Posted 01.08.2024 by Josh Krakauer

How to Create a B2B Social Media Strategy: The 2024 Guide

Grow faster in 2024 with an effective B2B social media strategy. Get our best strategies and complete guide for paid and organic social media (make coffee first, it's a long one!)👇

There’s never been more opportunity in B2B social media marketing than in 2024.

And that’s a problem.

Let me explain.

If you’re reading this, you’re responsible for your company’s social media strategy. Whether you’re the brains or one of many hands of the operation, you have ample opportunity in 2024.

At Sculpt, we design B2B social media strategies for growth-stage startups, established small businesses, and complex enterprise teams.

And guess what we’ve learned?

More problems stifle all brands.

  • More experts.
  • More attention.
  • More feature releases.
  • More emerging platforms.
  • More measurement tools.
  • More privacy concerns.
  • More content formats.
  • More investment.

If you lead marketing at a B2B, there’s never been more demand for ramping up social.

In 2022, social media spending increased to 14.5% of B2B marketing budgets

This will increase by 7% in the next 5 years because 58% of mature organizations agreed that they have tracked sales that can be attributed to social media, while 73% of marketers believe social media empowers them to reach new customers more efficiently than other media.

In short, social media is set remains highly relevant for B2B marketers who need to produce tangible results.

It would help if you had a better strategy with more to do and not more time.

That’s what we’ll cover in this guide.

We will help you:

  1. Understand why B2B social matters in 2024.
  2. Top B2B Social Media Marketing Trends in 2024.
  3. How to build a better B2B SM strategy (the framework).
  4. 7 traps to avoid in your B2B social media strategy (and how to get it right).
  5. Setting B2B Social Media Budgets & Measuring B2B Social Media ROI.

1. Why B2B social matters in 2024

LinkedIn’s data shows that 75% of B2B decision-makers source information on social media before purchasing. Your brand lives closer to your customers than ever before.

But behind every B2B purchase, there is a human.

With consumers completing 90% of the purchase process before contacting you – and also, wolfing down 13 pieces of content in the process – your products should be at the frontline.

You can build interaction on socials through the site, videos, carousels, articles, posts from your executive, and brand…

Great. So, we start posting.

And then they convert, right?

Right?

Let’s be honest.

You need more than content. Your social media strategy must align with your business goals.

And if you’re not building those bonds with your customers, who is?

You guessed right. Yes, your competitors.

However, you can get your team up to speed in 2024 by sharing these 7 trends in B2B social media marketing 👇.

2. Top B2B Social Media Marketing Trends in 2024

Influencer/UGC/Creator Marketing

It’s not new, but it keeps growing. 

B2B marketers are scaling up the impact of influencers — and influencer-driven content — within their overall efforts. And the proof is in the numbers, as spending on influencer marketing has increased annually by over 26% in the US from 2019 to 2023.

Why are brands spending more on influencers? Partly because of the impact social proof has on customers. In addition, investment in user-generated content (UGC) through customer reviews, testimonials, and case studies has increased significantly, aligned with this behavior.

According to our customers, it’s also the desire for “quality content” driving the trend. Who wouldn’t want creative, original content — told from a new POV and generated by talented creators — that may outperform your ads and posts? 

B2B brands are looking at independent content creators to promote informational and educational content about their products in new formats and styles — from TikTok videos to X (aka Twitter) threads and Reddit comments.

The proof is in the pudding. In 2022, 86% of B2B brands considered their influencer marketing successful because it helped them increase their brand reputation and awareness.

As brands continue to focus on increasing their brand recognition in 2024, more B2B brands will leverage influencers, UGC, and creators to influence buyer decisions, reach new or targeted audiences, and improve brand advocacy.

We expect more brands to adjust their media budgets in this aspect.

Impact of Generative AI on Social Media

AI itself isn’t new to B2B, but the chatter around it has increased in recent months. Led by ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms (looking at you, Google Gemini), companies are using AI  for copywriting, competitor research, decision-making, and improving customer experience through personalized recommendations.

One of the biggest selling points for AI is that brands can use it to speed up their social media content creation. It’s true, large language models (LLMs) are especially useful to unlock the creative process and increase the number of content ideas for engagement and marketing purposes. 

Ad creativity is being shaped by AI, too. AI models like Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Canva AI can generate original and creative images for social media content without risking copyright issues (so far).

In 2024, more brands will use generative AI for their marketing R&D and content creation. And let’s be honest, you’ll be hearing about this a lot.

Expect More (and Better) Search on Social Media

Both Millenials and Gen Z consumers are using social media to search for what matters to them. You’ve probably heard that 40% of Gen Z searchers turn to TikTok or Instagram to get more information on products, reviews, and who to learn from, before performing a traditional Google Search.

We’re also seeing an uptick in Google searches that append the word “Reddit” at the end, looking to obtain results from that platform alone, given the depth, variety, and quality of these.

And platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X are responding to this increased utilization by improving their product to drive better native search experiences. 

To stay on top of the social media SEO, be sure to include the right keywords in your profile, title or heading, and posts. And for search-friendly platforms like TikTok, consider what type of content you can create that will land at the top of search results.

More Investment in Executive and Employee Brand Social Media Programs

In 2024, B2B brands must include executives and employees in their social media programs.

Using your brand page as the only outlet for company communication isn’t going to cut it. People want to hear from people.

Some companies’ B2B social media strategies already feature employee advocacy programs, which formalize the process, tools, and incentives for employees to promote their organization’s content on social media. And these efforts work, generating 5x more web traffic and a 25% increase in leads.

Having CEOs and other executives active on social media gives current and prospective customers, employees, future employees, and investors a chance to engage in conversation and give feedback directly to decision-makers. 

This humanizes your brand and makes the audience feel more connected. It also encourages transparency and builds credibility.

Getting all hands on deck for an exec and employee advocacy program can be incredibly challenging, but the prospect of having actionable content that reflects your core brand values and resonates with your audience is just too good to pass on.

More Experimentation in TikTok and Short-form Video Platforms

Although many marketers are still tentative about their TikTok approach, we’ll continue to see more experimentation in 2024. While we don’t expect it to replace the biggest search engine anytime soon, short-form video platforms have been a boon for B2B marketers in the last few years. Whether through brand storytelling, case studies, or thought leadership, short-form videos have significantly impacted many B2B businesses positively.

For example, Sprout Social learned that short-form video is the most engaging type (66%) of in-feed social content.

And TikTok supports these types of videos, they’re the life and blood of the platform.

With its emphasis on new formats and its unique approach to social media, TikTok offers B2B brands a way to revitalize their social media strategy and reach new customers. It’s the perfect place to connect and engage with your audience using creative, relatable content.

