Do you worry that your B2B company can’t build a presence on social media successfully?

You’re not alone. There are many B2B company owners who wonder how they might engage people through social media content. The misconception is that B2B is too boring of a topic for people to get excited about engaging with on any of the social channels.

The truth, however, is that many of the best B2B brands are successfully using social media to build their brands. Google, IBM, and HubSpot are three companies doing a good job in this area.

You can do the same thing if you think through a strategy that results in engaging your audience without becoming too self-promotional on your social media outlets.

Let’s take a look at how you can successfully build your B2B branding on social media;

Photo by Tina Nord from Pexels

1. Know Your Audience

Understanding the target audience you must reach is vital before you start posting anything on social media. If you can get inside their minds, then you can communicate well with them.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What connects your audience? Is it where they live, an industry, a topic or something else?
• What are the questions they need answers to before making a decision to buy?
• Do they have common problems? What are those problems?
• Where do they hang out online? What websites do they frequent?
• Are they using social media to connect with others in the industry, to make sales or gather information?

Detailing out the answers to these questions allows you to more effectively understand why your target market makes buying decisions. You’ll see that you need to dig deep and get beneath the surface level.

Once you do, you’ll start to gain a better understanding as to what you should post on social media for your B2B audience. It worth to be mentioned that, social media is an important marketing channel for the biggest B2B brands to reach their customers, according to a recent study by Episerver.

Best Marketing Channel for B2B Brands 2019

2. Use a Unique Brand Voice

Many B2B companies invest money and resources to create a unique logo but then post generic messaging on social media. Don’t make this mistake. Invest time thinking through how to communicate in a consistent and unique voice.

A good starting point is to ask yourself whether your brand is:

• Casual
• Snarky
• Friendly
• Humorous
• Formal
• Serious

Use that tone consistently throughout everything you do on social so that your audience comes to recognize what your brand is all about.

3. Use Variety

Social media offers a variety of methods, such as:

• LinkedIn blog posts
• Instagram Stories
• Facebook Live
• Twitter polls

Use all of these ways to connect with your fans and followers. On the channels themselves, use all their various options. Use text-based posts one day. Use video the next day. Keep things interesting for your audience.

Consider that if a follower scrolls through your Facebook feed and sees the same type of posts all the way throughout the feed, they will likely get bored. Using images, videos, polls, gifs, etc keeps things interesting.

4. Use Original Content When Sharing

A common teaching point out there is to use curated content to share on social channels. This means you would gather third party resources to share with your followers.

It’s more effective to share original content because your followers can tell when you’ve taken the time to create something as opposed to reposting information from other sources. This might mean you need to post content less often and that’s perfectly fine.

Keep a quality over quantity mindset as you use social media. Check also the factors that B2B marketers believe are most important to the success of their organizations’ content programs.

The Top Success Factors of B2B Content Programs in 2020

5. Allow for Contact and Support

Don’t allow your followers to become frustrated when they finally feel a need to stop passively watching you and want to make contact. If they have a question, for example, and reach out to you, make sure you follow up in a timely manner to help them.

Some B2B companies post on social media but don’t have a plan in place to handle customer service issues arising from creating that brand presence. You don’t want to make this same mistake.

Another aspect of this is paying attention to general comments on your posts. Even if a person isn’t asking for you to reach out personally, make sure you and your team respond to any comments, etc on any post made by followers.

6. Showcase Employees

Showcasing employees is an important part of personalizing a B2B business on social media. It allows you to take your brand from a company image to one that allows your audience to see who is behind the logo. It puts a face to the name, so to speak.

People are behind the efforts of all companies, no matter what you sell or how large the business is. Give employees a presence and opportunity to shine.

This strategy also empowers your employees. It makes them feel like they are a larger part of the company’s efforts to create brand awareness. Another area it helps with is engagement and reach. If you post an image of the ten people involved with creating a product, it’s likely that all ten will share that post with their own personal accounts.

Showcasing your employees helps in many ways. It helps your audience feel closer to the company’s personalities, it helps with your overall engagement and it makes employees feel important.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment

As you get more competent posting on your social media accounts, start experimenting with various posting times and content types. Pay attention to when you get the most engagement and what your audience seems to like best.

For example, do you get better results when posting a lot or when posting less frequently? Do more people click on your links when you test different places to place those links inside a post? Is engagement higher in the morning, afternoon or evening?

8. Stay Consistent

Make a commitment to be consistent with your posting schedule. Think it through so that you don’t become overwhelmed with the process. Using a calendar and scheduling posts ahead of time will help you in this area.

It’s possible to build a brand for your B2B company on social media. There’s no need to be boring in the eyes of your audience. Keep your activity consistent with your overall brand image and you’ll successfully use social media to create awareness and increase your B2B sales.