B2B Social Media Creeping
-
I recently posted an (insightful) comment in a LinkedIn group. I can see that someone from this group has taken a look at my profile, so I'm assuming that they read my comment and they were at least a little intrigued as to who exactly I was. I would regard this person as a prospect. Maybe a slightly unlikely prospect as there's a couple thousand miles that separate us geographically.
I'm wondering what sort of etiquette/best practices there are for connecting somehow with this person/company. Initially I thought I'd follow them on Twitter, maybe like them on Facebook, but they have no such presence. I like the idea of connecting with them that way because it's a 'soft' connection - not too aggressive.
Doing something like emailing or calling and saying 'Hey, saw that you looked at my LinkedIn profile', seems creepy & desperate. Even sending an invitation to connect seems a little too forward.
I feel the only thing to do is to continue to involve myself in this group by posting thoughtful & insightful comments in order to get noticed further that way.
-
If you can contact the person directly, consider them a lukewarm lead. It's not like they filled out a lead gen form or otherwise told you they're interested in your product/service, but they're not exactly cold either. That being said, it is entirely possible that them looking at your profile was not motivated by any thoughts of purchase, so you don't want to go in too strong.
If I were you, I'd email them or send them an LI message and just say that you know that you're part of the same LI group, or that you're in the same field, or something like that and that you just want to say hi and learn about their business... or something to that effect. If they're not interested, they'll say no or not even reply. If they're interested, you've opened the door to inform them about what you do through asking them what they do
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is social networking really worth all the effort?
Call me old fashioned, but I can’t understand the buzz about social networking, I really don't get it, who in their right mind spends their valuable time conversing with a bunch of narcissists, chattering about what’s on TV, funny pictures and bragging about what they’ve done or achieved, it all seems so phoney to me. My site is reasonably popular, I get a rough 50/50 split of my visitors from referrals and organic and an infinitesimally small amount of traffic from social – Oh yes I hear you say,” that’s because you haven’t fully embraced social networking.” But here’s the thing, my social traffic doesn’t come from me at all, it comes from followers of my own social network (forums and user of my software liking and sharing my products and content), who have kindly shared on my behalf. Now when I visit Analytics to study the data from social traffic I find that it gives a huge bounce, 100% from Facebook, 93% from Twitter and 79% from LinkedIn, when my average is just 39%. The same applies to time spend on each page, less than a minute for all of the social sites, when my average in close to 7 minutes. So ok, social networking for traffic is a complete no go, let’s look at it from the perspective of out reaching. How can I break into that? I hate TV, I don’t find pictures of cats funny and I’m modest and humble, how can I possibly even begin to converse with these people? After using Twonk I got followed back by a good amount of users, but had to delete most because of the complete crap they were sharing, do I really want to know that someone ate lasgne for dinner, read about the top ten english railway stations, or what colour lego brick is someones favourite! Honestly I’m not trying to be funny with this post, and no offence to anyone here, but I just don’t get social networking, I’d love to but it seems a complete waste of my time and effort.
Social Media | | LeeC0 -
Language Specific Social Account
We have a managed server company http://www.centerserv.com in 3 languages. The 3 languages are international and not country specific. Should we open 3 different social media account/page for each languages (facebook, twitter, pinterest, linkedin, google+,tumblr)?
Social Media | | groupemedia0 -
How do your direct social media to use another picture when the web site is shared?
I set up a web site to raise funds for my nephew(www.helpmatt.org) and social media randomly picks a picture on the share. Unfortunately this picture is from happier times and sends a different message than we would like to prospective contributors. Is there a way to set the picture that is used when this web site link is shared on social media? www.helpmatt.org
Social Media | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Socialbakers tool for Social Media
Hi! I've been using Sprout Social to manage my Social Media. I saw a video of Social Bakers and was a little bit curious. I haven't heard of it. So I clicked through an ad to look at their features & pricing. I was surprised to see such high values. Does anyone has any experience working with this tool? Are this reports providing a lot more of information than the ones that I can handle through Sprout Social? Thanks for any comment that can help me understand this.
