Social media is the most effective marketing technique available to technology companies for generating leads and to win the new business. It can also be the least understood and underleveraged. Why so?
The frequent changes in rules of the engagement leave business owners frustrated. It is difficult to tie social media marketing directly to a new business as it’s often the part of the journey and not the endpoint.
But the social media marketing for technology services companies need not carry the shroud of mystery that often does. Peeling the layers reveals the less overwhelming, and impactful process to deliver few tangible returns.
Social media strategy for technology services
You have to nail down your strategy like how you would use social media to build visibility for your company’s brand, how you will generate leads or how you might use it to attract talent.
The social media strategy address the following items,
The purpose for business: If you are aiming for lead generation, overall brand awareness, talent acquisition or all of them? When you define your business you can prioritize which social media platforms you would leverage and what content type you will post.
The social media platforms: Which social media platforms does your customer opt?
Cadence and Rhythm: This would depend on your platforms and goals, how frequent you need the activity.
Goals to track and measure: What are the outcomes you expect to achieve? Your strategy outlines the ways to track, measure and report on those outcomes to know if your strategy is working.
Define the priorities and purpose for your technology services using social media strategy
Social media marketing for technology services companies play the vital role of your company’s overall marketing strategy in five distinct ways:
The network
The social media’s original role as the digital counterpart to the tradition has face-to-face networking. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are the opportunities to meet new people, develop the business and client relationships in a digital setting.
You have to work the room as an in-person event. You have to post the content that helps educate people rather than self-promotional content. People would expect that you will reply to their comments, tweets and questions as well as share other people’s content besides your own.
Promoting the Content
Social media is the cheapest and easiest way to promote your company’s content. Social media marketing helps technology services companies to promote their content through multiple channels that help build visibility and reputation (your brand).
The warning on content promotion is to not overdo self-promotion. Social media serves reciprocal as you need to balance self-promotion by sharing important content created by other industry thought leaders.
There seems no widely accepted standard for how many of others content to share, but is a bias toward education. You have to leave the marketing collateral on your website and focus on educating while posting content on your social networks. In simple terms, Don’t go for the hard sell on social media.
That doesn’t mean you have to completely avoid job openings, promotional posts, company milestones and so on. But focus the majority of your posts on valuable, informative and differentiated thought leadership that makes your audiences more receptive to the promotional content that you occasionally post.
Search Engine Optimization
Posting valuable content on social networks can drive visibility for your company. Another way for social media to boost your visibility is through incorporating keywords into your content as an SEO strategy. When sharing content widely, you attract “natural” links that have a clear impact on the page authority of your technology services website.
How would this happen? When people find your content valuable, become your advocates by sharing the content on their networks. Similarly, their connections do the same, and the circle continues. These are said to be the social signals that notify Google that your site content is valuable and indirectly improve your search rankings.
The hidden benefit of social media is that its content is searchable in LinkedIn and Twitter. Which means your tweet that links back to your website’s blog would be found by someone doing a simple Google search. It’s the other way to gain website traffic.
Understanding your audience
Social media serves the best way to gather useful information on your target audience, whether a prospective recruit or a prospective customer. Before meeting with a new customer, hire a new employee or interview a past customer for a case study, you have to check out their social media streams. You would learn a lot about their authority, personality, reputation and visibility. Social Media is the easy way to research marketplace trends as well as engage with the competition, help you to stay on top of their initiatives and allows for advantageous collaboration. This kind of intelligence gathering is referred to as “social listening”.
Recruitment
To find a new employee, social media is a natural recruitment tool or to seek out your business partners. Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to post high- targeted jobs focused on users with specific resume attributes and also provides real-time analytics showing about the post views. LinkedIn is a good place to search for the right talent and a new position.
The platform of focus for your technology services- social media marketing
You have to realize the most return on social media marketing for technology as it is the right platform.
You would prioritize Instagram, Facebook or Youtube? While everyone has been talking about LinkedIn. Most folks make the mistake of choosing the channel before they figure out their goals. That would waste your money and time. The social media platform has a different personality that maps out where you can invest your energies.
LinkedIn Platform
LinkedIn has 700 million active users that is considered a top channel for B2B marketing. You can post your best blogs, articles, and network like a true professional. You can practise social citizenship by commenting on posts as you find them valuable, respond to others if they have commented on yours. If you get time for one channel only then LinkedIn is the great place to be the technology services provider.
Twitter Platform
Twitter platform has a healthy following of users, but there is less interaction on generating leads and can start the in-depth dialogues which is a quick scan or read of the topical content. You can post an entire article on LinkedIn, an associated tweet may be a short quip about the content with the link of the source material.
Facebook Platform
If LinkedIn is about your expertise, then Facebook is an excellent platform to showcase your employer brand. You can post your blogs and thought leadership content, but Facebook is the appropriate channel for posting about happenings in the office, about company outings, work from home antics or the digital meeting. The active Facebook accounts are the recruiting tools because future employees give much weight to the culture and workplace environment as they do to the compensation package.
YouTube Platform
When you have good video content, YouTube is an effective channel to bring that video content to life. Out of the 2 billion YouTube users per month , 90% discover new products or companies through this channel. It would make sense to be on multiple social media platforms. Each channel requires a different strategy and is considered as unique. You should consider the characteristics of different platforms for your decision process. If you feel doubt, start small with one platform and built from there.
Bottom line
Social media can help companies educate their audiences, builds awareness, and drives action. Social media sometimes serves the first place where people engage with your company, other times it’s somewhere in the middle.
The role in a comprehensive technology services marketing strategy grows, when social media marketing for technology is the must have tool. The increasing number of companies jumps into social media with both feet, because of its reach at low cost, realizing that its reach is great while its cost is low.
