Top B2B Social Media Marketing Best Practices
Social media is a well-established channel in the B2C marketing industry. However, it’s not something that B2B companies naturally take to.
While B2B companies sell to other businesses it is important to remember that your end-users and decision-makers are ultimately people. And they can be just as receptive to social media as is in the case of B2C companies.
Leveraging the best practices in B2B social media marketing can very quickly help you engage with your key decision-makers to build lasting relationships and drive conversions.
Let’s dive into some the top B2B social media marketing best practices –
Create a Brand Personality
B2B companies often tend to think they need to be very formal and buttoned up on social media. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Sharing bland and banal content will not get you any eyeballs or clicks. People, including your key decision-makers, want to consume content that is engaging, engrossing and fun!
Learn More How Expert Can Help You With This
This makes having a consistent brand personality and style very important.
When planning your next campaign, carefully consider how you want your brand to look and sound like to your buyer personas. If you haven’t yet, this would be a good time to create a brand style guide that would define our messaging style.
Some general rules to follow while posting on social media –
- Make your brand more human by writing in the first person.
- Ensure consistency across all your social media channels
- Don’t be afraid to be creative and show some humor!
The Quintessential B2B Social Media Marketing Best Practices
It’s considered a B2B social media marketing best practice to time your posts on social channels when your audience is the most active. These timings can vary depending upon the channel.
When you are after high engagement it is best to time your post when your audience is most engaged on that social media channel. Timing analytics can help you with this.
Timing analytics is used to understand what’s the best time for you to post content on social media. Some social media management tools come built-in with timing analytics. You can also consider the help of an expert marketing agency to understand your industry’s best practices.
Using timing analytics you can bring more traffic to your social media channels and consequently your website, drive more leads, increase brand awareness and accelerate sales.
Provide Content That Speaks to Your Audience
The best B2B social media marketing best practice is creating stellar content.
Content is the centerpiece of any social media marketing tactic. Even though direct advertising is effective, it can be overlooked by savvier B2B audiences.
Try to spice things up by sharing content that is exciting and interesting on your social media channels. B2B buyers actively seek content that educates and informs them rather than content that directly sells to them.
More specifically, they are on the lookout for white papers, webinars, case studies, customer testimonials, infographics, blogs and more. Social media offers you the opportunity to present this content in an engaging manner.
Here’s what you need to do to create content that resonates with your buyer personas on social media –
- Share tutorials and how-to videos that help the buyer in their decision-making journey
- Share actionable insights, data and interviews that resonate with what their particular industry
- Create content that educates buyers about their key interests. This content need not be directly applicable to their business.
Always A/B Test Your Paid Social Ads
Nowadays you can run A/B testing campaigns directly within the social media platforms (e.g. Facebook). This makes it not only easier to do but also the best practice that you should make a habit.
Your approach towards A/B testing should be like this –
- A/B test your ad copy to find the winning text
- A/B test your creatives to find the winning image
- Combine these two to find a win-win
As simple as that may sound that is what is at the heart of A/B testing. If you’ve got the basics right, you can gradually build on top of that to A/B test different parameters.
These parameters can vary by campaign objectives, social media channel and ad type.
The important thing to remember is to allow the A/B test to run long enough to collect significant data but also not so long that you end up wasting money!
Social media for B2B is more nuanced than its B2C counterpart. Focus more on educating your audience in an engaging and interactive way. If done right, B2B social media marketing can reap dividends for your business by capturing more leads and more engagement.
Suggested Reads For You:
