An introduction to B2B social media strategy
When you say social media a lot of people still think Facebook and Instagram. Depending on what your B2B company sells these platforms may be of little use to you, but there are other platforms out there which you can use to increase brand awareness, share your marketing content, and reach potential new customers.
Like all other forms of marketing, you have to have a strategy in place and know what goals you are trying to achieve. Here is a quick guide for things to consider before you get started.
Which social media platform is right for your business?
If you sell complex products and services to other business, Instagram going to be of limited use. However, platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter which are more focused on business audiences and utilised by corporations, high level executives, and business decision makers can be very useful as marketing tools.
Why promote your B2B marketing content on social media?
Twitter and LinkedIn are great for sharing links to blogs from your website, promotional videos of new products, or company news, pictures, and updates. Plus you can increase the reach of your posts by paying to advertise them to a selected audience.
Social media can be a cost effective way of distributing content for B2B companies. Once you have created the marketing content to put on your website or for marketing campaigns elsewhere, it takes a relatively short time to share this on your company’s social networks. From here, there are two main benefits:
1. Your social community distributes the content for you.
If you post unique, interesting and informative content your followers will re-post or like it, which in turn makes it visible to their followers.
2. You can pay to advertise your content to social media users that are not part of your network.
Paid ads on social media are essential as part of a well-rounded online advertising strategy, along with other streams such as Google Ads and content amplifying. The cost per click on LinkedIn can be slightly more expensive than other B2C social media platforms, but it does allow you to target a very specific corporate audience who use the platform for business purposes. Plus it is still significantly cheaper than putting an advert in an industry publication, which may or may not reach your target audience.
What sort of content gets good results and engagement on social media?
Visual content which informs and educates your audience will get the best results. Videos, images and infographics are all great examples of content that gets good engagement on social media. For more content ideas to use in your B2B content marketing strategy see our previous blog post on interactive content.
If content marketing on social media is new to your company, hiring a specialist B2B marketing consultant to assist you can improve your results. Our B2B marketing consultants at Outsource can assist with part of the process, or manage it for you from start to finish, providing insight and experience on successful strategies and current trends in the B2B industry.
Click the link below to learn more about how we can help with your B2B marketing.