B2B businesses have found success on social media by turning their niche industry into a playground for social content. While their industry might not be the most exciting, they have found ways to make it work for them and their social media goals.
I can think of many B2B companies with great social media presence, such as IBM, Google, and HubSpot. They do an amazing job of sharing content that interests and builds their audience, without seeming too concerned with constantly broadcasting their products or services.
To be successful on social media, B2B companies should create content that is both engaging and non-disruptive. To figure out what their audience wants to see, they need to understand their audience’s needs and desires.
Companies that focus on business-to-business transactions have changed the way that people think about brands on social media. If you want to reach and maintain your own audience, look to the example set by these businesses and apply some of their winning strategies.
14 B2B Social Media Strategies for Any Industry
1. Set SMART goals.
A social media strategy cannot be successful unless it is based on specific goals. The key to measuring success in social media is to define specific, measurable KPIs.
The first step in deciding which KPIs to track is understanding what success means for your brand. Are you looking to use social media as a means of acquiring new customers? If so, you’ll want to track metrics like reach and engagement. If, on the other hand, your goal is to increase traffic to your company blog, you’ll want to focus on metrics like pageviews and unique visitors. Once you have a clear understanding of your goals, you’ll be able to pick the KPIs that will best help you measure success.
For example, if your business wants more customers, metrics like clicks and conversions are important. If you want people to be aware of your brand, then you should consider engagement, reach, and impressions.
Here is an effective example of a SMART goal for a company that is just starting to gain traction on social media:
Goal: To build brand awareness on social media.
Our company wants to improve its brand awareness by being more active on social media. We will post more on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Our content creators will make more posts each week, and our designer will create more assets each week.
We want to see a 4% increase in engagement rate for all users.
Our engagement rate rose by about 2% on average last month when we increased how often we published new content and put more time into creating content that was thoughtful and engaging.
If we can increase the engagement rate, that will lead to more brand awareness and more potential customers, which Sales can then convert into actual customers.
Time-Bound: End of this month.
Our goal for this month is to increase our social media engagement rate by 4% by posting more often and concentrating on thoughtful, engaging copy.
2. Keep an eye on competitors.
Social media enables you to see your competitor’s marketing strategy, or at the very least, their social media marketing strategy. Monitoring your competitor’s activity can be beneficial for larger companies in order to see what campaigns are being run and if they are successful. If a competitor’s target audience is similar to your own company, you can use their campaign as inspiration.
Although it may seem like a good idea to copy your competition’s social media strategies, it’s actually not. You’ll most likely have similar audiences and interests as them, which defeated the purpose of looking at their strategies in the first place. Instead, try to find opportunities that your competitor isn’t taking advantage of. This will make you stand out from the rest.
3. Share original content.
Although it may be tempting to curate content from other sources, it is important to remember that your audience can tell the difference between original and creative content, and content that you post just to say you were active on the platform.
Social media shouldn’t just be used as a channel to distribute content, but marketers should also use it to create positive impacts for their brand.
Quality is better than quantity when it comes to content marketing. If you find it difficult to produce original content on a daily basis, it is acceptable to reduce the scope of your work. If you lack the ability to post regularly on all platforms, focus your energy on the channels where your target audience is most engaged. In content marketing, quality trumps quantity.
4. Use multimedia.
Social media marketers are excited when a social platform launches a new feature because it adds a new medium to play with and test with their audience.
Examples of utilizing multimedia formats that are unique to each channel include Instagram Stories, Twitter polls, and LinkedIn documents.
Creating and publishing multimedia content, like videos and images, on your social media channels can help you earn your audiences’ attention.
Twitter is addicting because every tweet is different. You might come across a meme, a poll, a video, a photo collage, or a gif in just a few seconds. Your brand’s feed should be just as diverse to keep people engaged.
When creating social media content, you should think about the story you want to tell, and how you can tell it in different ways.
5. Adopt a customer-centric B2B social strategy.
People often say that brands need to be more “human.”
B2B companies should focus on their customers during social campaigns.
Engaging your customers can help make your brand feel more personable, even if your product is technical or niche.
Twitter has become a common way for customers to interact with businesses about questions, compliments, and feedback. This is because it is faster than email and provides a transparent way to have a conversation.
Offering responsive, proactive customer service not only wins over your buyers but also demonstrates to potential customers that you’re committed to their satisfaction.
6. Align your B2B social media strategy with business initiatives.
This point is worth reiterating.
An oft-cited perception of B2B social media is that there is little to no return on investment.
