11 Practices to Accelerate Your B2B Social Media Marketing

While it may not be the first marketing avenue that a business serving other businesses might consider an effective tactic, social media can actually present some significant benefits. These benefits only become more pronounced and apparent when a business’ social media adheres to certain best practices. Let’s go over them together so you can embrace them for yourself and your business.

These best practices are as follows:

Express Your Brand’s Personality

Okay, so your business provides technology support and related services to other businesses. While many of these services are, admittedly, pretty dry to discuss, that doesn’t mean your social media activity should be. Your business’ social media presence is your opportunity to let your brand—and the people who operate within it—shine. Take advantage of the chance to show off what makes your business appealing to clients and prospects, which is the human element that builds it up. Crack a joke, highlight some of your team members, and make sure all of your social media channels (while sharing slightly different messages) share a unified voice.

This will help to galvanize a recognizable presence for your business, encouraging those who come across your messages to remember it.

Line Up Your Social Media Use with Your Goals

We’ve spoken at length about how important it is to establish SMART goals—goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely—to help guide your efforts toward a desired outcome. This applies to your marketing, including your social media. What objectives do you have for your business, and how will your social media efforts assist you with them?

Knowing what you want to accomplish with your social media in terms of your marketing efforts will further help you shape your social media presence.

Establish a Consistent Routine for Your Social Media to Follow

It’s important that your social media marketing isn’t allowed to alternate between activity and dormancy. Figure out what you can sustain, and commit to repeating that over time.

If you can create impactful and insightful social media content for every platform you use, each and every day, that’s great. However, if remaining consistent means you only post a few times per week, do that. You want your audience to pick up on when they can expect to see your insights come across their feed, reinforcing your reliability as a provider.

Research Your Audience

Who is it that makes up your social media following? You need to know who you’re talking to if you want to communicate with them effectively.

Consider who it is that is actually following you, taking the time to do some research into the people following your page and identifying who it is they work for and what their roles are in their respective fields. This knowledge will give you the opportunity to shape your messaging to better fit the people reading it, or to actively retarget other roles and people within your target audience. The more effectively your social media activity communicates with those following it, the more effective it will be as a marketing tool.

Research Your Competition, Too

It’s important to clarify that we aren’t saying that you should copy what your competitors are doing on social media. What you should do is keep a careful eye on their activity—how often are they posting, and how are they speaking to their audience? What seems to be working for them, in terms of the engagement they’re seeing?

Once you have this data, you can reconsider your own approach. Again, we are not saying you should copy what your competitors are doing. What we are saying is that you should compare what you’re doing to what they’re doing, pulling insights and ideas to improve your own strategy as you find them.

Use Original Content to Teach

The trick to B2B marketing isn’t to sell your products and services to your prospects and clients…it’s to educate your prospects and clients about the needs they’re likely facing, showing them how important these needs are to meet and suggesting that you can help them do so.

To do so, you should be creating your own, original content, in a variety of formats. In addition to crafting written posts and status updates, you should also be producing video content, sharing links back to your website, and posting images. The more ways you have to share a message on your social media, the better.

Utilize the Platforms that Work for You

Let’s face it, there are quite a few social media platforms out there, each with its own means that allows you to share your message with your following. Likewise, each offers something different to those who use them, which means different people are apt to use each.

At the same time, you may not want to (or have the ability to) invest in every platform out there… especially if that platform doesn’t return sufficiently on your investments. While we recommend that you maintain some kind of presence on the major social platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Instagram, and YouTube), you very well may find that your audience tends to congregate on one of these options, where you could consider investing more into your marketing.

Traditionally, LinkedIn has been considered the best platform for B2B marketers to use, simply because the audience is entirely made up of professionals. That said, other platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, offer their own benefits, so it pays to do a bit of research to determine who your audience is (as we mentioned earlier) and which platforms they gravitate towards.

Proactively Build Out Your Content

Tell me honestly… how likely is it that you’ll commit to updating every social media platform you maintain, consistently creating new content to share? Is this something you’re going to want to do on a favorite holiday?

Probably not, and we’d argue it shouldn’t be. Fortunately, there are platforms out there that mean you don’t have to. Instead of manually updating your business profiles, these platforms allow you to build out all your content in advance. Therefore, you can set aside some time, commit to creating the best content you can, and allow the platform to take care of posting it all.

Experiment to Improve

Regardless of your experience, you can always get better at doing something. Social media is no exception to this rule. Don’t be afraid to lean on your metrics and change up your approach every now and then. How are people responding to your social media posts? Are they reacting to them, or even commenting on them and spurring discussions? This data, plus a variety of other metrics, will give you the information that can help inspire new things for you to try.

Incorporate Your Findings

Of course, once you’ve collected all this data, it would be a shame if it went to waste. Your next step needs to be to consider what your data—like the aforementioned metrics, for example—tells you and adjust your approach to social media appropriately. Rinse and repeat the process until you get more data, and continue the cycle.

We always say that marketing is an ongoing process, and this is one of the most important ways to keep it fresh, engaging, and relevant so this process can continue.

Use Social Media to Socialize

It can be too easy—especially for businesses—to forget that social media is more than just a marketing tool. Social media is meant to be inherently social. Use it to build relationships with prospective customers and clients, answering questions, sharing information, and showing them that you are there to help.

This is the big benefit of social media for businesses. It makes it that much easier for suspects and prospects to learn about you, start communicating with you casually, and be drawn to your website to seriously investigate your services. However, before any of this can happen, you need to start the conversation and invite them to engage.

Hopefully, This Will Help You Optimize Your Use of Social Media

As you’re marketing your business, it’s important that you also remember that you’re not really talking to other businesses… you’re talking to the people who own them, have invested in them, and are motivated to see them succeed. Prove that you can help them do that, and you’re halfway there.

We’re here to assist MSPs with their marketing needs, including their social media management, and we’d be happy to discuss how we might be able to help you. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to learn more.