Social media can be a very useful tool for brands and businesses seeking to foster relationships with other brands and businesses. Despite its utility, successfully creating B2B relationships through networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook has proven to be more difficult for most than for brands seeking to build relationships with traditional customers. In large part, this is because the nature of the relationship is often different, and in many cases, much more complex. Nevertheless, making good impressions with businesses who are within your reach is vital. Below, we’ll discuss how you can impress B2B audiences in an effective way, which will help make better relationships in the future possible.

Learn More About the Audience

Even for brands and businesses who are attempting to connect with businesses in the same industry or niche, there is much to learn about their habits, motivations and interests. This can be done at a base level through a variety of observational tactics, but perhaps the most straightforward way to do so is to ask them directly. By talking to existing contacts, interest above and beyond simple social media use is demonstrated. This will also help you – when combined with observational methods – to learn what they care about and what makes them a potentially good or bad partner in the future. You can observe a lot about B2B brands by watching them making comments, pinging URLs and interacting with their own audiences.

Be Unpredictable with Publishing

At first glance, being unpredictable with publishing may sound like a bad idea. This does not mean that you should interact irregularly or promote content that has nothing to do with the brand, but rather, it means that you should consistently seek to share and create content that comes in different formats. Whether it be emotional and captivating imagery, inspirational or informative videos, easy to absorb podcasts, content from key industry influencers or even traditional news articles, the ability to offer different forms of content will help to make impressions with as many B2B leaders in your network as possible. By ensuring that as many different forms of content as possible are available, you help to maximize the chances that your offerings resonate with as many people as possible.

Don’t Be Afraid to Invest

There comes a point in every relationship in which the next step must be taken. For B2B relationships that are being cultivated, this usually comes in the form of advertising investment. After your audience has been cultivated through the use of dialogue and excellent content, it then becomes a game of attracting business to business relationships by advertising to them directly. Throughout the previous two steps, you should have collected enough information about what drives these brands and what they find interesting in order to further engage them. Whether you are pinging URLs to B2B products or free seminars and subscriptions, the level of customization and targeting performed by you for each brand can make a huge difference in how much success is garnered with each type of investment and outreach.