If you are reading this blog post you already know some of this but it bears scrutiny and maybe you can show it to your boss to help prove that you are not just wasting your time.

As James Matthews-Paul wrote earlier this week there are now more than 500 million active users of FaceBook and more than 75 million active users of Twitter. Social media is hot for B2B communications because companies around the world are looking for new ways to access customers and prospects in the most direct and relevant ways.

In the post-FESPA survey I wrote about previously we asked stakeholders in the wide format market a few questions about their use of social media, the answers to which I thought would be of interest The Wide Network. The first finding is that it is early, but not terribly early, in terms of the adoption or use of social media in the wide format world. There were four groups that responded to this survey, printers, equipment and supplies manufacturers, dealers, and “other” which includes members of the press, educators, and other industry consultants. Printers were among the least likely to indicate that they are presently using social media, but still, nearly 40% of those respondents reported that they are participating.

Personally I follow a lot of different printers, magazines, pundits, and companies in my ongoing efforts to stay current in the wide format market and I have see how many wide format printing companies typically use social media, here are some examples that could be relatively easy to implement.

■Status updates: Printers often use Twitter or FaceBook to tell people when are working on something interesting. They frequently attach or post photos of innovative projects. Link your Twitter and Facebook and Wide Network accounts so that you post once and it appears on all sites.

■Finding people and being found: LinkedIn is an excellent professional resource for finding salespeople or people with a certain expertise or experience.

■Technical or Product Support: Join Groups to get additional technical support or to find out if anyone else has had experience with a new dealer, vendor or product.

■Plug-in: Just like in The Wide Network you can get notifications from these sites when something happens or something you are interested in is posted. Using social media is real-time, so it gives you a chance to know and react to things quickly.

While there is a lot more to social media than marketing, it is worth noting in this discussion that a recent research report from Augie Ray of Forrester Research described a tool and method of evaluating social media called the Social Media Marketing Balanced Scorecard, which considers metrics from four different perspectives:

1.Financial: Has revenue or profit increased or costs decreased?

2.Brand: Have consumer attitudes about the brand improved?

3.Risk Management: Is the organization better prepared to note and respond to attacks or problems that affect reputation?

4.Digital: Has the company enhanced its owned and earned digital assets?

As an analyst I love this analysis because these perspectives do help consider more than the direct connection between social media and revenue. Use of social media can be additive to your brand, it can be a tool to quickly respond to clients and prospects, and it can position a company as advanced in its industry. But as a practical matter you don’t have to use any fancy tool or scorecard to recognize whether or not the implementation of a social media strategy helps your company along these four planes. In the post-FESPA survey we asked whether or not the use of social media is producing any tangible benefit and found that, while there is a lot of uncertainty, 40% of users reported they are seeing a tangible benefit which obviously compares favorably to the 10% that reported no tangible benefits.

So, whether it is The Wide Network, FaceBook, LinkedIn, or other industry tools related to local associations or industry publications,there can be tangible business benefits by developing a social media strategy for your business. A well-conceived social media strategy can better connect you to suppliers, customers and prospects, help you solve technical issues, find employees, and stay up-to-date on competitors and industry developments.

What do you think? By the way, you can follow me on Twitter at tgwideformatguy.

Written by Tim Greene, Director InfoTrends.

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