Optimize Your B2B Social Media Marketing Strategy

For companies looking to boost their brand awareness, social media marketing can be a valuable tool. However, to use social media effectively, first, you must develop a B2B social media marketing strategy.

A B2B social media strategy is a plan for how to market your B2B company’s products/services to other businesses by using relevant social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn).

An effective use of B2B social media can reap many rewards including building a positive brand image, positioning your business as an expert in the field, increasing audience engagement, and ultimately, boosting revenue.

In this article, we’ll show you how to optimize your social strategy for maximum business impact. Topics we’ll cover include how to do B2B social media marketing, content ideas to add to your B2B marketing mix, and the importance of B2B performance marketing and continuous optimization.

Let’s start off with how to build and implement a B2B social media marketing strategy.

How To Do B2B Social Media Marketing

Laying a strong foundation is key for effective B2B social media marketing. This includes finding the right target audience and setting clear objectives to center your strategy around.

For the best B2B social media marketing strategy, you’ll want to:

• Determine Your Target Audience. What industries and businesses will you be marketing your products or services to? Don’t forget to narrow down your age group, too. For instance, B2B marketing typically targets workers ages 25-65.
• Select Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). To measure the effectiveness of your B2B social strategy, you’ll want to select KPIs to help you track your B2B social media campaign performance. Common KPIs are sales, likes/comments, website traffic, impressions/views, and clicks. A social media management tool like GaggleAMP can help track your success across social platforms.
• Define Your B2B Social Media Objectives. What are your goals? Do you want to boost brand awareness, lead generation, engagement, or sales? Perhaps, it’s a mixture of these common objectives.
• Choose Your B2B Social Media Channels. What social platforms does your audience utilize (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, X)? For example, B2B marketers know that having a presence on LinkedIn is essential for reaching prospects on social media.  
• Produce Thought Leadership Content. Savvy B2B companies create in-depth thought leadership content specific to their industry including white papers, reports, and webinars/live events. Follow their lead and focus on creating B2B social content that will resonate with your target industry.
• Create a Content Calendar. A content calendar is a great tool to help plan the type of content and how frequently to post. Your content calendar doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as a Google Doc Excel spreadsheet or Word document.
• Supplement With Paid Advertising. In addition to your B2B social marketing, investing in paid advertising on social media can further boost your brand’s visibility. Set a budget for paid social campaigns that include sponsored posts and targeted ads that feature text along with an eye-catching image or engaging video.  
• Leverage Employee Advocacy. Including your employees as part of your social media distribution channels can help your campaigns to see greater reach and engagement. It’s never too late to start an employee advocacy program, and utilizing an employee advocacy platform can help streamline the process.

Now that you’ve determined your audience and set clear objectives, let’s take a look at some B2B social media content ideas.

B2B Social Media Content Ideas

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers use social media to distribute content organically, making it one of the top content distribution channels. Furthermore, social media is a source in making purchasing decisions for 84% of B2B executives and 75% of overall B2B buyers. To harness the power of social media, you need quality content.

As you craft your B2B content marketing strategy, make producing the best B2B social media content a top priority. You want to create (and share) content that is not only exciting and engaging, but also helps educate and solve pain points for your B2B executives and buyers, too.

Remember the best B2B social media content ideas are authentic and relevant to your target audience. Here are five B2B social media content ideas to help inspire you:

1. Quick Tips

Sharing long-form content on social media can fall flat. Most individuals don’t take the time to read or watch lengthy content. Instead, grab the top highlights from a blog post or video and repurpose that content into a quick tips social post or image carousel.

Here’s a great example from Mailchimp. The email marketing company shared a clever and timely holiday-themed Instagram post focusing on end-of-the-year analytics review tips. Their tips included: deck emails with A/B testing, check conversion rates twice, and make sure your unsubscribe rate isn’t naughty.

Source: Mailchimp

2. Tutorial Video

Along with quick tip posts, tutorial videos are another great way to share content that solves a pain point. For example, create a video that answers a common frequently asked question(s) that your customers have about your product or service.

Dropbox’s Instagram page is full of helpful video tutorials featuring tips on how to use Dropbox Dashboards or Dropbox AI to make your day easier:

Source: Dropbox

3. Visual Data

Infographics and videos are two great ways to help your audience visualize data. Visual data also makes great shareable content, which furthers your brand’s exposure. Have you conducted any recent customer surveys? Consider taking your survey data and turning it into a visual, or share trending industry statistics like the e-commerce platform Shopify does here for Black Friday product categories:

Source: Shopify

4. User-Generated Content

For truly authentic content, look no further than your customers. Whenever you see positive content mentioning your brand, share it on your social platforms. If you’re looking to encourage social sharing, one option is to run a promotion or share a hashtag to incentivize sharing like tech giant Apple does here with its #ShotoniPhone UGC campaign:

Source: Apple

5. Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is another great tool to bolster your B2B social media marketing strategy. Social posts created by employees tend to perform better than branded content because they are viewed as more authentic. Forms of employee advocacy include sharing company content as well as employees creating their own content that promotes brand initiatives.

In this example, an Executive Chef from Trek Bicycle boasts about his company and his role in their award — Fortune’s Top 100 Best Companies to Work for.

B2B Social Media Marketing Best Practices

Now let’s take a look at some social media B2B best practices that B2B marketers can follow when building out their social media strategies. In particular, we will focus on the importance of performance measurement and continuous optimization plus the value of using an employee advocacy tool.

Importance of Performance Measurement and Continuous Optimization

If you aren’t tracking those selected KPIs mentioned earlier, how do you know what’s working and what isn’t? Reviewing key B2B social media metrics will help you modify areas of weakness.

For example, B2B social media engagement rates are one area you definitely want to focus on. If your posts are getting little to no engagement (e.g., views, comments, likes), then you need to review potential reasons why. Perhaps, your content isn’t resonating, your content is too long, you’re posting at the wrong time/day for your audience, or you’re utilizing the wrong social media platform.

Oftentimes B2B companies feel the pressure to have a social media presence on all of the major social platforms. However, that can backfire, wasting valuable time and resources that can be allocated elsewhere. Let’s say your B2B audience isn’t on TikTok, a channel known for entertaining and viral video content. Instead of pouring your content marketing efforts into a channel that won’t produce results (based on that particular audience), instead, focus on LinkedIn, which has more than 67 million companies on the platform.

For many B2B brands, LinkedIn produces the best results. In fact, 82% of B2B marketers have reported the greatest success on LinkedIn compared to other social channels, with 4 in 5 B2B leads coming from social media through LinkedIn.

By tracking your social engagement rates, you can immediately see if something is misaligned in your social media marketing and fix it.

Many B2B social media platforms include analytics housed within their platform (e.g., LinkedIn analytics). Use these B2B social media tools to your advantage, so you can consistently review metrics and optimize your B2B social media marketing campaigns.

The Value of Using an Employee Advocacy Tool

For robust social media analytics, an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP can help. GaggleAMP provides its users with a detailed analytics dashboard that includes metrics such as total reach and engagement, plus a breakdown of successful social channels and content.

You can also use the platform to create and distribute content plus customize your messaging to fit different social channels and B2B audiences, ensuring that your content is always relevant and resonates with your target audience.

To see how GaggleAMP can strengthen your B2B social media marketing strategy, schedule a demo today.