B2B social media: Where are they today?

As a person from the b2b space and also a normal social media user for my personal connections, I think it is worthwhile for us to evaluate the existing social media for businesses today even before we decide about the “cost-effective” social thingy for our organization. So, I take this blog post to ask a few questions that will help us with this decision for our respective companies. On the flip side, these questions below will also help us understand where the social media stand as of today with respect to a b2b use.

1. Other than just business leads, do LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter solve the typical issues of the b2b space including long sales cycle times, inability to effectively engage the users, influencers & decision makers involved in the sale etc?
2. Heard that LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter can be useful for customer support purposes. Think again. Are these existing social media helping you to post a negative customer comment as a support ticket for resolution? Or do they help in publishing a positive customer comment as testimonial to flaunt on your marketing collaterals? or do these existing social media provide you help to post a feature request as an input to your R&D team?
3. There is a lot of hype about sourcing candidates to your organization’s job requirements. Well, do existing social media networks render help in verifying the candidate’s background in any way? Isn’t the social media profiles of the candidates are a mere extension of their resume? These profiles can in no way be of help in your company’s recruitment process that includes the statutory background check of candidates.
4. Ever wondered about your employees spending a lot of time juggling around different systems like File sharing, Emails, CRM etc to accomplish their tasks and the result being the redundant tasks with reduced employee productivity. At a time when organizations are looking to reduce costs, shouldn’t you be expecting the social media for business to come to the rescue here?

What if the secure intranet or the collaboration space became the place to not only find our employees but also our business apps, our prospects, our customers, our vendors & suppliers?

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the companies of the world harp onto one cloud based b2b platform to collaborate externally (i.e prospects, customers, and suppliers) and also internally (employees)?

Yes, the ideal “social media for businesses” should be a b2b collaboration platform that allowed SMBs to connect and collaborate with companies worldwide and also allowing them to increase marketing and sales effectiveness, increase customer experience & retention and multiply employee productivity by leveraging the B2B community, secure intranet and apps marketplace.

Here is a YouTube channel where I have aired my thoughts as a plausible solution to the above questions raised by me. Please do watch all the videos in the channel and share your thoughts.

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