Adding value to your business with Social Media

This question comes from the LinkedIn PM Forum group:

I am primarily looking at ways in which professional services based organizations are using social media to add value to their organization. Everyone is interested in utilizing this vehicle to communicate with clients but does this add value for a business to business organization and what are the creative ways of making sure you are reaping the benefits.

This is a big and worthwhile question.

We, and our B2B social media marketing clients, get ROI from social media in the followinng ways:

We generate awareness of our services: we measure the success of this in terms of Web site visits, unique visitors and page view generated by social media

We generate engagement with our ideas, positioning ourselves as thought leaders. We measure this in terms of the online followers we generate and the comments we receive, among other things.

We extend our influence through our networks. We measure this through things like re-tweets, “diggs” and similar mentions.

And finally, we generate leads for our business. We measure this through leads and new client acquisitions generated.

In general we create value by helping people know us, like us and trust us through social media. That, in turn, creates leads and new business.