How Do B2B Companies Leverage Social Media In 2019?

Social media is hard to ignore because most everyone you know is using it in one way or another. Estimates sit at over 1-billion people with social media accounts and the majority of those people use more than one social media platform. With all of this in mind, you have a huge audience available to you, provided you know how to make social media work for your business.

 When you consider that over half of all B2B buyers use social media to search for product information, it only makes sense to have your business involved in some way. The traffic alone gives you a reason to seriously think about how to leverage social media with your B2B services and products. This article will explore the many ways you can do that for your B2B business.

1 – Think About It Before You Hit Send 

Social media travels pretty much at the speed of light. It’s real-time on steroids and requires that you approach it with a plan. Sure, it’s also a lot of fun but when you are putting together a marketing program with social media you have to be prepared before you post something. 

This may require spending time to map out a social media plan by defining your goals and objectives and identifying your target audience. With this data, you can put together a detailed outline of the kind of content you will publish and with a plan you will be able to engage more effectively. 

2 – Locate Your Voice

Since you will be communicating with real people in real-time, you will have an opportunity to give your brand a human feel to it. This means speaking casually not corporately and focusing on making connections with customers and clients in a friendly, compassionate manner. 

What makes social media so valuable to B2B businesses is how followers will demonstrate loyalty once they have truly connected with you. It won’t happen overnight but if you concentrate on conversing as you would with a buddy over lunch, you will see results that indicate followers like you and what you say. Be real, honest and genuine to make this work. 

3 – Engage With People

Because relationship building is the main goal of social media you have to put serious thought into the types of content you share with your audience. You can most definitely focus on business information such as news about your industry but you may also want to share something that is more human nature in content. The idea here is to connect with people.

Sure, you are a B2B business owner and you want to sell your products online. It makes sense but to build those social media relationships that will eventually generate income to your business, you can’t just sell your products with each post. This is why you need a plan of attack or to team up with the right consulting firm (here’s a great list from CTC here). 

4 – Spread Your Message Across Other Platforms

It was mentioned earlier that the average person has more than one social media account. That means you will have to get in the habit of sharing your posts on more than one social media channel. Believe it or not, not everyone uses Facebook. Several people just use LinkedIn. Others use Instagram and Twitter. You need to be everywhere.

Fortunately, there are content management tools that give you access to several different social media platforms where you can post on one and share that same post on other social media platforms. Sure, you may be reaching some of the same people when you do this but you will also reach some new people who have not heard of your B2B business until now.

5 – Become A Video Star 

Posts that include videos have been proven to receive more clicks than posts without. Plus, posts with video tend to receive more likes, comments, and shares so this shows that when you are engaging with your social media audience, adding a video to a post is going to get that post noticed more than if you just hit send without any other embellishment to the post.

The videos you post will be more effective if you produced them yourself and that they focus on your overall engagement goals. You don’t have to be an expert video producer, either. Most smartphones record video and by putting together a short 30-second piece on a topic of interest, you will appear more real and honest to your social media followers or work with a great team that can help you out.

6 – Watch The Other Guys 

One more tricky thing about social media is that you can bet that most or all of your competitors are already using it. That’s okay because with them also trying to engage with their audience you can learn a bit of information about your competitors just by monitoring what they are saying and doing with their social media content. You may be a bit surprised by what you learn.

The reason why you should do this is to see if there is an opportunity for you to learn from what your competitors are doing and are not doing online. If they are not very swift at responding to customer questions online, then that is something you can focus on improving in your social media channels. There are many ways competition can teach you about your business.

In Conclusion

Social media is not a fad. It is going to be around for a very long time. To leverage it to benefit your B2B business, you will have to get involved. This means opening accounts on several different social media platforms to reach the widest audience. With the high volume of traffic on social media, your business has to get into the middle of it. 

According to Digital Authority Partners, the fastest path to success with social media is to be real, connect with people and give your brand an honest, genuine, human touch. When you can reach people on an emotional level they will connect with you and your brand. Be careful what you post but post everywhere and don’t always use a post as an advertisement selling your service. The more you engage, the more business your business will receive.