Business to business selling is a much different animal than business to consumer. Consumers are interested in what is hip, trendy and cool. Businesses are into what works, saves money and is well supported. Additionally, most business go through a much more complicated buying process than your typical consumer. For the B2B marketer, social media is just one tactic in a portfolio of techniques that we use to generate awareness, drive leads and nurture relationships. whereas B2C is mostly about exposure, branding and impressions.

Let's use my industry as an example. The web conferencing industry has been through some consolidation recently. Audio conferencing has become a commodity and most web conferencing platforms tout the same features and functionality. Within this industry, your mainstream social media tools will not work as effectively. Link love rewards the trendy and controversial and viral campaigns the same. This does not mean that social media does not have a role to play in B2B marketing. Quite the contrary, social media is important for driving traffic, building though leadership and creating word of mouth.

In the next couple of blogs, I am going to talk about some of the social media tools that B2B people have at their disposal. I wanted to start out by linking to one of my favorite B2B blogs.