Who to Connect with and How to Manage Multiple Networks on Social Media
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MSPs engage customers VERY differently than do vendors and other entities. Nothing that is applicable to marketing in general applies the same to MSPs. Customers don't know what they do, have no idea how to find them, cannot search for them and do not want to air their problems with their core infrastructure and stability of their business in public.
This is much like the same discussion we had with every marketing firm a decade or two ago about yellow pages. They are worthless for an MSP because customers do not seek them that way. But the marketing industry knowledge was that that was how you reached people.
You can't take the broad view that "social media is a good marketing platform" and apply it blindly to MSPs. The MSP - Customer relationship is extremely unique and nothing like any where a product is sold.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller Why does it make a difference? Why can an SMB not interact socially the way that an MSP does with its vendors?
Because the interactions are nothing alike. Any MSP can tell you, working as an MSP is nothing remotely like selling a software product or a hosted service. It's a REAL relationship, it's conjoined businesses. As an MSP, it sounds utterly ridiculous that our customers would talk to us on Facebook. We are on email, IM, the phone all day, every day. It's like sitting in the living room with your family and then someone gets up, walks across the street and calls from a payphone instead of just talking in the room that they were just in.
Facebook, Twitter... these are "arm's length" communications. This is what distant vendor relationships use to act connected. They are so much less connected than MSPs need to be. If you feel this is a valuable way to communication at the MSP level, I feel like the relationships must be failing horribly. This is so much less social, less connected than an MSP needs to be.
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When you go on Twitter, it's because you are thinking of your vendor as an anonymous service - a big corporate entity somewhere. I use Twitter to talk to companies when I am the customer and they are distant and I have no tight contact with them.
Once I have any sort of viable relationship with a company, Twitter would be impersonal and cold. Even vendors that I don't do business with I have closer connections to than that. Even the MSP to Vendor relationship, I feel, would be a rocky one if we were to resort to such impersonal modes of communications. Potentially acceptable but only when not working together in a close partnership - not how a good MSP would want their vendor partners, ideally.
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@scottalanmiller Would you not interact with your friends on social media? I have all of my friends phone numbers and text them throughout the day. But if I see an interesting article on social media that they may be interested in, I'll tag them on it so that they can see it as well. Maybe we'll discuss it later when we're chatting. I don't think it has to be one or the other and I'm certainly not suggesting that MSPs rely only on social media to build relationships, but it can be an additional measure to doing so.
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@GlennBarley said:
@scottalanmiller Would you not interact with your friends on social media? I have all of my friends phone numbers and text them throughout the day. But if I see an interesting article on social media that they may be interested in, I'll tag them on it so that they can see it as well. Maybe we'll discuss it later when we're chatting. I don't think it has to be one or the other and I'm certainly not suggesting that MSPs rely only on social media to build relationships, but it can be an additional measure to doing so.
I have customers on social media. So an example.... @Dashrender is a client of @ntg and is on my Facebook. We interact as individuals normally there, not as professionals or as vendor/client or anything like that.
Having the companies have social interactions with each other there is weird. It's for the goofing around stuff. I agree, having unstructured, social, unofficial conversations or sharing cat pics is important. But if you make it a business channel it has to stop being that, right? How would that work?
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Keep in mind we are discussing this on social media. I'm talking about non-professional social media, public, random, ad hoc business to business communications that I think is a bad way for connecting to existing customers. Not that the people within those businesses should not connect and not that companies should not have a presence there (we do, but none of our customers do) but I think that thinking of it as the place to build relationships is where it fails for the B2B MSP to Customer category.
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@scottalanmiller It depends on how you want to brand your accounts. Many of our MSP partners have expressed interest of simply fusing their business into their personal accounts to sort of create a blend of those two worlds. Yes, you can still interact on that personal level, but you can also share helpful, topic content that your clients might find useful.
If the accounts are broken apart (personal and business) you could always use the personal account to point to helpful content shared on the professional accounts.
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@scottalanmiller I don't think it should be THE place to build relationships, but it's another place to connect.
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Facebook is how a good number of people network, chat, get their news, connect with like minded professionals in groups, and more. You underestimate its value because you personally don't use it. Plenty of consumers and business owners actively use facebook, though.
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@IRJ said:
Facebook is how a good number of people network, chat, get their news, connect with like minded professionals in groups, and more. You underestimate its value because you personally don't use it. Plenty of consumers and business owners actively use facebook, though.
Why do you feel that I don't use it? Both I and @NTG use it. I use Twitter as well. I've promoted both pretty much since the beginning.
I think you'd find that it is kind of hard to find anyone that is more on social media than me.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
Facebook is how a good number of people network, chat, get their news, connect with like minded professionals in groups, and more. You underestimate its value because you personally don't use it. Plenty of consumers and business owners actively use facebook, though.
Why do you feel that I don't use it? Both I and @NTG use it. I use Twitter as well. I've promoted both pretty much since the beginning.
I think you'd find that it is kind of hard to find anyone that is more on social media than me.
It's not that you don't use it. You don't use it like millennials do.
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@IRJ said:
It's not that you don't use it. You don't use it like millennials do.