Plus, you can repurpose that same content on other channels for additional reach. Considering a TikTok-first approach to social can result in a differentiated, engaging presence that competitors will envy (and likely, try to copy).

Although Instagram tops the average daily users, TikTok leads the way in time spent on the platform. TikTok users spent an average of 95 minutes daily in 2023. With each video lasting only 21 to 34 seconds on average, the platform leaves plenty of opportunity for B2B brands to create and share impactful videos to users’ feeds.

Increased Focus and Investment in Communities

Since the pandemic, more B2B content marketers have recognized the importance of investing in building online B2B communities.

A HubSpot study found that 64% of marketers decided to invest in social media communities in 2022. And by the end of that year, 88% of C-level execs saw a positive impact.

In what way?

  • Stronger relationships between customers and the brand.
  • Increased customer retention and more revenue growth.
  • Faster feedback, ideation, and crowdsourcing to improve products and services.

Whether through Reddit, Discord, or ad-hoc communities powered by apps like Discourse, B2B brands can use online communities to drive their social media marketing efforts.

Reduced Budgets Lead to Fewer Paid and More Organic

Time to get scrappy!

Marketers are under pressure to strike a balance between tactics that will directly increase sales or build their brand image while keeping costs low.

This means they are likely to explore lower-cost organic marketing opportunities and reduce paid or expensive campaign budgets. 

We recommend prioritizing investments in advocacy, exec social, UGC, AI-assisted copy, internal thought leadership programs, and targeted influencer marketing to drive a bigger impact for a lower spend, helping offset budget cuts. Improving and automating the processes involved can also have a positive impact down the road. 

3. How to Build a B2B Social Media Strategy – The Framework

An effective B2B social media strategy leverages growth, and reach, and sustains trust with your customers.

Our comprehensive framework will guide you through the checklist you need to create and execute an effective B2B social media strategy:

Bonus

  • Budgets & ROI for B2B social media: How to measure your ROI (Return Of Investment) from social media and set the right social media KPIs that match your budget.
  • Hiring: What to look for in a B2B social media marketer (or how to outsource it to an agency).
  • Top B2B social media FAQ: More Q&A we couldn’t fit up top. 😎

This section focuses on B2B social media marketing, but we’ll also touch on social media’s role in customer care and recruitment.

Let’s get into how to set ambitious but achievable goals for your B2B social media marketing program in 2024 (and beyond) without further ado.

image

[Bonus]: Organize your creative process with our social media swipe file + template

Use our Social Media Swipe File Template to build a gallery of good ideas and social media examples. To get you started, we’ve filled it with some of our favorite examples of great social posts — both paid and organic.

→ Click here to get it now.

Define Your B2B Social Media Goals

Before laying down your social media strategy, take time to define — what are you trying to achieve.

Pro tip: All business goals relate to making and saving money. Don’t complicate it! 😊

Choose 1 business goal per campaign and 1 KPI per channel.

How?

Create a goal and see how social media can fit into that.

For instance, you should choose one platform for your:

  • Marketing.
  • Sales.
  • Customer Success.
  • Talent attraction strategy.

Your social media program impacts marketing metrics across the customer lifecycle. Break down the steps you track before, during, and after becoming a customer.

  • Awareness: More people know who you are.
  • Consideration: Generating marketing qualified leads through education and nurturing.
  • Conversions: Driving sign-ups and sales from new and existing customers.
  • Advocacy: Gaining reviews and referrals from customers.

Should you have one goal or many?

In reality, most brands have multiple social media goals. Having specific, measurable goals for each channel is what drives the purpose behind your social media campaigns.

Here’s a rundown on the common types of B2B social media goals and how they can be measured:

Brand Awareness

You can’t build a business if your customers don’t know who you are, what you do, and how you help. Agree? That’s what brand awareness is all about, in a nutshell.

Done effectively, brand awareness creates excitement around your people and products, which will help you grow a loyal community and funnel in new leads. It’s an essential, if not obvious, part of your B2B social media marketing strategy.

Brand awareness can be broken down into:

  • Increasing awareness of new products.
  • Increasing knowledge of new products.
  • Increasing purchasing frequency.
  • Increasing attractiveness of products.

Metrics Used to Measure Brand Awareness on Social Media

  • Direct traffic: When users access your website by typing in your URL directly to their browser. Although direct traffic can indicate ‘dark social’ channels are at work, too, it also means users had to recall your domain name to find you.
  • Mentions: The number of times your brand or product has been mentioned directly on social channels.
  • Brand search volume: The number of times people have typed your brand name on search engines as a keyword. Brand keyword search volume and clicks are measured through Google Search Console and can show you if an active social media campaign is driving curious prospects to search for more information.
  • Reach: The total number of people exposed to a social media post. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram all give you the possibility to track your reach. X will only report impressions.

There are also more advanced brand awareness measurements, like unaided recall and brand lift (favorability, preference, intent). These require third-party verification and high ad spending, so we recommend crawling before you run.

Engagement

Social media algorithms reward engagement and interactions, which as a result, boost the visibility of your content to a larger audience. Solid engagement is one of the keys to a successful digital marketing strategy.

In content marketing terms, engagement is often associated with the consideration and interest-building stage of the funnel.

Engagement does not precisely translate into business growth. It does, however, signal if your content resonates with your audience. That’s why measuring engagement is key.

Social Media Engagement Metrics

  • Conversation / Comment rate: The (average) number of comments and responses on each post. With social feed algorithms rewarding posts with comments with organic reach, this is more important than ever. According to Avinash Kaushik, a high conversation rate signals that you are having meaningful conversations with your audience, and requires brands to add value to your followers.
  • Reaction rate: The number of reactions or likes per post. While likes are often referred to as a vanity metric, they do give you some insight into the value of your content. 
  • Amplification / Share rate: The number of ‘shares’ per post. This metric is powerful because it tells us the content contains a message worth sharing, resulting in earned (aka viral) reach.
  • Video views and duration: The number of times your videos have been played, and the level to which viewers who stuck around. Was your video exciting or not? For instance, a high number of 2 or 10-second views with a minuscule 100% completion rate tells us we got their attention—but couldn’t keep it.
  • Clicks per post: Measuring the number of times users have clicked on your link helps determine if your headline, article, or call-to-action was effective.

Lead Generation and Conversions

Demand and lead generation is arguably the most important aspect of a successful digital marketing program. It defines the first stage of intent in a prospect’s path to becoming a customer.

There’s a good chance your B2B marketing team is measured internally on demand and lead generation metrics, so social media needs to be held accountable.

