IT resellers embrace social media but require support from vendors to be more effective

This autumn we carried out research to find out the extent to which IT Resellers are using social media for marketing purposes. A focus group that consisted of 35 small UK-based companies were quizzed on their social media usage for business, and the findings indicate that the majority of small IT reseller businesses are utilising social media technologies for sophisticated marketing reasons such as growing brand awareness and online PR. However the study also shows that they are not always successful and would like more support from vendors to help them increase sales using such techniques.

Twitter and Linked In are the most popular sites for marketing

Twitter is the most popular choice of social media site for this technical audience to utilise for marketing purposes, closely followed by business social networking site Linked In, with Facebook also proving to be a popular choice. YouTube and RSS feeds are also well used, with less people choosing blogging but, unsurprisingly, even fewer opting to adopt Google + for marketing. Just a few individuals choose less well known social utilities like Vimeo, Flickr, Digg, Slideshare, Foursquare, and using forums. Despite low numbers for less widely used sites however, this shows they are a savvy audience that is willing to try out various sites and utilities to meet their targets.

Keeping it simple – using social media to tell the world about their business

Most IT Resellers surveyed are using social media to release news and online PR, and also to increase brand awareness. Many choose to use social media marketing as a means of distributing content and to improve search rankings, with less of them seeing it as a way to launch a product or to enhance customer services. These findings suggest that the companies we asked see social media as an interface between them and their customers; it is seen as a way of telling the world what they are up to, rather than a tool for customer service, which would take up resources and which requires a fairly sophisticated infrastructure.

It’s trial and error for many IT Resellers; they need more support to succeed

Almost half of the people said social media had yielded results to some extent, with a third saying no results at all were achieved - but a quarter said that solid results had been achieved. This indicates that social media marketing is something that works and doesn’t work in roughly equal measure for IT Resellers. Over half of them say that they would like more support from vendors.  

Summary: vendors should provide social media content as well as advice

Small IT Resellers are keen to use social media marketing to sell more technology products or services on behalf of vendors. With varying degrees of success, most of these businesses are using social media now, and in fairly sophisticated ways. Yet their success rates are hit and miss, so they are keen to know how to be more effective in their efforts. More than half agreed that they would like support from vendors to do this. It is up to technology manufacturers to provide support for social media marketing, and find ways of helping their resellers to market their products or services via the social channels they wish to use. This can be done by providing advice in channel communications about how they can be more effective, but also by actually creating content that they can send out on the vendor’s behalf.