Yesterday in Auckland, NZ I gave an all day workshop to 150 marketing and communications professionals on Social Media Content Marketing & Strategy at Social Media Junction. I’m used to giving workshops to 20-30 people so it was an interesting and enjoyable experience with such a large group. (Thanks to Bullet PR staff who are amazing).
One of the questions that came up was whether B2B companies are successfully using Facebook Fan pages. I shared a few of our client Fan pages like Marketo & McKesson Medical Imaging (forgetting to mention our own completely) but wanted to share a few more examples here.
While it’s true that the most popular Facebook Fan Pages are for consumer products and brands like Coca Cola (18.2m Fans), Starbucks (17.5m Fans) and Oreo (14.1m Fans), there are many B2B companies successfully using Facebook to engage with prospects, customers and employees. Here are a few good examples:
B2B Software: Symantec
Symantec has a modest number of fans but does make effective use of a landing page that incorporates video, poll, cross posts from Twitter and news all in the welcome tab. The Wall has a fair amount of engagement as well. I think what they’re doing with Facebook is what many B2B companies could reasonably do. Especially if they’re active in other social media channels. They Symantec Facebook page makes a good case for the investment in a custom FBML landing page.
B2B Technology: Cisco
Cisco doesn’t use a landing page for people that aren’t fans yet, but is certainly leveraging Facebook as a promotional vehicle to engage with customers as you can see from the SuperFan Spotlight promotion. Engagement on the wall is pretty good and they’ve certainly attracted a bit of attention with 116,429 Fans. Cisco is smartly cross linking to their other social channels including their social media hub, blogs, Twitter and newsroom. Watch Cisco’s overall social media efforts and you’ll find some great ideas for your own B2B online marketing efforts.
B2B Marketing Agency: TopRank’s Online Marketing
My personal bias aside, for an online marketing agency, I’d have to say that TopRank’s Facebook page (which is technically a page for the blog) is a pretty good example of a B2B Fan page for an agency. One year ago, we had 54 Fans and today we’re at 5,335. That’s almost 1000% growth without any contests, advertising, apps or promotions outside of adding the FB social plugin to the sidebar of this blog. We’ll be doing a lot more in 2011 with promotions and the FB page though.
The Facebook Fan page serves as a spoke in our Hub and Spoke Social Media & SEO publishing model. Content is shared manually from the web at large and from our blog to Fans on Facebook. The purpose of the page is to provide a place on Facebook where our audience spends time consuming business information.
While B2B isn’t what Facebook is known for, judging by the rate of interest, there’s certainly an appetite for using Facebook as a source of business related news, information and interaction. Our connections with people on Facebook are an extension of our connections on the blog. Together and in conjunction with other online and offline content marketing, they serve to generate awareness, interest, credibility and thought leadership for the TopRank Online Marketing brand. We could be doing A LOT MORE and we will.
Obviously, there are many, many other great B2B Facebook Fan pages out there. Which are your favorites? Please submit links and why in the comments. We’d love to curate a list of the best B2B Fan Pages for you.
For more ideas on how your B2B company can use Facebook, check out this post from Social Media B2B.
