3 social platforms you should not ignore in B2B

October 8, 2013

We spend a lot of our time with our B2B clients talking about, and operating in, LinkedIn, Twitter & YouTube. Whilst these platforms (for good reason, particularly LinkedIn) are taking the floor and presenting the most opportunities at the moment, it is important for Marketers not to become closed to the opportunities lying in other platforms. These 3 platforms are catching my attention at the moment and have the potential to be very effective – particularly when leveraged alongside the ‘big boys’ above.

Slideshare
To some of you, this might be an obvious choice but some are still overlooking the content giant. A recent set of feature updates has seen the platform move beyond housing just presentation content, to include infographics too (see Slideshare below).

What Makes Great Infographics from SlideShare

Benchmarks taken from some of our client content has seen an organic incremental views attributed from within the platform itself (outside of embeds) of 41%. B2B brands who are already using Slideshare should assess how content is optimised and presented within their brand channels and consider an upgrade to integrate form fill/data capture to capitalise on lead generation opportunities.

Pinterest
What? I hear you cry! Well yes, Pinterest may have a reputation for wedding day mood boards but the serious folk among us will know the stats about driving significant retail traffic. Their recent feature update allows users to pin articles, a significant change which will shift into the court of the B2B marketer. It is also worth noting, that with visual content on the up and up, we have seen some formidable brand channels grow on the platform, displaying infographics and other visual delights.

Soundcloud
Depending on your penchant for underground music or strings of remixes, you may well not have come across Soundcloud. But the platform is in huge growth mode, now boasting over 200 million active listeners per month.-Think of it as the YouTube of audio! Free, accessible across multiple platforms and easy to embed and deploy through your own brand channel, this platform shouldn’t be ignored. Rejuvenate the fading “podcast” style content and think outside the box like TheNextWeb have below. In addition, Soundcloud are ramping up with third party integrations, one of the latest sees embeds within Google+ posts.

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