In the age of available marketing automation suites, it is easy to create an escalation process that allows you to contain communications and ensure there is easy access to decision makers. Most importantly, don’t allow others to define your brand because you were not prepared or overly conservative and cautious. No response is a form of a response in today’s fast moving digital media age and it could make or break your brand more forcefully than any cosmetic fixes or updated customer services policies would.

  1. Recruit & Engage a Social Media Employee Advisory Council

In most organizations, social media is still viewed as the new shiny object that is highly coveted, but one must be aware that if your social media messaging and brand ambassadors are not included and don’t give you the necessary ‘buy in’ on your messaging, you are simply creating an ineffective strategy. The solution is to recruit from within employees that can form a monthly brown bag luncheon to discuss what they’d like to see the company communicating about in different areas. By making them part of the process, as early as possible, you can be assured that you will have additional ambassadors to promote your messages through a multitude of social media channels as well as avoid having a giant disconnect from the cadre of believers in your company’s digital brand.

  1. Make your social media messaging indispensable to your target audience.

Social media power comes with a mission of creating quality content that people care about. In 2016, the excuse that the only ‘approved’ messages from corporate are about account wins, new hires and company picnics is void of connection with the real-world. Successful companies use social media to create engaging content, no matter their field, to amass new fans and customers by offering up tips, how-to guides, funny meme’s that speak to their unique audience, and usage of un-contrived videos that show the authenticity of your organization. Your plan must strategically emblazon the word ‘what’s in it for my prospect on social media’ before any and all postings are promoted. If that answer isn’t clear, you got a loser on your hand.

About the Author: Mr. Gal Borenstein is the Chief Strategy Officer and CEO of Borenstein Group, a top digital marketing communications firm in the Washington DC metropolitan area that serves clients locally and globally. He is a recognized expert and strategist in digital branding, marketing, social media, advertising, online reputation management and public relations matters. He is the author of the new business leadership book, ACTIVATE! How to Power Up Your Brand to Dominate Your Market, Crush Your Competition & Win in the Digital Age, available in premiere bookstores and on Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and Apple’s iBooks

Top 10 Digital Branding, PR & Marketing Trends For 2016

Another article with Gal Borenstein talking about digital trend- http://www.itbusiness.ca/blog/3-cmo-trends-for-2016-show-how-digital-disruption-is-evolving/63828

The Hub Invites Gal Borenstein to Speak at Hub Convene Conference

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The Hub, PR Week’s go-to resource for today’s digital marketing innovators, has invited Mr. Gal Borenstein, CEO of Borenstein Group, to be a speaker at this year’s annual The Hub Convene digital marketing conference in San Francisco, on March 31st, 2014. The Hub Convene assembles the industry-leading champions in digital marketing, with Borenstein featured alongside fellow thought leaders from LinkedIn, Kiip, Adobe and Dell.

The Hub is a thriving digital resource where innovators in marketing, data, innovation, content, social and digital media share ideas, strategies and insight on emerging trends and their effects on client ROI. The Hub is also the sister brand to PRWeek, the leading business publishing brand, and is headquartered in Silicone Valley. With offices in several locations such as New York City, Austin, Boston and Los Angeles, The Hub is quickly becoming the go-to resource for today’s digital marketing innovators, both at large organizations and growing companies.

Gal Borenstein will be discussing how to leverage Big Data for effective marketing and the current trends in technology marketing. Mr. Borenstein will provide unique insight from his experience gleaned over nearly 20 years of providing trusted strategic marketing guidance to executives of technology companies, both SMB’s and large global corporations. Other speakers include: Brian Wing, CEO and Co-founder of Kiip; Daniel Roth, Executive Editor of LinkedIn; Gina Casagrande, Content and Conversion Evangelist, Digital Marketing of Adobe; and Bryan Jones, Vice President of Marketing with Dell.

About Borenstein Group:
Borenstein Group, Inc. is a Northern Virginia-based integrated strategic digital marketing communications agency that specializes in supporting private and public-sector marketers in the areas of systems integration, information technology, supply chain and logistics, homeland security, defense, intelligence, telecommunications, aerospace, and government.

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