For B2B Collaboration, Social Media Won't Cut It

We’re often asked about the difference between WinWin and the popular social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—understandable, as WinWin offers many of the same tools as these platforms. The difference is mainly in our objective and our audience.

Businesses tend to use social media with a few different common goals—chief among them are B2C content marketing, B2C advertising, and search engine optimization (SEO).

B2B networking, on the other hand, is a goal for only a minority of business social media users—after all, until WinWin, no one has offered the small businesses a platform with the best tools to foster creative collaboration, which is the true goal of networking.

Although both Facebook and LinkedIn host a number of industry-specific discussion groups, these platforms aren’t designed with true collaboration in mind, and lack the sophisticated tools business owners need to actually do business online.

WinWinUSA is the best way for businesses to collaborate online.

According to HubSpot, LinkedIn—the dominant B2B platform—is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. However, any business looking to truly thrive has much larger goals than generic lead generation. Although a business’s primary objective is to find sales opportunities, our members often find much greater tangible value, rewards and opportunities via other avenues. LinkedIn is primarily geared toward allowing individuals to network as professionals, or for businesses to find new employees—it was not designed as a collaboration tool.

What about Twitter? About 70% of small businesses have Twitter accounts, but many of those accounts are inactive or are simply used to recycle brand content from other platforms such as Facebook. You can use Twitter to keep up with news in your industry and stay in touch with certain contacts, but Twitter’s fast-paced atmosphere (the half-life of an individual tweet is about 15 minutes) means that few small business owners have the time to truly engage with the platform. And the 140-character message limit, by design, inhibits truly creative, open-ended communication.

According to eMarketer, 52% of small businesses don’t feel that they are being effectively marketed to by other small businesses, while 46% are dissatisfied by the feeling that they’re being “sold” to by business peers instead of “spoken” to.

We engineered WinWin to solve this problem—you can present your needs, goals, products and services to a like-minded target audience of business peers who actually want to hear and learn from you. Our members didn’t join as part of a cheap visibility enhancement strategy—as a strictly B2B platform, being a member won’t automatically generate new leads for you. That’s why you can feel confident that you won’t find businesses who are using WinWin “for the sake of being there” and who just want to sell “at” you—every one of our Winners is actively seeking opportunities to grow, save money and collaborate with other businesses like yours.

WinWin offers much more than a general B2B marketplace; it’s designed to let you actually do business online. Members have nearly infinite opportunities to increase revenue, decrease expenses and grow—creativity is the only limitation. We’ve used some of the latest technology to incorporate all the useful elements of typical social media platforms—like status updates, content sharing, dynamic connections and event publicity—while wholly transcending them.

On WinWin, you’ll find an easy-to-use, cloud-based environment with everything you need for successful B2B collaboration: a networking platform, business listings with free SEO benefits, a B2B exchange to foster effective relationships and save money, co-op marketing to help you combine resources with other businesses, and an events publicity engine to help you find and share events that matter to you. To this social platform we’ve added essential business tools like videoconferencing with screen sharing, easy document sharing, instant messaging, and more—with many more features currently in development.

For example, cooperative marketing may open doors to reach a larger audience than was feasible without an alliance, or it may open a market previously closed to a business. Members often find expense-reduction opportunities through bulk purchases, staff sharing, or freight load sharing. There are also opportunities to hold on to valued employees during economic downturns or during seasonal slow-downs.

As members create and post new ideas in any category, their engagement will prompt additional new ideas and solutions from other members. This business community engagement is what will trigger a revolution of thought in business activity. It is this very cycle that launches radical ideas that obliterate existing restrictive paradigms and will catapult the American business landscape into the forefront of the global stage. That’s what WinWin is for!

What hidden win-win opportunities is your business missing out on? Finding out is simple, and membership is free. Give WinWin a try to find out why relationships are at the root of every success, and why cross-pollinating with other businesses leads to new strategies, new friendships, and new money-saving insights.