Social Media Lead Generation Metrics

  • Cost per lead (CPL): Calculate how much it approximately costs you to acquire one lead. This metric can be aggregated for all social networks but works best as a comparison metric across paid campaigns and channels. If your CPL is higher than your benchmark, then you need to reconsider channels and approaches.
  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): It’s great to have loads of leads, but if none of them match your lead qualification criteria, then all of your efforts will have been in vain. Measuring your MQLs will ensure that you are targeting the right audience. Companies have their own definition for MQL vs. SQL. In general, the difference between an  MQL and an SQL is that the MQL has not signaled intent and readiness to purchase.
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV): Predicting the net profit a prospect will generate over a period of time (and assigning that value to each new customer) is integral to measuring social media ROI.
  • Close rate per channel: A careful examination of which channel generates the best leads for your brand is a good way to determine which platforms are worth pursuing and which aren’t.
  • Average close rate: Keep track of the quality of your leads to help you determine if you’re attracting leads with high conversion potential.

Linking B2B Social Media Goals to Operations

B2B social media adds value to other departments in an organization. After all, social is a customer-facing channel. Breaking out those goals, budgets, and resources separate from marketing/sales is best practice.

Commonly those include:

Hiring: Acquiring new candidates and employees better/faster. KPIs come from the Talent Acquisition or HR team and measure social media’s role in the application pipeline.
Experience/Service: Solving customer problems on social media better/faster. KPIs are set by the Customer Success or Customer Service team and measure social media’s role in closing tickets and retaining customers.

Audience Clarity

Your buying audience is anyone in the buying group. But unlike paid social, your organic social base is broad, including employees and brand advocates.

If you get this right, you could reduce the churns in your ad spending.

Follow these simple steps:

Step 1: Define ideal customer profiles/personas (ICPs). Who are the roles and companies you want to reach and engage?

Step 2: While you can’t control if they follow you, you can select the channels based on that audience, and the content you post, based on that audience.

Audience for paid social media

You can have different target audiences to keep in mind for your paid social campaign. But create specific messages that are suitable for every audience category.

Audience for organic social media

You don’t have the luxury of choosing your audience, because THEY find you. So you have to remember that your content should attract the ideal audience.

So define the audience(s) you want to reach and teach, but know that you can’t control who ends up seeing it without paid spending.

Audiences that follow you include:

  • Prospects.
  • Customers.
  • Employees.
  • Potential employees.
  • Partners.
  • Industry peers.

However, audience clarity is about being intentional. Since you can’t pick one audience group to follow you, you need better audience clarity for an effective B2B social media campaign.

Social Media Channels For B2B

Now that you’ve defined your goals for your campaign, it’s time to choose a platform that best corresponds to your objectives and audience.

Choose one core channel to master first.

Although you can’t easily influence your followers, you can understand them.

Also, use all of the available features, and study the masters.

However, with all the social media channels out there, how do we decide which ones are right for our business?

Here we have underlined the top 4 social media platforms for B2B, and how they can be used to drive results:

LinkedIn for B2B

Being a professional networking platform, it’s no surprise to anyone that LinkedIn is the most popular social media channel among B2B marketers. 

In 2024 we’ll likely see LinkedIn surpass 1 billion users, and they’re not just on the platform looking for new jobs. They’re reading articles, checking status updates, and most importantly, looking to network with potential collaborators. This presents a huge opportunity for B2B businesses.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of using LinkedIn as a B2B social network:

  • Builds and strengthens personal relationships: LinkedIn allows professionals to share their content and opinion on pertinent topics. This helps put yourself out there and is a great way to baby-step a relationship with prospects. There’s a bonus to empowering team members on LinkedIn: Engaged employees influence 4x more Company Page followers.
  • Launching products and breaking news: More than 90% of B2B say they prefer LinkedIn over any other platform for their product marketing. LinkedIn feeds tend to promote ‘big news’ and essential updates, hence why your new job promotion or article mention gets an extra lift in reach.
  • Generating leads: According to Hubspot, LinkedIn is 277% more effective in generating leads than any other social media platform. One reason is that marketing, sales, and HR professionals can be themselves—literally. Unlike running ads from the corporate account, which LinkedIn is plenty good for, professionals can post content, nurture relationships, and DM other LinkedIn users 1-to-1 to generate opportunities. According to LinkedIn, salespeople who regularly share content are 45% more likely to exceed quota.

read this next

15 Best Social Media Tactics for B2B Lead Generation

How To Drive Results On LinkedIn

Publish Updates with Native Formats like Documents and Carousels

Who knew the most effective content format would be…PDFs?

A smart marketer once advised us, that when a platform releases new features, use them. LinkedIn provides marketers with the ability to upload documents, videos, and photos.

So why settle for posting links and calling it a day? 🤔

Mix up your content with document uploads, images, and videos, and watch your engagement climb.

Example: Arm is the world’s leading provider of silicon IP. They leverage LinkedIn to break news, celebrate employees, tell customer stories, and show the real-world impact of their products.

Drive Engagement with LinkedIn Polls

Polling is a great way to generate engagement, do market research, and get client feedback. A few things to keep in mind while you’re celebrating, aka making lots of great polls:

  • You can choose how long the poll runs, up to two weeks.
  • Like X polls, LinkedIn polls are limited to four options.
  • Poll questions are limited to 140 characters and answers/options to 30 characters.

For more information on the do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn polls, you can read their FAQ page.

For inspiration on how to write great polls, watch how the pros do it and take notes.

example of a linkedin poll

Build Up your Employee Advocacy and Executive Social Media Program

Employee advocacy is when the employees of a company promote their organization on social media. It’s like having in-house brand ambassadors who raise awareness, grow, and boost your brand on social media.

Starting an employee advocacy program on LinkedIn helps you merge two of the most impactful forms of marketing: the reach of social media and the power of referrals.

Also, you can leverage the personal LinkedIn profiles of your executive teams through an executive social media program. They can function as brand ambassadors, and build trust, credibility, and thought leadership.

Tips for Executive Social Media Program

  • Aim for authenticity.
  • Commit to a posting schedule.
  • Respond to recent events.
  • Repurpose existing content.
  • Provide value.

Tips for Employee Advocacy Program

  • Make sure everyone has an updated profile.
  • Develop templates for your employees to use.
  • Train employees on how to talk about the company.
  • Showcasing employee work, projects, and achievement.

Optimize Your Company Page

LinkedIn company pages are a must for B2B marketers looking to promote their business on social media.

In 2018, LinkedIn made important changes to company pages by adding new features such as the ability to share documents (slides and PDFs), built-in content suggestions, and employee advocacy tools.

This expanded the possibilities of connecting with your target audience.

Here are some recommended steps to follow when optimizing your company page on LinkedIn:

  • Write a convincing overview of your company that clearly describes the activities of your business.
  • Add captivating banner images to your page that showcase your product or team in action.
  • Add a call-to-action button that drives visitors to your homepage, careers page, or product landing page.

For more ways to boost your LinkedIn audience and engagement, visit our post on how to grow your company page.

Publish and Repost Content With LinkedIn Articles

If you’re looking to boost your credibility in the eyes of your audience and build a good reputation, then publishing on LinkedIn is the way to go.

LinkedIn has a native publishing platform that allows business leaders to attract attention to their brand and build thought leadership.

Best of all, published posts are indexed on your profile and get excellent distribution in the feed.

The benefits of LinkedIn articles:

  • Reach your audience (and theirs): When you publish a new post, your connections may receive a notification and email from LinkedIn, helping your content avoid getting lost in the busy feed. When your first connections comment on the article, the article is likely to reach their first connections, too.
  • Build credibility: Publishing quality content on LinkedIn consistently establishes you as an industry expert and raises awareness for your brand. When your product, sales, marketing, executive, or [insert department] team publishes posts, you can re-share them on the company page. Oh hey, free content. 🙂

Best practices for LinkedIn articles

  • Incorporate rich media: GIFs, images, videos, and slideshares. They all display nicely on the clean LinkedIn publishing interface. Break up text and keep people on your articles longer by embedding visuals throughout.
  • Publish as consistently as possible: Consistency is critical when publishing articles. Aim to post at least once weekly, month, or quarter—whichever is most realistic to start.
  • Syndicate and repurpose content as a teaser: While we don’t recommend thoroughly regurgitating an article you wrote elsewhere for its SEO implications, syndication is an essential strategy with LinkedIn articles. Consider writing a new headline, sharing enough body content to add value on its own, and then pointing people to the whole piece off LinkedIn for the rest.
  • Promote your posts on other social channels: Promoting your LinkedIn articles on other platforms such as Facebook, X, and email will drive more traffic to your post.

If you’re curious about learning more about how the LinkedIn algorithm works, you can refer to the following article:  “People you know, talking about things you care about.”

To conclude, a few important figures to take into account from the Algorithm Report 2024, regarding the visibility of content in the LinkedIn feed:

linkedin-data-algorithm-report-2024

 

Facebook for B2B

Facebook has had quite a transformation (cue: Meta). The Facebook of 2024 looks entirely different from that of 2015. User preferences are shifting, their products are splitting up, available ad inventory is declining, and all the while, ad sales are growing. That begs the question…

Is B2B Marketing on Facebook dead? No.

Is Facebook changing? Yes. 

With the right strategy, B2B businesses can still reap massive results from the platform. Before you start to panic, check out these facts:

How To Drive B2B Results On Facebook

Broad Paid Reach

At the end of the day, most social media users still have a Facebook profile. Which makes it a powerful platform for reaching your prospects. For most brands, it’s an advertising channel only, but an important one to maintain a presence on for that reason.

With broad paid reach, you can reach users who’ve shown interest in your products (or products similar to yours), even if they haven’t visited your website or app. When you target a broad audience, people in this audience automatically see products from your catalog that are likely relevant to them.

If you’re advertising there, you should also respond to comments, create new posts, and manage direct messages.

Join relevant Facebook Groups (as a person)

Facebook offers the ability for its users to join groups based on their passions, interests, or industry. Over 1.8 billion people are using Facebook Groups to discuss their passions, chat with friends or colleagues, and plan events. In the past 12 months, you likely received an invitation to join a group yourself.

B2B marketers can easily find Facebook Groups related to their industry or niche. In these communities, they’ll be able to find professionals in their industry providing support for one another and discussing topics that are of interest to them.

Just like with LinkedIn, your goal should be to provide value to the community. The way to do this is to either post timely information about what’s happening in your industry or respond to questions someone asks that you can answer.

For example, let’s say someone posts in the group:

Hey everyone, I’m trying to drive traffic with Instagram ads but nothing seems to be working… What should I do?

This is where you can respond with:

@OriginalPoster — I’ve struggled with traffic and conversion rates from Instagram, too. What I’ve learned is that the right tactic depends on what type of audience you’re targeting (B2B/B2C, Lifestyle) and the offer you’re presenting. A few things you can do are (Tip 1), (Tip 2),(Tip 3), and (Tip 4).

If you’d like more ideas, I wrote a list of 30 things you can try on my blog – come check it out at [link] if you’re interested or DM if you have questions.

Create Engaging Video Content

Video marketing is big business on social media. 52% of marketers use video to build trust with customers., and 88% of video marketers are satisfied with the ROI they get from their efforts. Facebook gives the ability to B2B brands to use video in different ways:

  • Facebook Reels: Meta launched Reels, a popular Instagram product, in the Facebook app in 2021. Research by HubSpot shows 85% of marketers believe short-form videos have the highest audience engagement among all content types.
  • Facebook Video Ads: Regarding word-of-mouth marketing, video outperforms text and images by 12 times. Facebook lets you run videos as a standalone objective to get more views, or as an ad format for any objective (traffic, conversions, reach). We recommend testing videos as a creative format against a still image or graphic, or a video featuring a person against one with a product and text.
  • Facebook Live: B2B brands on Facebook can leverage live video to engage with their followers in real time. Rather than read social posts, 82% of people prefer a live video from a brand which is perfect when it comes to webinars, Q&As, and live product demos. If your goal is to generate leads, it’s best to wrap things up with a strong offer for those watching all the way through.

HubSpot regularly posts instructional videos about marketing on its Facebook page. In this example, HubSpot uses a case study to explain how users can use its CRM platform.

X (Twitter) for B2B

Forget traffic, this one is all about the relationships.

With 400+ million monthly active users and 500+ million tweets being sent out daily, X has become a place to “see what’s going on” worldwide. It’s no wonder that 87% of B2B marketers use X as a content marketing tool.

(Unfortunately, only a smaller percentage gets it right).

The beauty of X is the connection it creates between brands and their audience in real time.

Here’s how using X for B2B marketing can benefit you:

  • Relationships with the right humans: This goes back to everything we’ve been saying about humanizing and personalizing your brand. One-on-one interactions help drive engagement but, more importantly, they also help build meaningful connections with users. Cement your brand in your customers’ minds as responsive, helpful, and engaging. You know, human. You’ll be amazed at the caliber of people who pay attention to relationships here.
  • Social listening = customer intelligence: The best marketers don’t guess; they listen. X is a great place to do just that. And don’t just listen to what your audience is saying in response to your tweets. It’s very useful to know what your audience is saying about you, but not to you. So search mentions of your brand, products, and general industry topics to gauge audience sentiment and content opportunities.
  • A second net to solve problems (faster): Customers who need help with a product or are experiencing issues turn to X for immediate assistance. Customers value your response’s immediacy here, and many third-party tools now integrate with X DM. 
  • Important announcements that spread quickly: X is a great way to break news about updates and changes, and respond personally when customers have questions.
  • SEO benefits: Recent and engaging tweets can appear in relevant Google search results, which can lead to more followers and traffic to your website.

How To Drive Results On X (Twitter)

Develop a distinct brand voice and personality

Brands are a collection of unconscious associations in your consumer’s mind. One of the most powerful associations you can build is the personality of your presence on X.

Struggling to define your brand’s voice?

  • Write to your target audience: You’ll find it easier to write consistent, cohesive copy if you have the same person in mind every time you compose a tweet.
  • Set the tone: What’s your company’s vibe? Ask yourself: How do you want to make people feel? In general, are you more likely to be funny, serious, ~edgy~? Keeping that in mind…
  • Bring your brand to life with relevant words and visuals: Translate the brand attributes into the colors, imagery, ad messaging, and response copy you use across social.

An example of a B2B company with a noteworthy X account? Square. Their content is focused on the small business owners they serve and the overall tone is informative, casual, and encouraging.

Play to trends

X is a great place to go viral. The good news is that you don’t even have to be the one going viral to get a piece of the pie. Hop into the conversation on an already trending topic or respond to a tweet that’s getting tons of replies. 

The funniest or most helpful responses and comebacks tend to get high numbers of likes, retweets, and replies, too. You can also respond with relevant memes. So invest some time into crafting a winning comment. If it helps, shift your mindset to consider the comment as the content.

Share videos

According to X, 82% of users watch video content on the platform and would like to watch more video content from brands and celebrities. So why not maximize video content to drive more engagement to your brand?

Use snackable video snippets from the pillar content we discussed earlier to economize the process.

Post at the right times

X is all about immediacy.

A tweet’s half-life is only about 18 minutes. It reaches 75% of its maximum reach within 3 hours and then starts to decline rapidly. This means if you’re looking to reach the most amount of potential leads and maximize engagement, the timing of when you tweet is crucial.

Use a combination of Google and X analytics and good, old-fashioned trial-and-error to track traffic and engagement.

Test, rinse, repeat…

And then remember that getting the timing right sometimes has nothing to do with the clock. Sometimes it’s about responding to cultural phenomena or viral Internet news in real-time. Your clever observation about the Oscars isn’t funny if you tweet it out at 2 pm the Wednesday after.

R/GA does a great job of reacting to trending topics quickly and with their signature biting wit.

Let’s try one more read, but this time as if the script were good.

Instagram for B2B

Instagram’s visual-based platform is great for B2B businesses to promote their brand. Don’t believe us?

  • 200+ Million Instagrammers visit at least one Business Profile daily.
  • Consumers are buying what they see on Instagram: Instagram is a powerful tool when it comes to promoting your product. 60% of people say they discover new products on Instagram.
  • It influences consumers’ buying habits: Instagram is changing the online shopping process. 80% of users say Instagram helps influence their purchasing decisions.

How to Drive Results on Instagram

Set up an Instagram Business account

You do have a Business Profile, right?

Instagram introduced business profiles in 2016, giving businesses access to a variety of tools and functionality, including analytics on your posts and stories, third-party integrations, and call-to-action buttons.

You need an Instagram Business profile if you want to advertise natively and get data on your audience. To make the switch, you have to click on the settings icon on your profile page and tap on the “Switch To Business Profile” link.

Create and Curate Content Tailored for Instagram

To excel in Instagram, you must understand what works there and what audiences want. In general, the formula of entertaining and informative works well here.

Keep in mind in 2024, it’s best practice to use square photos and videos (1080 x 1080).

Share Client Success Stories

Not only is featuring testimonials from clients a great way to establish trust with your audience and leverage social proof, combined with appealing visuals they can make for a great piece of content.

Make your customers the heroes by highlighting their big wins.

Take a Peek Into Your Corporate Culture

My favorite definition of organizational culture is a concise answer to “the way we do things around here.” Prospective customers and employees alike want to know more about your company’s people and place.

From day-in-the-life takeovers to office snapshots, human-focused stories tend to perform well.

Hootsuite uses the hashtag #hootsuitelife on Instagram to give followers a glimpse into their company life.

(Dog-friendly offices? Enough said. 👇)

Leverage Instagram Stories

Posting to your feed is all well and good, but it’s not the only — or even the best — way to get noticed on the Gram.

There are two other native features that we recommend using for expanded organic reach, the first of which is Stories.

With Instagram Stories, users can upload videos and photos that disappear after 24 hours. Stories will show up at the top of your audience’s feed. You can also save stories to a highlight reel on your page.

Stories are a great place for more casual, less polished content. This opens up the opportunity for B2B companies to humanize their brand and have more personal interactions with their customers.

CoSchedule has an entire highlight reel called “Culture,” which is dedicated to fun behind-the-scenes content.

The algorithm attempts to serve users content that they already enjoy, so followers who already interact frequently will be more likely to see your Stories at the front of their queue. The same is true of the reverse: the more they interact with your stories, the more likely they are to come across your feed content while scrolling.

Leverage Instagram Reels

Another new-ish native Instagram feature that we recommend getting comfortable with is Reels.

Using Reels could mean better organic reach for your content. It’s a not-so-unspoken secret that Instagram boosts content created with new features (like Reels) during rollout to help drive widespread adoption.

And Reels doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Don’t believe us? Just take a look at the new Reels tab on your Instagram home screen.

So, it’s worth your time to develop a strategy for the short-form video format.

It’s best practice to cross-share your Reels to your main feed for maximum visibility. Bonus — one piece of content, two channels of distribution. Work smart, not hard.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by HubSpot (@hubspot)

Hint: Speaking of working smart, not hard, you can and should reshare TikTok content (if you have any) to your Reels feed. 

TikTok for B2B

TikTok is the fastest-growing social media platform. Beyond excitement, TikTok is a great channel to keep your audience engaged. Its algorithm makes it suitable for organic reach and virality.

It’s a great platform to teach your audience how to access and use your product.

How To Drive Results For B2B OnTikTok

Create authentic content on TikTok

TikTok is all about building genuine connections through content. Your content shouldn’t be complex.

Keep it simple and original.

For example, Microsoft 365 shares relatable #LifeHack to help companies and their teams improve productivity. Their content provides useful tips that improve the work experience.

Microsoft TikTok

Build shared experiences

Sharing User Generated Content (USG) is good for business on TikTok. It’s a fancy way to build an emotional connection.

Shopify does this excellently. It encourages small business owners to share their experiences to get featured.

Shopify TikTok

Teach your audience how to use your product

TikTok is a great platform to share product guides with your customers. It helps you share edutainment content. You can share product demos, feature releases, and product functionalities.

