It may have started out as a version of Hot or Not for Harvard University students, but Facebook is now undeniably a serious business tool. Likewise, twitter is no longer just for knowing what Stephen Fry eats for breakfast.

Social media often comes from humble beginnings, but can quickly evolve into a communications channel for the masses – including all B2B brands. For example, it has the benefit of real-time interaction with an engaged audience and can help to position you as a real thought leader in your field.

There is a lot of hype around social media, and this is where B2B brands can often come unstuck; it is tempting to jump on the bandwagon, but a poor social media presence is worse than having no social media presence at all.

It’s essential that brands take the right approach to social media to give them the best chances of success. On that note, here are eight top tips to getting started in social media:

1. Strategy

Before getting started, it is vital to have a clear strategy in place based on a rigorous analysis of the social media landscape you are operating in. This should tell you where your audience are, how they are using the various channels, what competitors are doing, and the opportunities for your brand.

Your strategy should also include key messages for every channel and a list of short, medium and long-term objectives based on what success looks like for your business.

2. Style

As any communicator knows, styles need to be adapted for different forums. For example, on twitter you need to learn how to communicate in just 140 characters and appreciate the ins and outs of short URLs, memes and hashtags. On Linkedin, you need to know how to capture a Group audience and encourage members to share their ideas and experiences.

B2B brands need to research and understand these new styles of communication, and ensure that everyone appreciates the subtle nuances that can help you to cut through the noise.

3. Sustainability

Setting up a social media account is one thing; having a social media presence is quite another. Before getting started, you need to know you have the resources and commitment required to keep it going.

Help yourself by creating a calendar of content and make sure you always have something to talk about.

4. Substance

As with any medium, content is key to a successful communications programme. There is a vast amount of information out there and people will quickly tire of feeds that are of no use to them.

Content must be fresh, unique, interesting and engaging. If you’re using social media to demonstrate thought leadership it must be new, or at least add value to the existing debate.

People often ask us how many followers they should have and how to increase their following, but perhaps there’s a better way of thinking about this. If you have the right content and promote it in the right way, the right people will come. It’s better to have 1,000 engaged readers of your blog than 10,000 disengaged followers and the right content will ensure that the high value interest keeps coming back.

5. Spokespeople

Getting key spokespeople on board is vital if you are to create a compelling social ‘product’. Some will be more familiar with the channel than others, so training needs to be tailored. They will also have varying perceptions of how much time they need to put into this and what they will get out of it, so you need to set reasonable expectations up front.

6. Stamina

It takes planning, dedication and perseverance to make a success of social media and to start seeing results. This needs to be built into your strategy and objectives, so that your targets are achievable and to manage expectations internally.

7. Suitability

A major benefit of social media is that it enables you to talk in real time to a niche audience. It is vital that your content focuses specifically on what’s affecting them. Getting the right spokespeople on board with the necessary insight and experience is the first step to achieving this.

8. Succinct

Generally speaking, easily digestible content works best as people have a limited amount of time to spend on social media. There are various analytics tools available to determine what works best on which channels. Keeping a close eye on this and recent industry reports will help you to tailor your content in various formats to keep your audience engaged.

For the last few years the PR industry has been embroiled in a seemingly interminable argument with other marketing disciplines over who ‘owns’ social media. But debates over ownership are not helpful – the industry should refocus its attentions on what good PR brings to the party.

Whilst the media landscape is irrevocably changing, big ideas and great content still dominate. Mass interaction, especially via twitter, is based on and fueled by, the sharing of useful and compelling content. And quality content is, of course, the basis of good PR.

At the same time the increase in the volume of information vying for our attention and the burden this places on individuals, is fueling the need for bite-size, and increasingly, non-text based content. People simply can’t cope with the sea of business, career and life-critical information they need to digest, so communicators need to make it easy for them.

But, while ideas are still making the world go round, PR needs to catch-up with the new (and newly accessible) tools and formats for bringing their clients’ ideas to life and making them easily digestible and shareable with the widest possible audience.

This clearly presents a huge opportunity for PR to create rich content in the form of videos, images, infographics and audio that help convey client ideas easily and rapidly. By doing so they can increase the opportunities to engage audiences, both by working with the media in new ways, and by encouraging content sharing through blogging and social media.

It’s easy for B2B brands to feel left behind with such comms innovations, but this trend actually holds more promise for engaging B2B decision-makers than consumers. The often dry approach taken by some in disseminating B2B content will benefit greatly from a fresh approach. Professional services companies, for example, have a sizeable opportunity to demonstrate its expertise – the only thing it really sells – in many more engaging and compelling ways.

Media brands have also recognised the ‘bite-size’ opportunity and are rapidly experimenting with short-form and multimedia content. The Guardian with its mass of podcasts and evolving data journalism can scarcely be called just a newspaper anymore.

To seize this opportunity however, communicators need to up-skill rapidly. The necessary transferable skills are well-established in areas of PR such as broadcast and radio specialists, but they need to become part of any PR’s toolkit.

PRs now need to be as au fait recording and editing a quick talking-head video or audio snippet as they are writing a press release. Likewise, they must consider how research can escape the comforting walls of the PDF whitepaper, via data mashups and visualisation and how they can work with media outlets to bring their data to life.

The above trends present some important considerations for professional communicators:

• The skim reader – Think about how you can earn and keep audience attention using different channels and new, text-light, ways of presenting ideas.
• Visualising data – Think about how data and client messages can be conveyed in more engaging and visually appealing ways via infographics and visualisation.
• The changing media – Consider how newspapers and other media outlets use data and work with them in the most appropriate manner. The Times, for example, has its own data team for its business dashboard whilst The Guardian uses open APIs to create and encourage data mashups.
• Escaping the page – Think about how accompanying multimedia content can support PR activity. Also, explore the opportunities presented by evolving media outlets, such as podcast interviews.
• Good to share – People don’t want to share everything but it should be made easy for them wherever possible. Explore open copyright such as Creative Commons for data and images and make videos and audio easily ‘embeddable’ using YouTube or Vimeo.

Essential viewing/reading on this topic:

Man Bites Dog’s favourite infographic sites:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/
http://www.gapminder.org/

The Guardian and FT’s dedicated data and visualisation pages:
http://www.ft.com/uk/interactive
http://www.guardian.co.uk/data

The Guardian’s podcasting operation:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/audio

The Telegraph and FT’s nascent video operations:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraphtv/
http://video.ft.com/

Examples of combining data, graphics and video:
The cost of the Iraq war to the US by Good Magazine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OT5uw1Fb_0

Apple iPhone stats in an infographic video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyOv8wZcNfI&feature=related