Social may have established itself as a brand-building requirement, but — as some marketers have learned the hard way — it can’t replace other channels yet. “Brand-building strategy and social strategy are inextricably intertwined,” according to Forrester analyst Tracy Stokes. Yet, “social efforts do not represent a stand-alone solution and need the scale and consistency of paid and owned media.”

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Earlier this year Twitter announced a partnership with American Express to make their self-serve advertising platform available to a limited number of small businesses. We signed up for SocialMediaB2B.com because access to Twitter’s advertising platform previously has been limited to those with big budgets. This leaves out many B2B companies. We offer this preview of what Twitter’s advertising platform looks like, so you can explore the option of promoted accounts and promoted tweets with the knowledge of how the platform works. Choose a target and a budget, and Twitter does the rest. Click on each image to enlarge it and view in new tab.

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A recent article on Marketing Sherpa discussed the idea of bringing gaming mechanics, or gamification, to the internal and external operations of B2B companies. One of several definitions in the article is using game-style systems of “goal setting, real-time feedback, transparency, competition, teams, etcetera — to motivate and engage customers and employees.” While not expressly tied to social media efforts, game-like rewards can be more successful when users have the ability to share them using social media, thereby amplifying the effect of the rewards.

Below are six tactics B2B marketers can use to drive internal and external engagement.

View the tactics 

In 2010 when LinkedIn finally launched company pages, I wrote a breakdown of all the things you could do with your page in the column, “Set Up Your New LinkedIn Company Page.” A lot has changed since then and the list of free and paid marketing and media opportunities on LinkedIn has grown significantly.

So with the help of Sarah Mitus (one of our agency’s social media specialists who helped with the research and images for this column) we are going to share an update and breakdown of all the things we think you can do to promote your business or brand on LinkedIn. Of course if we left something out please comment and let us know! We have broken down the tactics and features into free and paid categories that businesses (or their advocates) can use to promote their brands, products, and services.

Data about Pinterest is sparse because they’ve been slow to release their API, but I was able to utilize search engine APIs to pull some data about the trendy new social site. I gathered information on over 11,000 pinned images and did some analysis to create the infographic below.

This data should be useful for Pinterest users who’d like to get more repins on the images they’ve pinned, as well as content producers who want their content pinned and repinned more.

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The topic of online influence has suddenly become red hot as marketers have awakened to the reality that third-party validation by peers and experts is at least as important as marketing messages in customers’ decision-making. Not surprising, an important concept is quickly spiraling out of control.

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Recently, I found my way onto the Radian 6 website. Radian 6 is a leader in the world of social media monitoring and they have countless amounts of valuable resources for download on their website. This ebook caught my eye…ROI of Social Media: Myths, Truths and How To Measure. I thought it may be like others that just offer a vague description of how one company did this, but it doesn’t even come close to making sense for your organization.

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“Conversations are conversations — not business segments. They are based on what people feel,” said Richard Binhammer, director of social media and community at Dell The PRSA 2012 Digital Impact Conference at New York’s Sentry Center, Binhammer discussed how people are using the Web to connect and how “social brings new dynamics to continuing to grow the intersection between business value and customer value.” He said that there are three types of relationships: authority, community and exchange.

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360i has released a search engine optimization tool that assists marketers in Web site audits, but says it also points to shortcomings in social metrics across Facebook, Twitter and Google +1.

In development for nearly two years, 360i released a scaled-down version of 360iTIGER that is free to marketers. The tool monitors social media shares supported by Facebook Likes, Twitter tweets and Google +1s.

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