Right, I use it far, far more than they do. Millennials that I know use persistent, public social media very little. It's one of the complaints about them - they don't socialize to the same degree and often fight for ephemeral conversations - hence the rise of Snapchat.
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How do you picture a business to MSP interaction happening on social media? Give be a hypothetical example that you believe actually has a chance of happening in the real world between people at viable businesses, of any age.
I'm trying to imagine what you are even picturing as how this would work. Much like the yellow page situation, people said it would work, but in years and years of testing the results were zero. Not zero sales, zero calls. People just don't look for MSP services, in general. And when they do, they already have a huge list of providers trying to get their attention.
How would an MSP engage customers? Or how would customers engage an MSP?
To some very small degree, I can see using this for customer acquisition and brand recognition, but we are talking about relationship building for the MSP to customer linkage. What would that engagement potentially look like?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
It's not that you don't use it. You don't use it like millennials do.
Right, I use it far, far more than they do. Millennials that I know use persistent, public social media very little. It's one of the complaints about them - they don't socialize to the same degree and often fight for ephemeral conversations - hence the rise of Snapchat.
We could argue and go back and forth about this, but FB is only growing in usage. FB groups are being used more and more extensively and people are connecting more and more on it. I know this for a fact because it social media is what is driving my site and some of my clients sites. It's driving these sites much better than SEO would and at a fraction of the cost (mostly free)
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@IRJ said:
We could argue and go back and forth about this, but FB is only growing in usage. FB groups are being used more and more extensively and people are connecting more and more on it. I know this for a fact because it social media is what is driving my site and some of my clients sites. It's driving these sites much better than SEO would and at a fraction of the cost (mostly free)
You state this as fact but always give an example that I agree is true and show has no relevance. That you give specifically non-MSP examples, to me, solidifies that the MSP to customer relationship cannot exist there.
Of course your business works there. Tons do. That has nothing to do with the situation. Is Facebook growing for the MSP to customer relationship? Find me any data on that, because that is what we are discussing. It is snowing in Virginia too, but that has nothing to do with the weather here. That Facebook is good for connecting some kinds of business with some kinds of customers and that Facebook is growing are not in question and never have been. Why do we keep going back to that red herring when we've thrown it out as not part of the conversation?
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@IRJ said:
It's driving these sites much better than SEO would and at a fraction of the cost (mostly free)
How is it not SEO? It's just Facebook SEO rather than Google SEO.
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SEO has never done much for most businesses. SEO is good to have, of course, but is just one of those scams that offshore businesses run to dupe SMBs into thinking that they can pay a fee and get magic income - as if all of their competitors weren't doing the same thing creating a race to the bottom.
We had this same conversation about SEO as the yellow pages - MSPs work in a market when customers are not seeking them. That makes them very, very different than other kinds of businesses that sell say marketing or deal with customers. I've worked in all of these fields on the marketing end and have seen the range. I know where yellow pages and SEO work, I know where they fail. I've been marketing via social media for over a decade, more than any person I've ever known, anywhere. I have a decent amount of insight into why it works and where there can be exceptions.
SEO is based around the mistaken theory that there is a huge customer base out there actively seeking to find you and failing to do so either completely or by finding your competition. In the MSP market, this is not true. Our customers didn't come looking for us. We aren't losing customers that did come looking for us and then went elsewhere, we just don't get the leads in that manner. They just don't exist. I've worked with a lot of MSPs over the decades and this is pretty universal. MSPs seek out customers, customers don't even know that they need an MSP or if they do, do not go through anticipated channels to find them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@IRJ said:
It's driving these sites much better than SEO would and at a fraction of the cost (mostly free)
How is it not SEO? It's just Facebook SEO rather than Google SEO.
SMM in this case. You are not being actively searched, you are strategically marketing
To answer your other question. It's a wide open frontier. I see some solid ways you could promote MSP and other technology companies.
- Use your blog posts and post them strategically in certain groups
- Do what you do best and become helpful in places other than SW and ML. Provide simple solutions and offer advanced ones through your MSP
- Use FB as a portfolio for client projects. Everytime you tackle a difficult project post some info about the job. It doesn't have to be detailed or anything like that, but it could pique the interest of some SMB and other companies down the road to use your services
- Never stop posting. I know you are already know this, because in a way you were part of my determination to never give up. Even if you only have a few ears listening keep going forward and the fire will catch
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@scottalanmiller I think those are also potential benefits of using social media.
What if you were talking to one of your clients about a recent phishing attack while on a visit with them. Later on you see an article talking about ways to protect your business from phishing attacks. You could share the article with that person to provide some value and context to your earlier discussion while simultaneously making the content available to all of your other connections.
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Now if you were providing consumer services, like Crazy AJ's, then I would totally expect social media to play a semi-large role. Except that the more someone uses social media, the less likely that they are to hire support for their personal computer. That's a catch-22, but I would expect it to happen. Consumers love to interface over those kinds of media and it works well. And consumers have different engagement and partnership needs. Their home support isn't like an MSP relationship, you aren't business partners. It's much more arm's length.
