When social media first started flooding the market years ago, some businesses thought it was going to come and go like a diet fad.
However, it quickly grew in popularity and is here to stay.
Because of this, businesses must take advantage of social media in terms of social media marketing.
- Social media is where billions of consumers spend over two hours of their day, on average.
- Plus, statistics show that over 80 percent of B2B marketers use social media marketing, which ranked second in success, just barely behind search engine marketing.
So, if you aren’t currently utilizing social media to boost your B2B brand, you are missing out on numerous opportunities to build connections and relationships that could potentially land you lucrative contracts.
While B2B social media marketing may indeed be successful, it can also be incredibly tricky.
That’s why we’ve put together this guide for you with some useful tips that will help you rock your B2B social media strategies moving forward.
Why Do Businesses Need a Social Media Presence?
Regardless of whether you operate a small local business or a large national organization, you must have a social media presence.
Social media platforms help you with connecting with your customers, increasing brand awareness, increasing lead generation, and boosting your bottom line.
The facts are simple: social media gets attention, and attention is what you want when growing your brand.
Without a social media presence, you will lose potential customers.
B2B Social Media Strategies: 7 Tips to Help You Soar
While social media may be where you should be in order to be seen, it is also a place filled with excessive noise from other companies promoting their brands.
So, you must be able to define your B2B social media strategies and utilize these tips to break through that noise.
Tip #1: Start with the Right Social Media Platform
The platform you use serves as the stepping stool to your entire strategy.
Without the right social media platform, you ultimately can’t reach your target audience.
Therefore, you need to take the time to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the different platforms available to you.
But, first, you need to familiarize yourself with the platforms that have been rated best for B2B social media marketing.
This is a B2B platform known for employee engagement and thought leadership. It also has a solid advertising platform.
Here, you can locate current trends and interact with both business influencers and customers.
B2B marketing on Facebook focuses on advertising, but you can also share non-promotional content that is focused on employees.
YouTube
This social media platform is great for how-to tutorials, commercials, presentations, and interviews.
Instagram is good for anything visual, such as brief how-to content, infographics, and culture-focused content.
Ideally, to be most successful with B2B social media marketing, you should utilize multiple platforms at once.
Just make sure that the platforms you’re using align with your overall strategy and are where your target audience spends their time.
Tip #2: Identify Your Buyer Personas
Each of your customers has its own unique interests and lifestyle. Because of this, it can make it difficult to target your entire audience at one time.
This is particularly true when you are not targeting everyday customers and are instead targeting companies.
It’s imperative that you identify buyer personas so you can understand who your customers are before you get too deep into your social media strategy.
The stats prove this statement is true. Research has shown that when you create content that is specifically for buyer personas you can increase customer engagement by almost 60%.
Gathered from information from your biggest spenders or most loyal customers, buyer personas help to personalize the overall user experience, help you understand your customers better, engage with your audience better, create more successful social media marketing campaigns, and even guide your marketing decisions.
When identifying your buyer personas, they should include a list of attributes you believe would be beneficial about your customers. Here is an example:
- Demographic Data (name, age, gender, location, job role)
- Job Profile Data (position, main tasks, manages, reports to, company size)
- Psychographic Data (biggest challenges, daily struggles, main goal, fears, business values, motivations, achievements, frustrations, tools used, preferred platforms)
This information can be gathered in a few different ways.
For instance, you can collect information from customer surveys, customer interviews, social listening, and analytics.
Tip #3: Share Original Content
Some businesses understand the importance of original content, but if you’re new to the world of social media marketing, you may not realize that original content is essential to your success.
Believe it or not, your audience will be able to tell whether your content is original or if it’s been curated directly from another source.
Original content can be used to your advantage in a number of ways, and it has the ability to draw traffic to your website in an effort to increase time on page, page views, and shares.
In order to increase traffic from social media, you will want to focus on current trends in your content.
Don’t be afraid to simply reshare content that you find on social media with a short original sentence or two related to that topic.
When adding links to your social media content, make sure to add them as close to the start of the posts as possible.
Research shows that users are more likely to click on a link when it is toward the beginning of the post.
You should also take the time to experiment and see whether you should post during peak or non-peak posting times for each platform.
One social media marketer has reported that he saw an increased reach in his posts by posting during non-peak times as opposed to peak times.
Your success with this will likely depend on your industry and audience. That’s why you must experiment and find out when the best time is for you to post and gain the most reach from your posts.
Tip #4: Use High-Quality Multimedia Content
People use social media for visual inspiration. Therefore, it is imperative that you utilize multimedia in addition to your regular content posts.
Multimedia can be anything from images and memes to charts and videos.
When people are scrolling through social media, multimedia is what tends to capture their attention and makes them stop scrolling and look at your post.
This is what increases the chance of engagement, whether it is a like, comment, or share.
According to one study, Facebook posts that include images tend to get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more clicks.
If that isn’t enough reason to add an image to your post, we don’t know what it is!
Tip #5: Share Outside Content
Having to come up with original content to share on social media every single day can become quite difficult when you have other things to focus on as well.
Sometimes you just don’t have time to post each day. However, you do need to make sure something is being shared on a daily basis.
Well, to ensure you keep your followers happy and engaged, seek out valuable third-party information that can be shared.
Make sure these posts are relevant to your industry and that you aren’t promoting the content of your competitors.
By sharing content daily, whether it is original content or content from an outside party, your followers will view you as an industry leader for fresh, valuable content.
It will also help keep your followers engaged, which is exactly what you need when you want to increase brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Tip #6: Maintain Consistency
Anytime you are dealing with content and marketing, consistency is always key. This is the case when posting on social media.
Being consistent can be difficult, especially when you are trying to post original content to multiple social media platforms.
Think about it: you are creating content, planning when to post it, posting the content, and so much more. This occurs every single day, and it takes a lot of time and effort.
If you are just beginning, it is better to focus on creating quality content that your audience will want to read and engage with rather than trying to get content posted every day that doesn’t offer much value.
Consider using a social media tool that can help you schedule your posts ahead of time, which can come in handy when you have extra time on your hands to create posts and schedule them.
This can help maintain your consistency with the posts.
Tip #7: Embrace Employee Advocacy
Sometimes, when you get too technical or business-y, you can lose the connection you have with your audience.
One way to get that connection back or to ensure you maintain your human connection is to highlight your employees every now and then.
Not only will this add some personality to your brand, but it will also showcase the culture of your company.
By spotlighting your employees, your audience gets to put faces to your brand and helps with overall brand awareness.
This process can also help with staying consistent with sharing daily posts and having to develop new content constantly.
Wrap Up: Are Your B2B Social Media Strategies Ready to Rock?
As social media takes over the world, B2B brands can’t afford to sit back and relax.
Regardless of whether you are looking to build brand awareness or promote products/services with content, these tips can help guide you in the right direction.
If you believe you’re ready to take your B2B social media strategies to the next level, or begin working on yours from scratch, consider getting started with a solid social media blog strategy!
