Social media is a great tool for connecting with other businesses while driving sales to your own business. In fact a study by the IDC revealed that 75 percent of the B2B buyers and 84 percent of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions.

The same study also showed that B2B buyers who are most active on social media to support the buying process were more of senior executives. These seniors had 84 percent bigger budgets, made 61 percent more purchase decisions, and had great influence over purchase decisions.

What does this mean for your business? A huge opportunity to tap into the power of social media to influence B2B buyers and drive ROI. One way to get this done is through the use of SEO. I’ll be showing you exactly how you can leverage on the power of SEO to influence B2B buyers in your niche.

Align Your SEO And Social Media Objectives

Influencing a business audience is not as easy as it seems. After all, you’ll be marketing to professionals in their own right. From experience, I know that stepping into B2B marketing without a foolproof plan is a recipe for marketing disaster.

Therefore, the first step to using SEO to influence B2B buyers on social media is aligning your SEO and social media objectives. Your goal might be to achieve awareness or even sales, whatever the case; you should outline clearly, how you intend to use social media to achieve this goal with a B2B audience.

Develop A Content Strategy

Content is a highly relevant aspect of any SEO activity. You can only influence your business audience by producing highly relevant, valuable and of course targeted content that drive conversations and subsequently, qualified traffic and conversions. A working knowledge of keyword analysis will also come into play here to help you create content that your B2B audiences are actually interested in reading about. Strive to create content around niche relevant keywords for maximum relevancy.

Create Punch-line Content And Show It Off

Creating optimized content isn’t enough to influence your B2B audience. You have to create what I call the punch-line content and show it off. What is the punch-line content? The punch-line content is the type of content that incorporates lots of research, stats, and visuals to address a common issue in an industry.

Many marketers like Neil Patel have used the punch-line content strategy to gain global appeal with their B2B audience. It’s not just about creating that awesome content though; you have to blow your trumpet as loud as you can! Share your content with other influencers on social media and get them to talk about it until virtually everyone in your niche is talking about it too.

Be Easily Found For Niche Relevant Hashtags

Every day, business owners search for services in various industries on social media. If you want to tap into this trend, you should use niche relevant hashtags to ensure that your business is found in its niche. I can’t even begin to tell you how many time using niche relevant hashtags has landed me deals on social media. One thing though; you have to make sure that your hashtags are connected to pages that actually showcase the “best side” of your business. For me, this all points back to the quality of content on your social media pages.

Optimize Your Content For Social Search Engines

One very oblivious fact is that social media channels are search engines too! Nowadays, people don’t just go only to search engines like Google and Yahoo to make enquiries they also use social media channels to find what they’re looking for. This fact makes optimizing your content for social search engine very vital!

Here are some impressive stats from KissMetrics that show just how much people are using social media to search:

• As of 2010, Twitter handled 19 billion search queries a month (that’s more than 5x the queries handled by Bing!).
• In 2012 Facebook said it got around one billion search queries per day.
• As of March 2010, YouTube got roughly 3.7 billion search queries a month. Also, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, making it one of the largest content repositories on the web.

If you’re going to get across to your B2B audience on social media, then you have to optimize your content for social search. Some elements of an optimized page include optimized content, optimized profile and of course niche relevant hashtags and social activities.

Get More Social Shares

Social shares are very similar to backlinks on a website. Getting quality social shares is an ideal way to influence your B2B buyers on social media.  The fact is that people can only buy from your business if you’re visible. Even more so, people would rather buy from a business that everyone in their industry is talking about.

Social shares are a great way to get people talking about your business. One great way to increase your social shares is by being active on social sharing sites like Twitter and Google+. This will help you build a network that spreads your content to your audience.

Tap Into Optimized Social Media Marketing

When it comes to social media marketing there are a hoard of options available to businesses today. However, many businesses still struggle to generate leads because they’re yet to tap into the power of optimized social media marketing. The key factors when it comes to optimizing your social media marketing are content, targeting, testing and of course measurement. If you’re going to reach your audience and convince them to buy, then your social media marketing better be optimized for social media.

Leverage On Relationships

Building relationship on social media isn’t just for B2C marketers. B2B marketers can also leverage on this SEO strategy to influence their audience and command more sales. Building relationships is one of the most lasting ways to influence your B2B buyers on social media. The key activity here is leveraging on your SEO power to connect with your audience.

You can start by following the people you would like to connect with and engage with their content across social media platforms likeFacebook and LinkedIn. From then on, you can slowly ease into asking for their contributions, working together and finally pitching your business.

Profile Information

Your profile information is another key point in leveraging on social media SEO. One of the first steps you take when looking to influence your audience is filling out your social profiles with relevant information about your business. This content will help increase your local rankings. This means that you can easily be found by other business owners who are within your geographical location and who are more likely to patronize you.

Finally, it’s important to remember that your business website is a huge part of using SEO to convert social media prospects into actual buyers. The ideal set up when targeting prospects on social media is to drive them to your website. Given the report by KoMarketing and BuyerZone on the role of content in actually converting leads, it goes without saying that your web content should be crafted to “keep” your social media prospects.