B2B Social Media Value: Twitter and Monitoring Conversation

Well, well... it's been a while. My life is pretty hectic and I'm juggling quite a bit both professionally and personally, so my blogging keeps taking a backseat. I'll try to remedy this in the coming weeks.

As you may or may not know, I work in marketing communications for a B2B transportation software company. It's not a fast-paced agency or B2C company with a product I use, but it's very interesting. I've learned a lot about my company's products and modules by jumping head-first into sales literature and product documentation. It's very challenging, but I'm proud of my new-found knowledge about the products.

Part of my job involves managing our company's social media presence. Do you know of any transportation software companies using social media? Yeah, I don't either. My company is huge in our industry, but we don't have the presence of other giant B2B software companies (Oracle, for example). Our closest competitor uses Facebook to repost press releases, but that's an awful use of social media. So I've really been experimenting with our social media presence. Here's a recent example demonstrating the value of Twitter for my B2B company.

Monitoring the social media conversation isn't just about mentions

I monitor our Twitter feed using HootSuite every day. I set up HootSuite to let me know when our company or products are mentioned on Twitter. Many people think this is enough to qualify as monitoring social media. It's not. You need to actually read these tweets and pay attention. Why? Well, let me tell you:

(Note: Company name has been redacted. We'll call it 'XYZ.')

Last week, one of our customers (who we follow) tweeted something similar to this: "If you were an XYZ driver, call us! Let's get them back to work!"

XYZ must have went out of business or had something major happen, but I didn't know if XYZ was our customer. So I checked our customer database and it turns out XYZ was a customer. Further digging online showed XYZ went out of business the day before in the late afternoon. I saw no mention of this in any industry news source. I contacted our general manager (GM) for the product line XYZ is on, to let him know about XYZ's sudden closure. Guess what? The GM had no idea XYZ closed and I was the first to tell him.

This is why you must actively monitor your social media sources. A keyword search for trucking or my company wouldn't have told me this information. Actively reading what customers were talking about was the only way I would have found this information in a timely fashion. By doing this, I've shown a GM at my company the value of social media.

I plan on sharing more B2B social media experience as more happens.

Do you have any stories demonstrating B2B social media value? I'd love to hear them!