For example, Adobe uses the platform to answer users’ feedback.

Adobe TikTok

Content Strategy For B2B Social Media

A 2023 survey by Sprout Social shows that 57% of consumers follow a brand to learn about new products while 47% follow to stay up to date on company news. However, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand for sharing irrelevant content.

So each post should have one purpose, and one “job to do” for your audience.

Pro tip: Choose 1 purpose and emotion per post. 

When examining B2B advertising, social media was used by 83% of marketers and ranked second (29%) in success behind search engine marketing (33%).

You get results when you deliver quality content.

To achieve this, focus on creating better content through these steps:

Quality content is Emotional, Useful, Relevant, and Timely.

  • Connects with tribal concepts.
  • Founder-led content and amplification.
  • Features people, make you feel something.
  • Leverages original research and ideas.
  • Distills big ideas in digestible formats.
  • Leverages video in beautiful or episodic formats.

Paid and amplification

The truth about brand social media? (Organic) Reach is not a given. To ensure you’re reaching the valuable audience you seek, you need methods of amplifying those posts with the content you invested in.

There are 3 ways of amplifying your content on social media:

  • Paid Amplification (Ads and Sponsored Content).
  • Influencers
  • Advocates.

Paid Amplification

Paid amplification lets you control your social performance because it’s highly targeted and reliable.

So you pay for reach, sponsor content and get complete control over reach.

B2B Influencers

B2B Influencer spending is on the rise. You can find experts that reach your target audience and sponsor them to create content for or with you.

So partner on content with influential people to achieve your social media KPI.

Employees and Advocates

Your employees and customers are the best people to tap into for sharing your content. So invest in tools and processes to help them share your news, updates, and articles.

It’s an innovative way to grow your brand’s reach and engagement while making your brand more relatable.

Our recommendation: Choose one1 method of amplification, then make it a machine. This will reduce the churn and stress involved in the process.

Roles & Rules: Defining the people and process for implementation and analysis

There are a lot of misc tasks to manage your social media.

Moreover, there are 5 functions in social media marketing alone.

  • Strategy development/definition.
  • Content creation and workflow.
  • Community management (1:1 response/listening).
  • Paid advertising/amplification.
  • Analysis, reporting, and optimization.

Each of these COULD be its role, though often it’s not.

But, you need to define WHO does WHAT and WHEN to be successful. Your team needs to choose one person to make the calls.

Implement your B2B Social Media in This Order

First: Pick an ‘Owner’ – Who has the final say?

They are the tie-breakers and rule-setters for questions like:

  • Does this get posted or not?
  • Should we be on TikTok (or X new channel) or not?
  • Should we invest in this new tactic or tool?

Second: Assign roles for each of the 5 functions and fill gaps with contractors/agencies

Third: Set a reporting rhythm – Quarterly, monthly, weekly

  • Quarterly – Review of Plan – What’s working, what’s not, what’s next?
  • Monthly – Review of Plan / M2M Traction.
  • Weekly – Review of Progress (Scorecard).

Fourth: Tools come last

  • What tools should we invest in to make our jobs easier based on our needs?

If you remember nothing else…

  • Think social + media in your strategy.
  • Avoid best-practice traps, strive for better.
  • When in doubt, start with one.

7 Traps to Avoid in your B2B Social Media Strategy (and How to Get It Right)

Social media marketing has real business implications. But, it could amount to a waste of time and resources if you don’t play by the rules.

We share seven misconceptions B2B makes in their social media strategy in this session.

Let’s get started.

Repurpose Content, Don’t Use (organic) Social as a Website Traffic Channel

Avoid the mistake of using organic social media as a traffic channel.

Resist the temptation.

You want people spending time on your site. Social platforms want people on theirs.

Think of this as a win-win situation.

Optimize for dwell time.

Make your audience stay using the 3-R formula; Remix, Remake, Recycle. 🤷‍♀️

Make Your Content about Other People

Social media drives a small % of your total traffic. And a smaller % comes from your posts.

Why would I click your post?

Because it’s about me. Because it’s about someone I know. Because it’s about something I know.

Making your content with or about other people increases its share value 💡

Don’t Consider Organic Social a “Brand Awareness” Play

Organic social works for people who already care and are interested in you. But paid social helps you reach new audiences.

A study by LinkedIn shows that organic audiences are 61% more likely to convert with paid media.

Don’t be caught, because reach is rapidly declining. Resonance speaks to everyone.

Recall is impossible to measure.

Don’t Value All Engagements as Good Engagements

Don’t get caught.

People don’t necessarily need to engage with content to notice it, be interested in it, or be persuaded by it.

Engagement doesn’t equal persuasion. Instead, build a deeper connection with the brand and product.

For example, when you optimize for video watch time you can measure their attention, and retarget them by interest peaks.

Don’t Limit Socials to What’s Controlled on Corporate Channels

People are 3x more likely to trust company info shared by an employee than a CEO.

Content shared by employees has 2x higher CTR than when it’s shared by a company. Employee networks have 10x more connections than a company has followers.

So use the voices of the company. Build through your executive team’s authority and authorship. Employee and customer advocacy are good additions.

What Do People Want To Hear From Thought Leaders?

According to LinkedIn:

  • Provocative content: Challenge them (80%).
  • Human: Want less formal, less intellectual TOV (64%).
  • Personal: Want to see an identifiable author (66%).
  • Curated: Include third-party insights/data from other reputable sources (80%).

FYI on dark social: In B2B, your employees and execs are a vital part of the social strategy.

The scary part? Their impact may not easily appear in attribution reports (aka dark social).

Don’t Take ‘Consistency’ Too Literally

Consistency comes at a cost. Learning, timeliness, creativity.

So be sure to monitor your audience’s most active time and your best-performing posts.

Learn, be timely, and get creative.

It’s Not Social Media, It’s Social + Media

The comment is the content.

So, establish trust with your audience by connecting and resonating with your customers through useful and inspirational content.

To build connection, engagement has to be two-way.

So don’t just listen. Get involved.

5. Setting B2B Social Media Budgets and Measuring B2B Social Media ROI

How much should I budget for B2B social media marketing?

There’s no one budget formula for social media marketing. Naturally, large marketing organizations have more buckets to consider than teams of one.

Here are a few things you should keep in mind to set up a B2B social media marketing budget:

Percent of Annual Sales Formula

To determine their ceiling for marketing spend, most companies start with a percentage of their expected revenue. To follow this formula, start by taking ~5-30% of your desired gross revenue goal and set it aside for marketing.

According to the 2019 CMO Survey, the average B2B firm allocates just under ~9% of its revenue on marketing budgets. Meanwhile, B2B reviews note over 50% of B2B marketing managers reported a higher 2023 marketing budget than the previous year.

