Using LinkedIN as part of your social media strategy is key for many B2B organisations. It’s a powerful community as demonstrated by these interesting stats: LinkedIn is a network with 65 million business professionals around the world; this year 43% of marketers have found a customer on LinkedIn; and 50% of LinkedIn members have decision-making authority for their companies, so it is an attractive social media platform to use when marketing your business. Since it offers everything from a free profile page to a selection of advertising and sponsorship opportunities, it is relatively inexpensive, so also provides a “lot of bang for your buck”.

For those who have never come across LinkedIn – first of all, where have you been for the past 12 years J - and secondly, have no fear, as we’ve outlined below seven simple steps to successfully use LinkedIn to promote your business.

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Twitter ranks as one of the most popular social networks – and its influence has expanded rapidly into the B2B sector with 85% of those marketers who use social media using Twitter as part of their strategy, so ignore this valuable channel at your peril. If you’ve never run a Twitter campaign though, just how would you go about it? Outlined below are seven simple steps to ensure that your Twitter campaign hits the mark.

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 We put together our top predictions for the PR industry for 2015,

1.The rise of the PR, search and social agency

PR agencies are expected to grasp traditional and online media, as well as create communities on social media and manage social channels. Agencies will be expected to have the capabilities to run SEO and PPC campaigns also.

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A recent infographic from Sage looked at how SMEs use social media and which sites they prefer for business. We were surprised to find that Facebook tops the list, with LinkedIn (perhaps the site most SMEs would use for business) coming second. Twitter was third, followed by Google+.

Interestingly, only seven per cent of SMEs have their own business blog. Surely, with the growth of SEO, businesses should be investing more into their own blogs but, according to this infographic, only seven per cent of the SMEs surveyed have their own – a truly astonishing fact to us!

Another result that surprised us was that 47 per cent of the SMEs still do not use social media at all, while seven per cent have the same social media account for both personal and professional purposes. Despite there being a certain draw to photos of your office and staff, why would stakeholders want personal pics of you – on holiday, with your family or out partying at the weekend? Always keep your business social media accounts professional!

Whether you’re keeping existing customers and potential stakeholders updated with your news and opinions or you’re using social media to attract new customers there is no longer any excuse not to have at least one of the B2B social media accounts. For us, Facebook is more B2C, but LinkedIN, Twitter and Google+ are essential sites for promoting your business and networking purposes. They also give you the opportunity to check out what competitors are doing which, in itself, is useful. How can you position your business as a thought leader if you don’t know what else is going on in the market or with other SMEs?

In addition to our blog, which you already know about since you’re reading this post, we have four other social media accounts that you can follow us on: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

And let us know if there are any results in this infographic that you’ve been surprised by!

Last week I supported a client at the Electronics Design Show and in our conversations with journalists the hottest topic they are reporting on is M2M or the Internet of Things.

And this week, I had a client meeting in Germany about smart homes – again another potential story about connected devices.

The opportunity is huge, with Cisco predicting back in 2011, that there will be 50 billion internet connected devices by the year 2020.

The thing is that many electronics firms have been helping clients develop M2M products for years, but haven’t necessarily used this phrase. Here we need to get old school companies to ride on the coat tails of the hype, whether they like terms such as IoT or not.

The opportunity in terms of PR is also huge. There are stories to be told about a range of subjects including data privacy, smart homes, wearables, the electronics considerations when building M2M devices/apps and new business models.

Security scare stories are always of interest. Concerns re privacy as information from one device transfers to another were highlighted by HP when the company recently found that 70% of Internet of Things Devices are vulnerable to attack.

There are also concerns about whether large scale M2M projects will actually work. Take the smart meter programmes across the world where there will be a billion residential smart meters in ten years’ time. In all of the machine to machine (M2M) world, the scale of the smart meter rollout (often now mandated by governments and regulators) is one of the largest. Utilities and the governments pushing this initiative need to save face and put in place early system testing to head off problems.

New business models are also high on the agenda. In the utilities sector for example, how will utilities use smart home devices to roll out new services that will reduce customer churn and differentiate them. With Apple and Google entering the smart home, the competition certainly got more interesting.

It’s definitely an exciting time for M2M and we’re looking forward to helping our clients tell their stories.