By Jep Castelein, Lead Sloth, via Genius.com

Social Media is everywhere today. However, if you’re in a B2B market and you want to find prospective clients, Social Media may not be the best way to spend your time and money. There are more cost effective ways to reach B2B buyers online, such as search.

What Social Media is Good For

Social Media is definitely a useful medium for online marketing. Just take a look at the B2C space: 200 million people log into Facebook every day. That is obviously a a great place to connect with your customers. This picture changes in the B2B market: of course, most employees at companies are also Facebook users, but they use it for friends and family, not for work. Then which B2B users are using Social Media professionally?

B2B Social Media Users

In my experience, the most active B2B Social Media users are marketing professionals, consultants, students and innovators. Those are typically fairly small customer segments, or not potential customers at all. So if the goal of your Social Media program is to reach prospective buyers, you may be disappointed. Your statistics may look good – like the number of Twitter followers or Facebook fans – but they don’t have a direct impact on revenue.

So Now What?

Instead of making Social Media your primary goal, I suggest focusing on organic search. “Organic” means being found in the regular search results, as opposed to placing advertisements. Search is used by all potential clients (both B2C and B2B) and the keywords that they use give lots of insights into what they are looking for. If they are looking for something that your company offers, it’s obviously very valuable if your website comes up on top.

Search Engine Optimization Today

Unfortunately, a lot of the companies that I talk to are doing a mediocre job with search engine optimization (SEO). That’s a pity, because a small investment in SEO is more likely to bring results that have an impact on revenue. Because you don’t pay for organic search ranking, it may take 4-6 months before you’re on page 1 for your preferred search terms, but then you’ll get free traffic for years to come.

Social Media for Search

Social Media plays an important supporting role for your search efforts. Part of a good search ranking is the number of sites that link back to your website. If you have interesting content, Social Media is the perfect way to promote it to bloggers, journalists and thought leaders, who may mention it on Twitter, bookmark it on Delicious or add a link to your site in one of their blog posts: great for your search engine ranking!

My take on online marketing is that Search is the workhorse, and Social Media is the helper. I’m curious to hear your take: please leave a comment!