Now, how much should you budget for social?

Take 10-25% of your total marketing budget and allocate it to social media marketing.

For example, if you forecasted sales of $10,000,000 in 2024 and assigned 10% to marketing you would have a budget pool of $1,000,000 for marketing/advertising expenses. That would leave $100,000 – $250,000 for social media, or ~$8,000 – $20,000/mo.

B2B Social Media Expense Breakdown

Consider how your marketing budget will break down between the core social media expense categories:

  • In-house team members: Part and full-time employees dedicated to social media channels. For instance, one social media manager + half of a graphic designer’s time (shared resource) = 1.5 FTE salaries.
  • Outsourced work: Agency and freelance team members dedicated to social media activities like content creation, community management, and paid media.
  • Paid media expenses: Total ad spends from social media channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and X.
  • Tools and technology: Software dedicated to managing and measuring social media marketing. This tech completes functions like scheduling, monitoring and listening, ad-buying, and reporting & analytics.

Programs and Campaigns

Social media marketing budgets are often easier to understand on a project or initiative basis.

In that case, group related activities together and assign a budget as needed. For instance, an event activation.

Within short and long-term campaigns you can allocate the budget further into individual channels and programs.

Some strategists recommend a 60/40 split of campaign budgets with 60% towards brand-building activities like community management, content creation and publishing, and paid amplification. Then 40% to sales activation activities like influencer marketing, retargeting ads, and direct-response ads.

Social Media Recruitment and Other Activities

Using social media to attract talent? Consider a top-down approach with a percentage of your total recruitment budget allocated towards social media programs. From there, decide how to divide up that spending allowance. There are several areas to look at:

  • Content creation: Determine what kinds of graphics, images, or videos you plan to use in your campaign. Eager to showcase your awesome office space with an amazing view? High-quality photos are a cost-effective way to do that. Looking to highlight a fun company culture? It might be worth the extra expense of video production to capture that. 
  • Paid promotion: Unless you already have a large, engaged organic following, you’re more likely to reach your target audience—in this case, talented, qualified applicants—with paid social. Decide how much of your recruitment budget you can designate to ad spend.
  • Outsourcing: You can also choose to delegate the recruitment process to a third party. If so, you’ll need to budget for the total cost of outsourcing your campaign efforts to a social media management agency.

What are the best ways to measure ROI from social media marketing?

Let’s get something straight: True ‘ROI’ is a measurement of dollars gained or lost.

You may consider marketing-specific measurements as a gain, but you’ll have a hard time selling it to the C-suite.

That’s why ROI is easiest to measure in the form of an individual channel or campaign (versus the totality of your efforts).

Thanks to tracking pixels, success can be attributed to leads that originated on social media, or conversions assisted by social media. Analytics software can be used to analyze which social media channels your visitors came from, what they did once they landed on your webpage, and the actions they took after completing a form.

Let’s say you invested $10,000 total on a paid media campaign leveraging LinkedIn and Facebook ads for a new product launch. 

You reached 100,000 professionals, drove 2,000 people to your landing pages, and collected 50 emails (MQLs).

So what was the ROI?

There are several possible answers.

  • ROI – short-term: Those leads are now known prospects moving through your sales funnel. In 3 months, if 10% of those 50 leads convert into closed deals with a customer lifetime value of $10,000, you stand to generate ~$50,000 from the campaign. ROI = $50,000 – 10,000 / (10,000) = 400% projected ROI.
  • ROI – long-term: After 6 months, or 12 months, how many additional campaign leads have converted? What was the expected value of those deals? That’s when things get interesting. 🙂
  • Indirect ROI: What is the ‘value’ of a page visit? How does the CPM for this channel compare to another channel? What other social or conversion actions can you attribute to the campaign (like saves, engagement, or downloads)?

Measuring the total reach, the size of the engaged (retargeting) audience built, or the attributed brand lift will only give you a proxy for success, but still extremely valuable to measure and report.

[Free Template]: Make our social media campaign brief your own →

Use our Social Media Campaign Brief Template to distill your big ideas into a simple, actionable format. Copy/paste the Google Doc to get started. → Click here to grab it.

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Hiring A B2B Specialist To Manage Your Social Media Marketing Strategies

Running a B2B brand is hard enough, let alone mastering social media. 

This is where hiring a B2B social media specialist comes in, to lessen your workload, focus on other aspects of your business you want to manage, and create powerful strategies that generate results.

This isn’t a role you can just pass off to the intern. A qualified social media manager or agency can provide immediate value and launch campaigns that will drive B2B marketing results.

But how do we find the perfect candidate? Competent social media specialists are hard to come by. On top of that, they need to correspond perfectly to a brand’s current needs, budgets, and goals.

Should I Hire a Social Media Agency Or a Social Media Manager?

One dilemma that many B2B teams experience is the balance between internal and external resources. While both options have their benefits, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to managing social for your brand.

To help you in your choice, we’ve highlighted both possible options, their pros and cons, and what to look for when hiring either of these.

Hiring a Social Media Agency

If you know exactly what success looks like and you’re trying to conserve internal resources, then hiring a social media agency is the way to go. Having the budget to hire a quality social media management firm that gets your brand voice and goals is well worth it, considering the time it will buy you.

Keep in mind that you don’t need to outsource all of your social media marketing programs.

Pros of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:

  • Quality and consistency of social data reporting and analytics, thanks to efficiencies across clients.
  • There will be less trial and error: an agency will bring experience and lessons from working with many clients to the table, which in return will accelerate your social media results.
  • Social media agencies have access to advanced tools that can have an important effect when it comes to growing your audience.
  • You will be working with a variety of social media experts, from analysts to creatives, who individually will be able to bring their unique skills to each platform.

Potential Cons of Outsourcing Social Media Marketing:

  • Hiring a social media agency can be expensive for early-stage entrepreneurs and businesses who have smaller budgets for testing and limited time for communication.
  • Since agencies set scopes of work for everything they do, they may not handle all of the ancillary and administrative tasks an in-house social media manager would do.
  • They have their process. Most social media agencies will begin by auditing your past performance and analyzing your audience. This phase could last 1 week to 1 month.

