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Social media can play many different roles as you begin to build out your digital marketing strategy. For example, it can be used for lead generation, influencer outreach, building brand awareness, or for social listening and customer research. With that in mind, here are five highly successful B2B social media marketing tactics to match up with each of these different business goals.
1. Make content actionable
The B2B audience is different from the B2C audience in that people are not coming to your social media platforms in order to be entertained or amused. Of course, a little humor or showbiz glitz can help, but primarily, you need to focus on making your content actionable. What this means in practical terms is that each piece of social media content should deliver value and help users solve a specific problem. This can be very effective when it comes to lead generation, since users will already be coming to your social media platforms confident that you can help them solve a problem or deal with a challenge.
2. Share content from others
At first, this might sound counter-intuitive. You might even ask, “Why should I be sharing someone else’s content?” The answer is simple: social media is all about forming relationships, and one great way to get the attention of thought leaders and social media influencers is by sharing their content. Here, it’s best to focus on industry influencers – that is, people who can really move the needle on your key business metrics. So, as a very basic form of influencer outreach, share, re-tweet, and like content from others. You might just be surprised at how often people in your industry reciprocate.
3. Create bite-sized chunks of content
The best way to build brand awareness is by making it possible to distribute as much of your content as possible across the social web. The way to do that is by creating short, bite-sized chunks of content that can be easily consumed and digested. For example, if you’ve written a stellar corporate blog post, think about ways of using takeaways from that blog post as part of very brief tweets. If you’ve created a huge corporate sizzle reel of accomplishments, look for ways to divide that video into much shorter clips of two minutes or less that can be shared on other social platforms like YouTube or Instagram.
4. Participate in conversations
It’s called social media for a reason, right? One way to be “social” is by participating in conversations that are happening around the web. For example, if there is an industry association that everybody in your niche belongs to, see what they’re saying online and start to participate. First, of course, you need to hone your social listening skills (nobody enjoys a corporate shill who shows up uninvited and then starts promoting products instead of really listening to what people have to say).
5. Analyze your data and metrics
Social media can become a wonderful research tool, if you first learn how to run the numbers and figure out what they have to say, For example, there are plenty of audience measurement tools on Facebook, where you can see exactly where people are coming from, and what types of interests they have. The more data that you have – the more likely that you will be able to create a marketing message that really resonates with users.
Final Thought
Putting together a comprehensive B2B social media marketing plan might seem daunting at first. However, if you first consider which strategic business goal or objective you are trying to reach, it becomes much easier to find a social media marketing tactic that matches up with it perfectly.
