How to Ensure Your Social Media Strategy is Extending the Reach of Your B2B Company

 

For businesses that don’t directly engage the public, social media can feel easy to dismiss as something frivolous or not worth the time and effort. But B2B companies that view social media as not worth the investment of full-time resources are missing out on a vital tool for marketing, recruitment, and lead generation.

Social media allows even the most niche companies an opportunity to continue conversations, promote recent achievements, and deliver key information to their audience. Every platform has its own benefits, but at its root, social media provides a valuable opportunity for your organization to showcase its expertise.

To get the most from your B2B social media strategy, there are a few principles to keep in mind.

B2B Social Media Strategy Requires Brand Consistency

While social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn each require distinctive communication approaches to generate the greatest rewards, the one constant should be your organization’s identity.

Before an organization establishes a social media presence, it should implement guidelines and templates that ensure each post carries a consistent look and feel. Though the content may change, the voice and tone of your messaging should remain true to your already established brand.

But in addition to ensuring a level of consistency from the perspective of what’s being shared, your company should also remember that social media requires a committed effort. Even if engagement isn’t readily visible in indicators such as likes and followers, an organization should still dedicate resources toward regular updates. A consistent, steady supply of posts on social media platforms will increase your company’s SEO rankings, which will make you easier to find for whatever audience you’re targeting.

Your Primary Social Media Objectives Impact Your Choice of Platform

Though your social media presence should remain true to your brand identity, the differing expectations and audiences for each platform should be both understood and explored.

Recruitment and a Focus on Business are Built into LinkedIn

With an emphasis on establishing professional networks and promoting milestones, the LinkedIn audience is looking to gain insights about companies and their thought leadership. If your goals are to reach more prospects and recruit new talent, LinkedIn is an obvious focus.

But that isn’t to say LinkedIn always requires a direct, suit-and-tie approach. Where appropriate, even the most business-focused B2B company can experiment with more human touches like emojis on their posts. These small details can lead to greater engagement by breaking from the platform’s norms.

The visual emphasis of Instagram offers opportunities to engage with a different demographic to generate similar results as LinkedIn. Along with Facebook, which skews older in terms of audience, these more conversational platforms can be used to celebrate the collaboration within a team that just launched an exciting new project for your company.

That achievement, which on LinkedIn may be presented to emphasize the thought leadership behind the effort, can be approached here in a more casual way to provide a valuable look at your office culture. Though light-hearted in nature, these posts offer just as much value to your business as a recruiting tool.

When prospective employees are evaluating your company as a place to work, they turn to search engines to gather insight into who you are as an organization. These sorts of Instagram posts can speak to potential hires about what your organization can offer in a way that reaches beyond a LinkedIn job listing.

Organizations should feel free to experiment on each platform with different headlines to find what approach delivers the most useful results.

A Targeted Social Media Strategy Demands Attention and Timing

Like any communications outlet, social media should be approached strategically to maximize its impact. This doesn’t only apply to plan the right message for the right audience on the right platform, but the consideration that your updates are arriving at the right time.

Your social media content does not exist in a vacuum, and each message should also be evaluated for how well they fit with the larger discourse. On one hand, this includes a focused effort to ensure that the correct active hashtags and keywords are applied where appropriate to be searchable within the platform’s wider conversation. But on another, this focus should also evaluate the trending topics of the day to ensure your organization stays current.

If there’s a global development such as the coronavirus crisis that’s become crucial to your industry, your social media feed should reflect that. While such efforts should be evaluated within your organization to ensure they are both thoughtful and tasteful, they should also be considered for their timeliness. Publish an update that’s behind the curve, and your organization runs the risk of appearing the same.

Ensuring your content is optimized for social media is as vital an effort as those undertaken to maintain visibility for search engines. The quality of the updates being shared across platforms has greater value than the quantity, as does posting content at times when a given platform is most active. Even small efforts such as ensuring profile pages include your company logo, website, and an engaging summary of what you do can go a long way.

Establish Benchmarks for Social Media Success

On the surface, social media’s core metrics appear built into each given platform. But as much as follower totals and likes may provide immediate gratification, those figures don’t immediately translate to your organization meeting its goals.

A large number of followers on Twitter or Instagram may show promise in terms of potential audience, but without measurable results their value is lost. Companies should set targeted goals such as 20% engagement on a given post, which tells a more valuable story. In the case of Instagram, this can be seen the form of an insightful user comment or, in the case of LinkedIn, an increased number of clicks to your organization’s about page or website that leads to conversions. For Twitter, success looks like extending the reach of your organization’s expertise through your followers retweeting or sharing your blog content.

FACEBOOK POST REACH ANALYTICS

A social media strategy requires investment to be successful. This includes ensuring a dedicated person at your company is managing your efforts, and that the time your audience spends with your content is generating meaningful results.

Monitoring site analytics to track the ways social media has led users from a given platform to your business is key. That way, your audience is now engaging with your business on your website rather than the social media platform where they found your updates. For every company, this is the ultimate goal.