Social Media | | guillermoga0 -
Social Media Strategy and Tactics for sensitive counselling industry
With my business I had always intended kicking social media into gear much sooner but various other pressures put this back somewhat. Counselling is quite sensitive for a variety of reasons:- We want to disassociate ourselves from the masses of non- professional folksy type "advice" that dominates the net, People, particularly in the UK often do not talk about mental health issues nor would we always want people to if they had not protected their privacy enough. Key marketing messages such as "get the first class service you deserve" (in UK people are more likely to wait 6 months to be seen by a trainee with no choice of who they see or when they see it than pay for counselling, "there are no quick fixes for mental health and counselling can make a real difference to your life if you invest time, energy and cost into it" (in a market where read this 300 word article to never feel stressed again dominates) and "what help choosing the counsellor who is best suited to you" - are not the sort of thing many people are likely to "like" or share with friends. At the moment I am looking to focus on LinkedIn (for corporate work), Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. I have a blog which is going to be producing excellent daily content including people's positive experiences of counselling, comprehensive self help tips, counsellor advice etc. On Google+ and Facebook I am looking to autopublish some of the blog posts and there are probably some other channels I will autopublish to but I do not yet know which to go for. Initially I am going to do little else on Google+ to focus time and energy developing Facebook and Twitter. I am trying to achieve the following:- Social Legitimacy - having decent number of engaged fans will make us seem more legitimate in an industry where trust is important (only 14 FB likes so far is not a good start) Engaging with Potential Content Creators - Reaching out to people who have experienced mental health issues so that this content can be used to provide peer support to others and enable them to see benefits of counselling Creating relationships with people and organisations where we can cross promote each other's initiatives, potentially co-deliver services in the future (community counselling work etc) Bring traffic to my site that will potentially convert into counselling clients in several cities in the UK through both people finding Promote my content more widely than is happening with organic search, reach different audiences, engage with potential customers, generate links to quality content I create Develop the social infrastructure to be able to leverage it for future goals, whether promoting an article, raising awareness for good mental health initiatives (that may have no financial benefit to the business but will help people) etc. Sorry this is so long but any comments, ideas, suggested tactics etc would be appreciated.
Social Media | | LighthouseC0 -
Best Social Sharing Platform for B2b sites
Guess that title of the question says it all. What is the best social platform for dull b2b sites? The kind of content that you wouldn't want to share with your friends and family.... Not that type of content before anyone gets the wrong idea 🙂
Social Media | | DavidLenehan0 -
Will we penalized for using social media contests to gain fans/followers in the future?
To help build up my company's website, we've been making a huge push in social media and to gain followers on our social pages, we've recently been running a couple of contests. So far it's been a great success - more traffic to the social media pages and more traffic to the website. We are considering making the contests a regular part of our social media & SEO strategy. In the past, our social media strategy has relied completely on "organic" likes (no incentives to follow our company's page) and posted content articles, pictures, etc. In the past month or so, we've began to use giveaway contests as a way to gain followers. Since focusing more on running contests, we've seen a huge increase in actively on our social media pages. We've continued to regularly post content articles, interesting pictures, etc, during the contests, but haven't see the same level of engagement that we do with the contest posts. Right now, it's looking like there is no down-side to running the contests as we're seeing an increase in traffic on the social pages, getting some additional traffic to posts and on our site, but before we start to completely commit to this strategy, I have a couple of questions: Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction? How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)? There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines? How often is too often to be running a social media contest? Basically, I want to make sure that we are using social media as a long term SEO tool and are setting ourselves up to be successful in the future and not get penalized for gaining followers the wrong way. Any tips, strategies or advice is very much appreciated. Thank you!
Social Media | | airnwater0 -
How to best promote this content via social media to gain backlinks
I have created this content http://www.musicliveuk.com/live-music/the-worst-function-bands-and-wedding-bands-ever in order to promote it via social media. Ideally I want it to be shared across the web in order to gain backlinks. My question is how can I best do this? I know I can post it on twitter, facebook, google plus etc... but is that it? I'm new to social media and don't really understand how to use it to good effect. By posting it on social networking sites am I risking people copying the content and duplicate content penalties? Any help would be much appreciated!
Social Media | | SamCUK0