This afternoon, a few of our Godfrey team members attended a HubSpot webinar given by Dan Zarrella on ‘The Science of Social Media’ – immediately after the magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit the East Coast. There were 7,000+ people attending, which just might have been high enough to put in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most attendees of a webinar (but final live attendee count is still TBD). I’ll be waiting to see if we actually made it in! Our crew was very interested to hear about real data, statistics and science to learn more about how to apply a scientific method to social media marketing efforts such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

Here is what I gathered as the top 5 takeaways to share with B2B Marketers:

1. Just merely engaging in the conversation doesn’t work – publishing interesting content does. Create that content that people WANT to share. Be novel and be an authority. Produce amazing content, and people will retweet it on their own.
2. Communicate clearly – write simply and plainly when writing for social media. Use nouns and verbs. Leave the “flowery” adjectives and adverbs behind.
3. Don’t leave any information voids – if there is a void, people will fill it with social media. Especially if there's a crisis, DO NOT leave a void, or else rumors will fill it. After all, B2B is not immune to crisis in social media.
4. Ask for people to do what you want them to do – give them clear calls-to-action in your posts. Ask to be retweeted. If you’d like blog comments or to have your blog linked elsewhere, ask for it. But be careful, don't overdo it.
5. Experiment, experiment, experiment – figure out what works best with your audience to optimize for open rates and click-through rates in terms of times of day when you post, as well as the day of the week.

If you watched the webinar too, what are some other takeaways for B2B that you’d like to add to the list?