Social media marketing sometimes gets a bad rap in the B2B market. Executives, sales people, and even marketers might not see it as a valuable platform that can help drive revenue. You can’t really blame them; there’s a lot of marketers, agencies, and others who have for too long used “soft metrics” – likes, shares, reach – to report on social media successes. Often, there is also a lack of strategy behind implementation, with companies simply sharing their own content, only talking about themselves, and trying to use every platform — even when their audience doesn’t.
In this post, we’re going to give you a few tips on how to build out a better B2B social media strategy that will help you focus efforts on practices that actually get results.
Determine What Platforms Are Right For You
You know your audience, and it doesn’t make any sense putting time and effort building a presence on a platform that your audience doesn’t use. Generally speaking, in the B2B space you would be much better served investing in LinkedIn than you would on a platform like Facebook (of course, there are exceptions). But how do you determine which platforms are right?
Knowing where to devote your time starts with having a firm grasp on buyer personas. Who is your audience? Where do they go to research, network, read, and interact? It’s always valuable to create buyer personas, not just for crafting your social media strategy but also to help inform your other marketing activities.
If you can formalize and profile your ideal buyers, you can get a better idea of what social media platforms they are using, as well as their intentions and behaviours while on those platforms. This is key to determining where you should be spending time, effort, and budget.
Identify What to Measure
B2B social media marketing efforts, like your other marketing efforts, should be based on data. It’s important to define what metrics are important to you when building your social media strategy.
Do you find value in “soft” metrics, such as likes and followers? Or is it more important to measure things like the number of sessions to your website that came from social media, conversions, and opportunities generated?
The metrics that are important to you will depend on your goals. If your key purpose on social media is to build brand awareness, you will want to look at things like reach, impressions, shares, and likes. If you want social media to function as more of a lead generation tool, then metrics like conversions will be much more important – for example, the number of whitepaper downloads or webinar registrations whitepaper driven by your social channels.
Promote Your Content & News
If you’re producing content, you should be promoting it on your social channels. It’s another means of distribution that can help you drive more traffic to your content and allow your audiences to easily share with their networks.
This should also extend to company news, posts about company culture, events you’re attending, and more. For one of Slanted Frame’s clients, we tested the types of social media content we were posting and found that when we shared company milestones, content about our culture, or posted about events we were hosting or attending, they performed better much better than blogs we wrote and other content we produced – across almost every metric we were tracking.
As always, remember that relevancy to your audience and how compelling your content is will be a big factor on how well your social media posts perform.
Curate Relevant Content
One mistake that is common on corporate social media channels is that companies only talk about themselves or share their own content exclusively. If this is true of your social media channels you are missing a big opportunity.
Curating content carries two big advantages:
- It allows you to find and share content that is highly relevant and compelling to your audience, while reducing content creation time and efforts
- It can help you build ongoing partnerships with the businesses or individuals whose content you are curating (more about this later)
It’s important that you create a process for content curation, as it can be time-intensive. One of the simpler ways to do this is to search hashtags, groups, and more that are relevant to your business and audience. Subscribing to high-quality newsletters is also a great to get compelling content delivered right to your inbox. If your marketing team is a bit more sophisticated, there are also tools that can make content curation easier, such as Flipboard, Feedly, Curata, and Sniply.
Create and leverage partnerships
One of the most effective ways to get more out of your B2B social media strategy is to build and leverage content and social media partnerships. We’ve found that when we’ve taken this approach with our clients, we helped significantly reduce time spent on social media content creation; amplify reach, engagement, and effectiveness of their social media posts; and drive more website traffic and lead generation from social platforms.
Building partnerships requires some upfront work: researching and identifying the right partnership opportunities, spending the time to negotiate and define what the partnership entails, and building a strategy for measuring the results of the partnership. But investing time in the short term can save you a lot of effort in the long run, allowing you to get more mileage from your social media content and channels. There are also tools that can help you build and measure your social partnerships, like Sprout Social, Mention, and Buffer.
Engage your leaders and employees
Engaging executives, team leaders, and employees to help amplify and share your social media posts can help you reach more people by taking advantage of the network effect. If you post on your corporate page, you reach your followers; if you also have your leadership and employees sharing posts, you have the added benefit of reaching their networks, too. This can be easier said than done, but here are a few tips to help you get started:
- Have executives and managers lead by example
A top-down effort will help you gain traction internally. If your leaders are proactive in sharing news and content, it’s much easier to get other members of your team onboard. As an added bonus, people in leadership positions (generally) have larger, more influential networks, which can be very valuable for brand awareness and more hard-hitting metrics like lead generation.
- Be selective
While sharing content on social media isn’t particularly labour-intensive, there is still effort involved on the part of your team members. You need to be mindful of this when asking employees to help out. Identify and prioritize the most important content, such as big company news and announcements, launches of new services or products, and larger campaigns.
- Make sharing easy
Keep in mind that using social media isn’t a cakewalk for everyone. Some people on your team might not be very active and find the platforms unfamiliar. Copywriting can also be a challenge. You want to make it as easy as possible to share your content.
You can facilitate this by directing team members to your post on your corporate social media page so they can simply click share, or you can take it a step further and create a few copy variations that people can copy/paste onto their personal channels. If you have a larger and more active team, there are also a variety of tools that can help you engage your team, including Hootsuite Amplify, Bambu, and Sociabble.
Social media can be a highly valuable tool for B2B organizations, but like anything else, there needs to be a strategy behind it to maximize its effectiveness. The above tips should help you get started with identifying your goals and performance metrics, building the foundations of your strategy, and engaging your team.
If you’re interested in learning more about creating an effective B2B social media strategy, drop us a note.