What To Look For In A B2B Social Media Agency:

  • B2B Proof / Results: When searching for a social media partner, ask them for B2B case studies and/or links to social media campaigns they are managing right now for B2B clients. While most large clients have strict confidential agreements, the existence of the engagement itself is usually fair game.
  • Client references: In some instances, they will supply names and contact info of clients that will answer your questions. You can also scan Facebook, Clutch, G2, or Google to see what previous clients have shared. Keep in mind that agency reviews will primarily showcase the super positive or negative experiences. (Just being honest here).
  • Consume their content: Can you get a sense of their personality and people from their social? Is their blog content genuinely useful? Conduct a surface-level audit to judge their first impression.
  • Audience and industry experience: An agency that has worked in your niche or marketed to your audience may be able to generate results faster.
  • Pricing structure: Do you want to pick from a pre-set menu or customize your approach from scratch?
  • Communication cadence: Communication plays an essential role in any healthy partnership. Consider your communication preferences and the options they provide. Will they send you weekly status updates? Review monthly reports? Will they set up a shared Slack channel?

Here at Sculpt, we focus on building social media marketing programs that help B2B businesses grow their audience and revenue. That means prioritizing the right channels and mapping content opportunities across your buyer’s journey.

We connect 1-to-4 times per month on your performance and progress to make sure you exceed your goals. You can schedule a strategy call right from our chatbot if you’d like to learn more. 😊

Hiring an In-House Social Media Manager

An alternative to hiring an agency is to hire a social media manager directly in your company. The main advantage of having an in-house social media manager is that he or she will have closer access to the rest of your organization. 

That can mean more responsive content and better connectivity with key people and updates.

Pros of Hiring a Social Media Manager:

  • A social media manager may have a better sense of your brand’s actual customers.
  • While an agency works for multiple clients, an in-house social media manager will make your brand the sole focus of her work.
  • You’ll have full control over the tasks of your social media manager and how they complete them—including non-social assignments.

Cons of Hiring a Social Media Manager:

  • It’s rare to find social media managers who are well-versed in each social media channel.
  • It’s even rarer to find an individual social media manager who is skilled across all five social media roles—paid ads, analytics, content (writing and visual), community management, and strategic planning. Depending on the size and needs of your company, these roles might need to be distributed across an entire social media team.
  • With social managers, you’re going to have to pay for overhead costs such as onboarding, insurance, bonuses, and benefits.

Best case scenario: Hybrid team

Best-case Scenario: Hybrid Team

Let’s get real. One social media manager can’t do all five social media roles without tactical support. And ideally, your agency isn’t operating in a silo. 

The best scenario would be to leverage the flexibility of an external resource and the customer connectivity of the internal team.

In practice, that means the agency is lifting the in-house social media manager with audience research, content strategy frameworks, process improvements, and timely opportunities. Or if the in-house team is comfortable with the strategy, the agency is creating batches of scheduled content and paid support for growth goals.

It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

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B2B Social Media FAQ

B2B VS. B2C Social Media: What’s the difference?

Let’s break down the basics.

B2B social media marketing refers to the marketing of products, services, and career opportunities to the employees of other companies on social media. B2B companies can come in a variety of forms: professional service providers like marketing agencies, medical equipment sales, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) to name a few.

B2C (business-to-consumer) social media marketing deals with the process of promoting products and services to consumers. Often we’re describing social for businesses like food service, bricks-and-mortar / online retail, and consumer packaged goods. More frequently today we’re talking about DTC e-commerce, subscription services, and mobile apps.

Fundamentally, social media has the same utility between the two business models—connecting brands with customers. However, we’ve found a couple of noticeable differences between B2C and B2B social media marketing.

1. Relationships vs. Direct Sales

Where does the relationship begin?

With B2C marketing, the relationship with a brand often starts with purchase. You might see an ad on Snapchat or a deal in a Facebook Group and become a customer. It might take months of targeted social media advertising to reach purchase consideration, but the value begins when we receive a discount or start using the product. After purchase, the brand’s social media channels might become a place for new deals, lifestyle inspiration, and product information to encourage repeat purchases.

With B2B marketing we’re selling high-ticket goods, so our goal is to foster long-term relationships with employees and decision-makers of customer companies by positioning our brands as approachable experts. The value journey on social media often progresses in sequential stages — from awareness and consideration, to purchase and ascension — with the top-of-the-funnel possibly taking months or years.

2. Employees as key audiences and influencers

In B2B organizations, your human resources are one of the most effective marketing tools for brand advocacy. When distributing information like articles, announcements, or offers, programs often start with employees sharing to their networks before expanding out to new audiences.

In modern B2B marketing organizations, personal brand building is encouraged, not stifled. An employee with a large, professional social network can be used as an asset to reach new customers.

Will Social Media work for boring industries?

Many B2B firms believe that social media won’t work for them because they’re in a “boring” niche and it’s better to focus exclusively on client referrals, offline sales channels like tradeshows, or online channels like Google ads to generate clients. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

For example, CBRE is a global real estate firm that dominates when it comes to brand awareness on social media. What could be a boring corporate feed on Instagram is instead a showcase of some of the world’s most beautiful architecture.

Which B2C social media strategies work for B2B?

Whether you’re targeting a B2C or B2B audience, at the end of the day, You are still communicating with individuals. All humans, regardless of the niche, want and need to fulfill. Social media tactics known for B2C such as giveaway contests that offer an incentive for action, or developing content optimized for commenting (to instill a feeling of belonging), can also be used by B2B businesses to increase their reach.

From our experience, social media strategies used for B2C can be even more lucrative for B2B. Take inspiration from brands with similar values, even if their business model is different.

What if my customers aren’t using social media?

According to IDG, 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers are influenced by social media interactions in their buying decisions. In total, they found that 75% of B2B buyers consulted information on social media before purchasing a product or service. By not having a presence on social media, you are missing out on opportunities to network with important clients.

As a low-cost experiment, develop a research project of your own. Assemble a list of 50 of your customers and 50 of your prospects. Create a separate column for their social media profiles on as many channels as you consider relevant. After taking stock, note if they’re following your brand or employees back. What did you learn?

Which social media platform is best for B2B marketing?

LinkedIn is often cited as the channel for B2B social media, but that’s somewhat misleading. While it’s true that 78% of B2B marketers agree that LinkedIn is the best platform for achieving their specific objectives, that doesn’t mean you should put all of your eggs into one basket and not leverage other platforms.

Above, we discuss how to optimize for success using the other top 3 channels for B2B: Facebook, X (Twitter), and Instagram. Of course, you don’t have to be a juggernaut on every platform (and probably won’t be). But it’s worth testing out each channel and finding which is best suited to your brand’s niche and needs.

Are you still here? Thanks for sticking with us to the end! 😅

Still have a burning question about B2B social media that we didn’t answer? Leave it in the comments below and we’ll add it to the post. 👍

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Josh Krakauer

Josh Krakauer is the CEO of Sculpt, that B2B social media agency you just discovered. Josh has launched social media campaigns for best-selling books, publicly-traded corporations, and early-stage startups. Josh works from Washington, DC, but still thinks Iowa City is the best city on earth.

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