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I attended an excellent roundtable at B2BMarketing.net last Friday on 'The State of B2B Social Media for 2013'. It was a very helpful experience, and I was able to learn a lot from B2B Marketing. The Social Media Benchmarking Report was produced by B2B Marketing and is designed to provide an insight on key social media trends and activities in B2B businesses. I took some notes on the topics presented that I deemed would be helpful to all of us marketers and business owners in light of social media in the business.

Here is some of the information I gathered from the presentations to assist us with our social media marketing strategy.

Which social media channels can be the most useful in business?

These are the highest ranking and where the most traffic is drawn from in social media:

• Twitter 85% - Very simple yet effective in promoting brands and giving them exposure online. This is a great channel to connect with journalists and reviewers to write about your dating business.
• LinkedIn 82% - This is an excellent channel for establishing new connections and getting contact details for contacts in your niche.
• YouTube 77% - The most popular video uploading site in the world. YouTube makes a great social media marketing strategy. People will easily remember your business from tutorials, vlogs and infomercials. Video content is the most popular on social media.
• Facebook 71% - Millions upon millions of people all around the world have a Facebook account. Social media is even easier when people share and like your pages. It's a great way to establish an audience and a great site to promote your brand with a Facebook page to millions of people.
• Google+ 36% - Google is the largest and most popular search engine. It is predicted to become the most useful social network. B2B Marketing suggests you should be running Google Plus in the background now. Google has spent millions on Google Plus, and they will not let this social media channel fail. B2B suggests you should be using Google Plus as part of your social media strategy, and put in the ground work now as this is going to be massive in 12 months time. By creating content on this social media channel, it will help bump up your Google organic search engine results. Also, they recommend adding a profile picture as part of your author's signature as this really shouts out your content, and your content will rank higher in the search engines.

What role should technology be playing in the B2B platform?

Technology has served us well in the past and continues to do so even to this day. It has been a great help to B2B marketers for the past decade. Though you should not solely depend on technology and social media for the future of your business, you can take advantage of it to make your business expand. It's easier to connect to others with the technology we have today, it's easier to make contacts and create business opportunities. Technology and social media has immense potential in B2B, that is why most businesses make use of it to target more audiences worldwide.

Tips on using B2B Social Media Marketing

Businesses use different social media platforms for different demographics. It's important to break down the platforms so you have clear goals on what you want to achieve from each platform. Don't do random attacks on marketing, have a clear strategic plan to follow. It's important to ask yourself why you are doing this. What goals you want to achieve? What are you going to get out of it? When you achieve results, your business will grow.

B2B Marketing recommends writing an excellent piece of content each month rather than average content every week. You need to tailor your content to your audience's needs. Don't repeat the same message that people are saying in the market. Find out what interests your audience and push this content through the social media channels.

In conclusion of the role of social media in businesses, I have come up with this statement. Social media is indeed important in growing and expanding our businesses. With the help of social media, you can establish core relationships with more than just business partners; you can expand those relationship and open opportunities to meet people online who can be a beneficial alliance to your business. Via social media interaction, you can set the foundations for valuable business relationships and drive traffic to your website making a massive impact on your online business.

Please, see the attached info graphic for you to view on 'The State of B2B Social Media for 2013' from http://www.b2bmarketing.net