06 Jul 5 Best Social Media Platforms for B2B Businesses
It’s no secret that social media is the most widely used channel to drive brand awareness. 91% of B2B marketers use social media networks to achieve top-of-the-funnel goals like reaching their target audience and driving sales.
With the continuously evolving landscape of networks, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and possibly extend your brand to too many platforms. The problem with using too many networks is that it prevents you from having a meaningful social media presence.
If you want successful marketing campaigns, you must choose the best platforms to advertise your products. Not just that, your campaigns should be compelling to draw in the target audience and fuel engagement. Each platform works differently and requires tailored content to succeed.
Today, use our expertise at Ignite to help you discover the five best social media networks for your B2B marketing campaigns.
If you choose to use only one social media network for your B2B marketing, make it LinkedIn. This platform has more than 830 million users from over 200 countries worldwide. The fact that most business owners are active on this platform makes it a highly effective place to nurture online referral relationships and generate business leads. In fact, 80% of the total B2B leads come from LinkedIn.
The key to a successful presence on this platform is providing valuable information and support to your connections and groups. There are over a million groups on LinkedIn, some with a narrow industry focus to accommodate all businesses. You can run highly targeted advertising by industry, location, and other demographics.
Another exciting LinkedIn feature, specifically for B2B sales, is the ability to discover everything about a target prospect at a professional level. This makes target marketing much easier.
Facebook boasts the broadest audience of any social media platform, providing B2B marketers a perfect opportunity to meet their target audience or other business owners. It has more than 2.93 billion active users every month, of which around 10 million are businesses advertising on the platform.
Even international B2B companies can connect with businesses from other countries that may not be aware of their brand. This platform enhances potential reach because almost every social media user has a Facebook account.
Facebook offers a cost-effective way to showcase your brand personality and build brand awareness to a broad audience. With Facebook ads, you can land clients in a specific area by targeting those with a particular location in their profile.
It is also possible to reach your prospects from their job descriptions on the profile. When developing your ads, focus on the demographic options to get the most out of your ads. We recommend continual testing and optimization here, as we’ve found that the matching to job descriptions isn’t particularly accurate.
YouTube
YouTube has more than 2.6 billion monthly users, making it a perfect marketing platform for businesses targeting a broader audience. Most Facebook users are active on YouTube. This allows B2B marketers to create campaigns targeting the same user profiles across the two platforms. When prospective customers see your brand on more than one platform, they will begin to recognize your products.
Additionally, YouTube is one of the leading platforms business owners use to make decisions for B2B products. 95% of B2B buyers claim that videos play a vital role in purchasing decisions. Many buyers also use YouTube to research and learn more about new brands.
With this in mind, you can build a twofold campaign for your brand. In the discovery phase, you should focus on raising brand awareness within your target audience. The other one should involve adding brand and product videos to help buyers make decisions in the research phase.
Although Twitter isn’t considered as effective as LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube for B2B, it still qualifies in our list of top social media platforms for B2B business. It gives marketers the potential to reach over 330 million users worldwide. Only a few brands consider using Twitter in their marketing campaigns. The truth is that at least 30% of decision-makers use the B2B brand research platform, making it a place to consider as you market your products.
Using Twitter to build your brand identity through entertaining and informative tweets can be challenging to get an audience from scratch. Luckily, there is an abundance of influencers on the platform. Try finding the most industry-relevant influencers on Twitter to help promote your products to their followers by tagging you in their posts.
You may view Instagram as a non-professional platform, but many B2B businesses use the platform for marketing. With more than 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram offers a prime location to target your prospects. One of the perfect ways to utilize Instagram in your marketing efforts is to create short 2D videos demonstrating how your B2B products work. Of course, this platform isn’t for every kind of business, so think carefully about what content makes sense (if any) for your brand on Instagram.
Customers make purchasing decisions when they see the effectiveness of products in action. Ensure your videos do not exceed one minute, and each demonstrates a different use case. This approach allows you to reach many potential customers in your target audience.
How to Successfully Market your B2B Business on Social Media
There’s no doubt that social media has changed the way we do business. B2B businesses can no longer afford to ignore the power of social media marketing. But with so many platforms and options, it can be tough to know where to start.
Here are a few tips to help you successfully market your B2B business on social media:
Understand your target audience.
First, take the time to understand your target audience. Who are they? What are their pain points? What kind of content are they looking for? Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, you can start creating content that will appeal to them.
Don’t be afraid to mix things up.
B2B businesses often make the mistake of only posting business-related content. But social media is about building relationships, so it’s important to show some personality and share other types of content as well. Mixing things up will not only make your content more interesting, but it will also help you build better relationships with your followers. B2B is often a patient, multi-touch process.
Engage with your followers.
Finally, don’t forget to engage with your followers. Respond to comments and questions, and join in on conversations. The more you interact with your followers, the stronger your relationships will be—and that’s good for business.
Measure your results.
Keep track of things like engagement rates and click-through rates. This will help you determine what’s working and what isn’t so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
With these tips in mind, you’re well on your way to successfully marketing your B2B business on social media. So get out there and start building those relationships.
Final Thoughts
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to jump into the social media pool and start swimming with the big fishes. At Ignite Social Media, we can help make that happen. We have a team of experts who are good with all there is to know about each social media platform and how they can be used successfully for B2B businesses.
With everything we have outlined today, the following considerations will help you get faster social media marketing campaign results.
- Select platforms where your biggest target customers or audience are
- Get your employees involved by sharing your content on their social media accounts
- Focus on building a strong presence in more than one platform
- Involve a marketing agency
Hiring a social media marketing agency is an effective way to achieve your brand’s success on different platforms. Suppose you have been struggling to reach your target audience. At Ignite, we have helped thousands of B2B brands build a solid social media presence and increase revenue.
Request a proposal now and let us show you just how easy it is to get started on the right foot in social media marketing — and see those leads start pouring in. What was your favorite platform from our list?
