There are a lot of misconceptions about organic social media and B2B companies. Some traditional marketers still minimize the importance of having a social media strategy in place, even though 84% of C-level and VP-level executives are influenced by social media to make a purchasing decision.
If you aren’t at least present on social media, you’re missing out on a big audience. Marketing is all about keeping up with trends, so plan out your social media strategy carefully—pay close attention to content, engagement, and conversion.
Setting up a business profile on social media is also 100% free digital marketing, promotion, and publicity for your business. It’s no wonder why it will continue gaining popularity in the marketing world. So if you want to remain a relevant competitor in your industry, then it’s time to harness the power of social media.
Challenges of Implementing an Organic B2B Social Media Strategy
Most of the world has immediate access to social media platforms in some way, which is why having a social media strategy in place is important. But it’s often difficult to implement one.
Cutting Through The Noise
First, cutting through the noise and sparking engagement can prove to be quite difficult considering there are thousands of brands competing for attention on social media. Familiarize yourself with best practices across the different social media platforms your company is utilizing and track what your competitors are posting that’s proven successful.
Difficult To Track Success
Recent survey results reported that 44% of marketers haven’t been able to show the impact of their social media efforts at all, much less point to real ROI. But that doesn’t mean social media isn’t impactful. It does, however, mean that marketers are regularly struggling to effectively measure the impact of a b2b social media strategy. Unfortunately, the number of likes and followers your post gets is not indicative of how successful your campaign is. Shift your focus to these four metrics that will help you determine the true success of your social media efforts.
Creating Social Media Visuals
Furthermore, if you want to keep up with your competition, then you need high-quality visuals. Avoid stock photos and maintain your originality by creating unique visuals that compliment your content. It might sound difficult, but through tools such as Canva, anyone can learn how to create visually appealing imagery that can be optimized according to any social media dimensions for your viewing pleasure.
Creating an Organic B2B Social Media Strategy
The first step in developing a solid B2B social media marketing strategy is determining what you want to achieve. What are your goals for your social accounts? From there, you can get a better idea of how often you should be posting throughout the week.
Post at Optimal Times
An effective social media strategy should include at least three posts per week across all your channels. You need to be strategic when it comes to scheduling out your social media posts. It’s important to know what days of the week and time of day is most optimal for posting across your different social media platforms. You can use this breakdown below to help you get started:
Facebook:
- Best times: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
- Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
- Worst day: Saturday
Instagram:
- Best times: Tuesday 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m.
- Best day: Tuesday
- Worst day: Sunday
LinkedIn:
- Best times: Tuesday through Thursday 9 a.m.–noon
- Best days: Tuesday and Wednesday
- Worst day: Sunday
Twitter:
- Best times: Wednesday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.
- Best day: Wednesday
- Worst day: Saturday
(Source)
Cater Your Content
It’s also important to have a full understanding of what types of posts perform best for each specific social media platform. For example, long-form posts that open with an industry-specific data point will perform better on LinkedIn or Facebook. Whereas, more condensed content or videos typically perform better on Instagram or Twitter.
If you want to learn more about which types of content work best for specific social media platforms, then click here.
Help Provide Solutions
Consider posting content that leads prospects to a landing page and requires prospects to submit contact information. Directing your leads to a landing page drives new traffic, improves your company’s SEO, and helps build your brand. Landing pages encourage your leads to take action. As soon as a lead fills out a form we can start nurturing these prospects through the sales funnel.
It can be difficult to develop compelling content that your audience will actually convert on. Talk to your sales reps and see if they can identify common pain points and objections they hear from different buyer personas. Next, work on developing content that can serve as a resource in helping them overcome those specific obstacles. If your content resonates with what they’re struggling with, then they won’t hesitate to fill out your landing page form because they want access to your resource. Additionally, if your content is compelling and industry-specific, then this will inevitably help build loyalty and drive in more sales.
While driving in a constant stream of marketing qualified leads is the fuel that keeps the revenue engine running, that shouldn’t be the only objective behind your social media marketing strategy. Your audience wants to hear from industry experts and in the business world, there’s no easier way to share your knowledge with others than via social media.
Incorporate Thought Leadership
If you’re looking to build credibility and be viewed as a trusted source of information for your audience, then you must provide valuable content. This type of content doesn’t necessarily need to be geared towards capturing prospect’s contact information, but rather towards positioning your company as an expert and encouraging prospects to partner with your business over a competitor.
People value the opinions of trustworthy industry experts, especially on social media. You can develop more meaningful connections with your audience by sharing your expertise and providing them with relevant content, free of charge, in the form of blog posts, podcasts, videos, and more. We call this, “ungated” content. And if you want to see results from your social media strategy, then you need to provide your audience with a balance of both gated and ungated content.
How To Measure Social Media Successes
It’s important to keep a pulse on your efforts if you want to be able to identify what type of content (and what channel) resonates with your audience the most. Two of the main factors we use to evaluate the performance of our social posts include reach and impressions. Reach refers to the number of users exposed to a piece of content and Impressions refers to the number of times a piece of content was displayed to your target audience.
Take advantage of the in-platform reporting and audience insights provided by Facebook and LinkedIn. In Facebook’s Page Insights tab, they break down reach, engagement, views, actions, and audience demographic data. This enables marketers to easily identify which posts their audience is engaging with the most, so you can make informed decisions about what content resonates best on your company’s page. Some top-level progressive analytics provided by LinkedIn include unique visitors, new followers, post impressions, and custom button clicks.
Twitter and Instagram also offer in-platform reporting analytics. While these two channels do not offer as in-depth insights as Facebook and LinkedIn, you can still get a read on what’s working vs. what’s not. If you take the time to analyze the reporting offered within these platforms, then you can constantly find ways to build your audience and get more people interacting with your business.
Results
When we designated a social media strategist, we reaped the benefits almost immediately. We reviewed the numbers after one month of having our b2b social media strategy in place and discovered that our audience had increased by 358%. We also achieved $30k in closed-won deals just that month, which was a record-breaking number for revenue generated from organic social media.
If you’re still not convinced by those numbers, then it’s also worth noting that the way people interact with your social media posts (likes, shares, and comments), also known as social signals, helps increase your overall digital presence. This directly contributes to building trust and customer loyalty, driving brand awareness and exposure, all of which indirectly helps boost your online visibility and traffic.
Key Takeaways
So, what’s one of the best ways to get your company’s name out there? Social media.
A powerful social media strategy has quickly become one of the most important tools for b2b marketers today. And with good reason. The fact that more than half of B2B buyers have leveraged LinkedIn when making a purchasing decision over the past year, should be proof enough that your business needs to be active across social media platforms (Source).
Not to mention that B2B buyers who are active on social media tend to represent a more senior and influential segment than those who do not utilize social media. Meaning, the more influence a potential buyer has, the more likely they are to use social media (Source).
It’s no wonder marketers love social media. It’s one of the most popular B2B marketing strategies with 83% of marketing teams using it. It’s also considerably time efficient compared to other marketing channels. After only six hours a week spent on social media, 66% of marketers reported that their social media efforts brought them new leads (Source).
Social media helps brands to connect directly with customers, establish a community, and share their products or services efficiently. If your company already has a solid organic social media presence, then it might be time to consider scaling your social media efforts to include a paid advertising strategy.
