Social sharing is becoming more and more common in email marketing, but B2B marketers may be tentative about adding social sharing features to their campaigns – and with good reason. Because social sharing is such a trendy option right now, many marketers are implementing it without considering the risks. Most B2B marketers will likely find that some of their communications include content that is meant for its intended audience only and should NOT be shared via any method, so including sharing options in the email could create issues if people post that information to their social channels.

So how does this effect B2B email and social media marketers? Well, you’ll need to consider your content for every communication and then determine if social sharing options should be included in your campaigns. You should make sure that all the content in each communication is either sharable or not- try not to mix and match. Sometimes newsletters can be a source of trouble as it could contain both proprietary and publicly available information.

So what kind of B2B email content is generally safe for social sharing? Here’s a short list:

1. Offers or Promotions
2. Events
3. Industry news
4. Company news
5. Press
6. Product/Service features and updates
7. Anything that’s already been published (i.e.- blog posts, white papers, etc)

Some ways to encourage social sharing in B2B email campaigns that do not contain sensitive information:

• If you have multiple content areas in your email, make sure every piece of content contains sharing links. Don’t just provide one option of sharing the entire email message. This way the people your recipients share the content with won’t have to view the entire message to try and locate the content being referenced.
• Provide an offer for something of business value (free trial, white paper, etc).
• Ask a question in the email and continue the conversation in social channels.
• Ask recipients to share your content.

The good news is that social sharing is becoming more commonplace in email, and recipients are becoming accustomed to having the option of sharing email content with their social contacts. And the benefits to marketers are significant- social media sharing buttons generate click-through rates around 30% higher than those sent out with no sharing options, and messages with three or more sharing options generate 55% higher click-through rates. (Source)

So as long as you review your sharing options for every B2B campaign, you shouldn’t run into any issues. Be careful of social sharing options in email templates that you may use for multiple communications as those may carry over into campaigns that should not include sharing. And as always, make sure you test every campaign and review it prior to delivery.

This post originally published on SocialMediaB2B.com.

Tags: b2b, email marketing, social sharing