B2B marketers are using social media for branding, PR, customer service, and keeping watch on the competition. But improving search engine rankings is especially high on the list of reasons why marketers are allocating more resources to social media.

According to the BtoB Magazine’s report, “The Impact of Social Media on Search”:

• 56% of marketers report increasing resources allocated to social media.
• More than 45% of report using social media links to drive inbound search performance.
• 44% report expanding social media accounts to increase rankings on major search engines.

If improved search rankings are driving developing a b2b social media strategy, recognize that social media links aren’t the answer to everything, but they can help. Links from social sites do carry some weight. They don’t pass link juice, but they do pass trust. (Read Search Engine Land’s explanation on What Social Signals Google & Bing Count). To build more links, the first thing you need to do is build more influence, which means establishing a strong network in your b2b audiences’ social spaces. How? Turns out common guidelines for social etiquette apply to b2b marketing as well.

The Rules of Being Social (for B2B Marketers)

1. Showing up doesn’t mean anyone wants to talk to you.
Having a Facebook page and tweeting about new products isn’t going to earn you fans and followers. Building influence takes more investment than just having a presence on social sites.

2. Hang out with the right people to improve your reputation.
Develop relationships with credible, authoritative social media users (and domains) with good reputations. That means following, re-tweeting, commenting and interacting on an ongoing basis so these influencers will do the same for you.

Some web pages are more trustworthy than others. When these trustworthy pages and power users link to your pages, your pages will look better (have more authority and gain reputation) to search engines too.

3. Talk about interesting, relevant things. (Which doesn’t always mean you.)
People like good content. Google understands that people share relevant things. So even though these shared links don’t have a lot of authority on their own (and many are redirected or nofollow), getting enough of them still helps because it shows that your site is relevant to real people.

4. Ask about the other person.
One-way conversations aren’t interesting or worth following. Encourage interaction from your b2b audiences. Blogging? Pose a challenging question to elicit response. Tweeting? Ask what others think.

5. Being positive can lead to more opportunities.
If your content gets high positive rankings on social content sharing sites (e.g. StumbleUpon, Reddit) that counts as a link from a trusted domain and can result in more traffic to your site.

The basic rule? Build relationships. Build content. Build links.

More on B2B Search and Social Media:
-  Using Social Media to Boost Search Rankings
-  Does Google Use Data from Social Ranking? (Google Webmaster Video)
-  Move Over Search Engines, Here Come Social Networks