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What IT Pre-Sales Engineers Really Think About b2b Content Marketing.
Video 13 of 18: Social Media
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An edited transcript of the conversation is provided below.
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Video 13: Edited Transcript
This section is about social media and b2b IT content marketing.
And the first question relates to Twitter.
Matthew, in your experience, are prospects and customers finding companies via Twitter?
Or is it (social media) just a bunch of hype, especially with regard to Twitter?
Mark, personally, Twitter is probably about the most valuable asset for me, compared to all the other social media sites.
Twitter Is "The Largest Knowledge Base That I've Been Able To Come Across"
And the reason I say that is because 95% of what i do on Twitter is typically work-related.
I have the ability to reach out and talk to any number of people that do what I do or do things differently, or have touched equipment (hardware, software), that i haven't.
It's the largest knowledge base that I've been able to come across.
And with someone always being online, even if it's late at night, I can ask a question and someone in Asia, Australia, is probably awake and can answer that question.
It's a valuable tool now.
As far as customers, prospects, I follow a lot of technical companies.
I follow a lot of different brands on Twitter and watch their corporate accounts because they're saying things, or posting links to videos and papers I want to read.
We use Twitter for my company but we haven't been using it too long.
The thing that people have to understand about Twitter is you can say everything you want but if no one's listening, if no one's watching, you're not going to get any response.
I started using Twitter several years ago and it's taken several years of making sure that I engage with people who engage with me.
And making sure if people mention me and ask a question or something, I try and answer it.
Because it's important for me to engage with other people. And over time you build a certain amount of followers and you find the people that you want to follow, and that takes months and years to cultivate.
LinkedIn, FaceBook, all those other things; a lot of them you've just got to filter through a lot of the noise out there.
And so, I don't know that we're gaining a lot of traction from these other(social media) vehicles.Again, it's (about) sitting down and talking to someone face to face.
Or inviting them to a luncheon or a breakfast; an event that you put on with a vendor involving a movie, or something, to get them out and about.
Those are the things I think that generate the best results.
Twitter as 'Community'
I look at Twitter as 'community' in the sense of I talk to these people enough (online) and whenever I happen to go out of town, if I haven't met them in person, I try to make an effort to do that.
There's tremendous value from meeting you in person, because I now have an idea of what your mannerisms and your personality are like.
Now, I can text sarcasm!
There are numerous people that i actually met first on Twitter, and when I finally met them in person, I actually had something to talk about.
And we use each other for information sharing.
Just bouncing ideas off each other that I don't think you can do from a 'corporate level'.
Twitter is, to me, almost exclusively for person-to-person relationships.
Corporations and the Measurement of Online Social Conversations
That's one thing that people don't think much about.
Companies are out there, and they are watching.
There are plenty of corporations that have social media worms that are out there.
They pay people to sit and watch things going on with their particular brand, if it's being mentioned on Twitter, or FaceBook, or LinkedIn. That's the kind of visibility they have.
It's amazing. Vendors are watching more than people think.
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