B2B Social Media: Prove Your Value

by Andrew Krebs-Smith | June 11

Many B2B companies are not yet sold on the value of social media as a worthwhile tool for increasing sales or attaining new business. In marketing our own company, we’ve seen first hand just how valuable it can be.

You can use social media to position your B2B company and your team as experts. If you can prove your business’s value to people via social media by highlighting your expertise in the industry you serve, then new business leads and positive word of mouth may be right around the corner.

Social Fulcrum’s own marketing plan involves seeking opportunities to do just that. One of the platforms we use is Quora. Quora is a discussion website that allows users to ask and answer questions about various topics. All the questions have topic tags, which house the question under a topic, making questions you may be able to answer easy to find.

In our case, we look for questions about social media where we can use our own real life case studies as examples to answer the question and prove our company’s knowledge on the subject.


Take this question we found last week:




This question caught our eye because we had a previous client, a B2B wellness company, that was looking to generate sales leads through social media. We had a great case study to reference which would prove our expertise, so we answered the question by directly referencing what we did to help the wellness company.




When you write a Quora answer, other Quora users can endorse your answer by voting for it.  In our case, a Quora user who happened to be a social media influencer really liked our question, voted for it and then left this comment.




But he didn’t stop with the comment. He then went onto Twitter and tweeted the following:



As demonstrated above, the simple act of answering a question garnered our company an endorsement from someone with a large social media following, as we effectively positioned ourselves as experts in the online space. His endorsement gives us credibility as it holds much more weight than if we were to tweet a positive message about ourselves. This is the powerful word-of-mouth effect that discussion based websites can have on B2B companies. By showcasing your expertise and your company’s value, you can make the B2B connection.

One final note: make sure you actually answer the question. If you’re merely trying to make your business look good, then your answer will appear self-serving and you will have wasted your time.

The questions that your business has the right answers for are out there. You just have to find them. Expert status awaits.

Andrew Krebs-Smith
About the author

Andrew Krebs-Smith
