6 Best Uses of B2B Social Media Marketing
About the Author: Noa Eshed
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Introduction
Social media is no longer considered a channel where people simply share news with each other, chat about their everyday life or post fun content for their friends. While it was initially designed to serve such purposes, nowadays social media is crucial for every business’s online success and sales generation.
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For example, common practices like creating a social media activity calendar, building relationships with potential and existing customers, establishing authority online and providing customer support via social media are being fully utilized by both B2B and B2C companies.
The main difference between B2B and B2C remains the content that is shared with the public and the target audience towards which that content is aimed. Here are 6 best uses of social media for B2B companies:
1. Create and promote content via social media
Social media is one of the most time efficient and cost efficient ways to reach a wide audience of potential buyers and promote your brand online. On average, most businesses spend less than one hour of time on their social media activities each  . That time is generally enough to take care of everything related to social media (including engagement on community sites and forums) and achieve formidable results in terms of promotion and reach, compared to more complex marketing activities.
Creating valuable, interesting and educational content in various formats (visuals, text, infographics, videos, etc.) and sharing it on different social media platforms will help establish a solid social media presence, interact with potential buyers and tell your brand’s story in a fun and compelling way.
Depending on your target audience, content format and style, different social media platforms will help achieve different goals. For example if your audience consists of more professional people, LinkedIn will be a good choice to share whitepapers, industry updates and show the professional side of your brand.
On the other hand, Facebook and Twitter can be used to share fun, interactive content that is more easygoing and suits a more fun oriented audience. Whatever platform you decide to go with, make sure that you share the right content with the right audience at the right time, using the platform that suits your specific goal best.
Here is a graph showing the effectiveness of different social media platforms for B2B social marketing purposes.
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Read more about the Best B2B Marketing Channels.
2. Listen to your customers
If you are new to B2B social media marketing, it shouldn’t be a problem as long as you are a careful listener and an attentive person. With so much content being shared and customer interactions happening on social platforms, it’s easy to understand what kind of stuff your audience wants to see around a specific topic, on each platform.
You can also check out your competitor’s pages to find content inspiration and get a good idea of what you should be sharing with your potential buyers. Look for posts that have been shared a good number of times on Facebook, posts that have lots of views on LinkedIn and tweets with trending hashtags on Twitter.
Read about 6 Awesome and Creative B2B Marketing Examples
3. Engage with your customers
As much as it’s important to provide a personal touch to each client, it’s more so in the case of B2B marketing and sales. While you can get away with a bit of a more general approach in case of B2C marketing, B2B clients usually require more content, value and personalization in order to make the sale a reality.
Social media provides an excellent opportunity to engage with your audience and build relationships without spending a lot of cash on communication. Also, you will be able to reach arguably the widest audience you can with the help of a good social media strategy, talk to your potential buyers in a more personalized environment and offer specific solutions to each.
Here is how marketers use social media for engagement purposes:
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4. Keep an eye on your competitors
Since social media is one of the key elements of your online marketing strategy, it’s safe to say that it’s equally important for your competitors as well. Social media is a great way to keep an eye on your competitors, understand their social strategy, monitor their results (for example keep track of how many likes, retweets or shares their content gets on average), find and filter potential gaps in their strategy and even adopt some techniques that can be implemented in your own strategy.
5. Drive more traffic to your website
As you continue to build your social presence and share more and more content, some of it will eventually lead people to your website, thus increasing the number of your visitors and provide more sales to your business in the long run.
Also, you can include your website’s URL in your social media profiles, which will help potential customers find your website quickly and easily, in case they are interested in your products/services.
Finally, if you think about the content that doesn’t provide as much organic reach (whitepapers, ebooks, etc.), sharing them on social media will help boost awareness around that type of content, even if it doesn’t have a fancy headline or eye catchy design.
6. Improve your company’s SEO
With Google’s recent update, social media now has a big influence in terms of SEO and page rank for your business. Having a good social reputation will boost your page ranks, which in turn will increase your search engine visibility, drive more traffic to your website and increase the number of leads.
The more you promote your content on social media, the higher page ranks you will earn, especially if your content is valuable for your audience. Content value is roughly calculated by the number of likes, shares and links that your content receives on different social media platforms.
Conclusion
Social media is of the best channels for every company to be present on nowadays, in terms of cost efficiency, customer engagement, acquisition, and great company reputation.
Remember that building a solid social media presence doesn’t happen overnight and needs time and dedication to bring sustainable results. Craft your strategy, monitor social media activity and constant improve your approach to maximize the results of your investments.
If you found this helpful, let’s pick up the pace, learn how to rectify your sales pipeline and grow your business in our FREE 14 B2B Marketing Best Practices that every CMO must know eBook!
Noa Eshed
Noa is the co-author of the Amazon no.1 Bestseller "The Smart Marketer's Guide to Google AdWords" and co-host of the podcast "Real Life Superpowers". She's a content lover, certified journalist & lawyer (Hebrew U). She practices martial arts & yoga. She's been consulting and helping businesses create a significant presence online since 2010.
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Noa is the co-author of the Amazon no.1 Bestseller "The Smart Marketer's Guide to Google AdWords" and co-host of the podcast "Real Life Superpowers". She's a content lover, certified journalist & lawyer (Hebrew U). She practices martial arts & yoga. She's been consulting and helping businesses create a significant presence online since 2010.
