The use of social networks to bait and catch B2B success.

Social networks can be seen as a charter fishing trip. With Facebook,

Twitter and many oth

ers you can easily get to where the fish are with the help and advice to land yourself a big catch. But with B2B environments, the difference is you will have to catch the fishermen instead of the fish.

These questions might come to mind. What if you are not selling your product to customers?, but instead you are selling your products to other businesses? What should you do?

In a business-to-business (B2B) environment, the same social media networks can help you land a sale or it can inform you of a lead. However the tools and tactics you use with B2B will be a lot different. In actual fishing, you will use different bait for different types of fish. The same can be said for selling to different businesses; it will determine what bait you will use in the process of catching their business.

One can argue that the best B2B marketing is face to face contact with a sales person and a client. However Brian Pemper from logistics and delivery services UPS argues that "People buy from people and nothing ever replaces a face-to-face conversation. But the business landscape simply doesn't allow that conversation to happen on a global scale. Social media does."

So how do you use social networks to bait and catch B2B success? Here are a few tips on how to achieve success with B2B on social networks.

1. Find opportunities

Find clients that have a problem that you can solve and offer a solution to their problem.

“Rather than using social media to find people, sales professionals need to use social media to find problems,” says Mark Hunter, a sales trainer and consultant.

2. Learn about your buyers.

Social networks can be used as an extremely useful discovery tool. Thus it can be useful in buyer research. Dan Waldschmidt, sales strategist and author of the Edgy Conversations blog, shared an example of how a client found a creative way to use social media to differentiate him from the competition, which resulted in a more targeted engagement, and resulted in a win:

A client was trying to close a deal with a hot prospect, but eventually things went cold. Rather than declare it a loss and move on, my client did some additional research and found one exec’s public profile on Pandora. They discovered he was a fan of the Dave Matthews Band, and it just so happened that the band was going to be playing soon. So, they bought tickets, invited the exec along and won the deal.

3. Understand your competition.

B2B sales persons can use social networks to find their competition, see what tactics they are using and identify the competition's customers. By using this information the sales person can develop a plan in order to reach those customers as well.

4. Be Human.

Just because you are chasing a business deal, doesn’t mean you can’t be human. Adam Fridman suggests that you should be interesting, funny, and engaging on social networks. The key to remember is that your clients might be buying a product from you but they are in fact also building a relationship with you and the business. He goes on to say that sharing stories or news about your employees as well as your product not only builds employee loyalty but also humanizes you and your brand.

By implementing these four steps, it will be easier to use the correct bait in-order to catch new businesses as well as the business of your competitors. It will also be easier to reach international clients using social networks.