Far too many B2B companies focus their energy on traditional methods for bringing in new leads, through things like paid advertising, trade shows, and cold calling. But in reality, just like all those B2C businesses, they ought to be investing heavily in newer, organic methods, like SEO and social media.

But how to best use social media for B2B marketing? It won’t work quite the same as B2C social does, but it can deliver similar results! In today’s fast-paced business environment, you’ll need to have a B2B social media strategy in place to see greater success.

How to Create an Effective B2B Social Media Strategy

A well-planned and documented B2B social media strategy helps keep you on the right path as you begin your social media marketing campaign. If you’re only posting occasionally and sporadically across your social media platforms and not measuring the results, you’ll never know if you’re reaching the proper target audience, spending your money efficiently, or hitting your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Follow these simple steps to craft an effective B2B social media strategy.

Determine Your Social Media KPIs and How to Track Them

The first step is always to figure out what your KPIs should be. Keep them specific and include a timeframe in your plan. Some common KPI examples might be:

• Gaining more than 150 followers on Twitter per month.
• Increase Facebook engagement by 40% within 90 days,
• Increase web traffic from social media campaigns by 20% within 30 days.

Knowing what your KPIs are will help you decide how best to achieve them.

But, before you start posting to social, you’ll need to figure out how you will track these KPIs’ performance through analytics. There are many tools available to track social media metrics, like Google Analytics, SEMrush, and BuzzSumo. What’s more, each social media channel offers its own metrics and analytics for you to study.

Decide Which Social Networks to use

The next step in how to use social media for B2B marketing is to figure out which social networks will be most effective for you. While most social networks are great for B2C, B2B has a few specific platforms that work best:

• LinkedIn is the number one platform for B2B marketers to share content and makes up more than half of all social traffic for B2B blogs and websites.
• Twitter is the second most popular platform for B2B content.
• YouTube is also extremely popular, with 59% of marketers using it to share B2B content. It’s ranked as the 4th most effective B2B channel.

Create Engaging Social Media Content

Next up is content creation! The best practices for creating engaging B2B content include, but are not limited to:

• Try to create content for different kinds of buyers who are at different stages of their purchasing journey.
• Include a nice mix of “top of the funnel” and “bottom of the funnel” content.
• Use multimedia, such as videos, images, memes, infographics, etc. Social is where people go for visual inspiration, so make sure your posts are visually interesting!
• Post a mix of original content (like your own blogs and white papers) as well as curated content from top industry sources. Try to hit a mix of third-party links 50-75% of the time, and original content 25-50% of the time.
• Experiment with your posting schedule and frequency to best find when your audience is online.

Measure Your Social Media Campaign Results

Finally, it’s time to monitor how your campaigns performed. Did you meet your KPIs? To figure this out, you’ve got to go back to your analytics platforms to look at things like engagement, follower counts, shares, and other metrics useful to your specific KPIs.

With a documented B2B social media strategy it’s much easier to reach and exceed your goals. And with the proper monitoring tools, you can continue to adjust your strategy to make sure it keeps performing well.

Looking for a little more in-depth help when it comes to putting together your B2B social media strategy? Look no further than Asset Digital Communications! Book your free call with our founder, Mary-Jane Owen, and let us help you get started on social today!