Why is social media not being used more to tie together performance and organization-wide data? One reason is that many marketers fail to do this or fail to communicate results across departments.
However, social media is a great way to support company-wide initiatives. It is important to communicate with people outside of marketing and provide context to your campaigns.
The two main points here are to measure your social media efforts in terms of how they affect your business goals, and to keep your team updated on your progress.
7. Overcome the “boring” B2B content label.
Okay, this is the big one.
The excitement isn’t always there when it comes to certain topics. Although certain topics might not seem exciting at first, they can be interesting once you learn more about them.
Even if you aren’t in an interesting industry, your potential customers will still be interested in your service.
Making your social presence less snooze-worthy can be a challenge, but it’s definitely not impossible. Below are some tactics to consider for your B2B social media strategy that can help:
8. Refine your brand voice.
No surprises here: don’t talk like a robot.
A conversational brand voice that highlights the humans behind your social accounts can make you seem more approachable, despite popular belief that a “professional” voice has to be stuffy or rigid.
9. Adapt your content to social-friendly formats.
You can make your content more buzzworthy by simply changing your post captions and formats.
For example, would you be interested in following someone that just drops link after link with no commentary? Below are some ideas to both give your social feed(s) some flavor while also giving your content some entertainment value:
- Convert blog posts or lists into short infographics
- Instead of simply linking a podcast or video presentation, publish a minute-long snippet
- Use Twitter threads and long-form text posts (think: LinkedIn) as an alternative to external links or even blog posts
Remember that people on social media have a very short attention span. The formats above are more interesting than just links and will encourage people to engage with your content.
10. Stay on top of trends.
So much of B2B social media centers around trends.
In today’s business landscape, there is a lot to keep up with. Companies are always coming up with new promotional techniques, and others are failing. Keeping up with hot takes and industry insights is essential to being successful in business.
It is important to monitor your customers’ and competitors’ social media activity to identify trends and participate in relevant industry conversations.
Instead of spending all day looking at Twitter or LinkedIn for news, you can use social listening to find news for you.
11. Embrace employee advocacy.
It is important to let your employees speak about your brand as this will help build trust with potential customers.
There’s no one better than your employees to show your human side and complement your brand voice with some personality. They can also show off your company culture.
It is well-documented that employee accounts have greater reach than business accounts alone. This can boost your social presence by creating a sense of community among your coworkers.
12. Focus on the most B2B-friendly platforms.
This is especially true for B2B companies who have to be wise with their time when it comes to promotion.
The Content Marketing Institute’s recent research indicates that a few specific channels are most effective for B2B social media.
here are a few things that should go into your social media strategy. We recommend only worrying about one or two networks so you don’t get overwhelmed. Here are a few things that should go into your social media strategy as a reminder.
- LinkedIn: the ultimate B2B network known for thought leadership content, employee engagement and a robust ad platform.
- Twitter: a prime place to spot trends and interact with customers and business influencers alike.
- Facebook: most Facebook B2B marketing centers around ads, but it’s also a good hub for employee-centric, non-promotional content.
- YouTube: perfect for how-to tutorials, interviews, presentations and commercials.
- Instagram: ideal for visuals (think: infographics, brief how-tos) and culture-centric content
Pinterest might be gaining popularity for B2B social media marketing, but the five networks below are still the most important.
13. Use analytics to inform your B2B social media strategy.
Reporting and analytics are essential for successful B2B social media campaigns.
What are the most effective networks? Are your sales increasing? Should you start running ads?
To show your ROI and improve your performance, analytics can give you the answers you need.
14. Experiment with content and posting times.
After you have proved that you can keep up with a regular posting schedule, you may want to take some time to research your audience a little more in order to gain some insights. Although there are always best practices for when and what to post on social media, keep in mind that every audience is unique so you may have to run some tests to see what works best for your brand.
There are endless experiments you can conduct on your channels. Here are some ideas to inspire you:
- Alternate between using questions and statistics in your copy to see which one pulls your audience in more.
- Test different link positions to find out if it makes users more likely to click.
- Add emojis to see if it increases interactions.
- Post more frequently.
- Post less frequently.
- Put paid behind a video post and a still image to see which performs better.
- Segment a different part of your audience to test how they react to an ad.
- Test different amounts of hashtags to see if it affects impressions.
- Spend more time replying to posts to find out if it increases your follower count.
Trying different things with your content is the best way to figure out what works best for you, which will always be more tailored to your needs than general industry guidelines.
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