6 Tips for Crushing Your B2B Social Media Strategy
At face value, social media can appear to be a vehicle best suited for brands and companies to interact directly with consumers. This is certainly true – but the benefits of social media absolutely extend to B2B brands and companies. In fact, it can be an extremely valuable vehicle for engagement and lead generation in the B2Bspace. Here are six tips for taking your B2B social media accounts to the next level.
1. Quality Over Quantity
It might seem daunting to try and push out a post every day – or even just four or five posts every week – but don’t let quantity stand in the way of quality. To get the engagement that is going to drive your social media engine, you need to spend time crafting posts with substance, whether that’s information that resonates with your followers or creative, personable messages presented in a way that provides a chuckle or a chin scratch from your readers.
2. Focus on What Your Audience Needs
If you sell bolts and fasteners for aircraft manufacturers, don’t fill your feed with pictures of bolts, you dolt – focus on the problems that your product solves for the customer. If you can’t pinpoint all the places where your product or service fills a customer need, it will be difficult for you to provide any real value to your followers’ feeds. But once you put the proposition in those terms, it should be much easier to produce winning content that really grabs your audience’s attention.
3. Social Media Should Be … Social!
The products you sell may be dry, but chances are the people that you work with have a lot more spunk than one might assume about tractor supply employees. Let that come across! Each post you write should sound conversational as if it’s coming directly from an actual person. Remember: the people on the other side (you know, the ones who click “Like”) are people. Talk to them like people, and they’re more likely to return the favour with shares, likes and comments.
4. Users – a Shortcut to Great Content
When you tap into the thoughts, opinions and content of your users, not only do you get free material to fill up your feed – but you’re also far more likely to get engagement because those users and their friends want to share that somebody else thinks their content is worth trumpeting. How do you do this? Ask provocative questions and post periodic quizzes; reward users for engaging with and amplifying your posts. The more users become used to engaging with your posts, the more likely they are to do so even when they aren’t being explicitly asked to do so.
5. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
You’re not the first B2B company to be in this situation – not by a long shot. So, take a look at the companies that came before you; study what they’ve done, what has worked well, the missteps they have made – and learn from their successes and failures.
6. It’s a Social Network – so Network!
You don’t have to start every conversation, and you don’t have to control every conversation. Treat it like an actual networking event. Insert yourself into others’ conversations. Be an amplifier. Take the messages of other businesses and leaders in your industry and be a mouthpiece for them. When you’re engaging in conversations that you wouldn’t normally be a part of, in your wider industry audience, you’re automatically getting new eyes on your business and your messaging.
These tips aren’t guaranteed to get you more followers, likes and shares, but just shifting the way that you think about social media’s role in your B2B communication strategy can really get the gears turning about how to execute a winning social media strategy.
About the Author:
Mike Schaffer is the CEO of Echo-Factory, Inc. Throughout the course of his career, Mike has provided strategic oversight and executive leadership for companies looking to position their businesses for growth, acquisition, or both. Mike is an ongoing contributor to CSQ Magazine and a regular speaker at marketing conventions, and mentors start-ups with the USC incubator and the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator. He also organizes the largest Innovation Group in Los Angeles which meets weekly in Pasadena.
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