As of the beginning of 2022, there were nearly four billion total social media users across all platforms, with the average user having accounts on seven social networks. That’s a huge potential audience for your products and services, but if you’re not approaching each site the right way, you’re going to get overlooked.
Additionally, you don’t have to market on every social media platform to be successful, especially if you don’t have a large budget. Focus on the sites that most cater to your ideal customer profiles and start there, increasing your reach as necessary.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular social media platforms and go over best practices for marketing on each.
There are a lot of ways to use Facebook to engage with your audience, including posts (organic and boosted), ads, stories and reels, groups, and messages. However, you don’t have to engage in all of them to be successful — it really depends on how much of your budget you’re willing to put towards Facebook marketing and how much time you can devote to it.
Posting, for example, is completely free. But if you end up with a post that gets a lot of engagement, you may decide to pay to boost that post for a limited time to help it reach even more eyes. You could also turn that content into a video for a reel (again free) or turn it into a story ad (paid). For more paid options, consider creating Facebook ads. Facebook has one of the largest potential audiences of social media platforms (around 2.11 billion people), so it’s a good place to focus your social media advertising efforts if you have a limited budget.
Additionally, make sure you’re posting when you’re most likely to get engagement — typically, on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8 AM and noon, but your business and audience may vary. Test things out to see what works best for you, and use analytics to compare engagement numbers.
Instagram requires photo and video content, so it’s probably not one to focus on if you don’t have the resources to create high-quality original content. Stock photos can only get you so far. However, if you do have the resources available, there are a lot of ways you can engage with this audience.
Like with other social media sites, posting regularly is going to be key to keeping your following up and finding new followers. Accounts that post regularly get a bump in the algorithms, making it easier for new people to find you. Additionally, Instagram has put a lot of focus on reels recently, meaning that video content is getting promoted in the discover tab (free) more than still photos. However, you can also pay to boost your posts or stories and use hashtags to increase their reach.
Games, contests, and challenges tend to get the best engagement on Instagram, so it’s a great place to post giveaways, poll your audience, or challenge them with trivia questions. Instagram stories make it easy to post polls or get audience input, so make use of them whenever possible. Instagram paid ads are also a good option, showing up in the user’s feed and acting like native content.
One of the best ways to market your business on LinkedIn is to post regularly about industry trends and thought leadership for your industry. Posting around 20 times per month can help you reach approximately 60% of your LinkedIn audience. While that may seem like a lot of posts (about one every weekday in a month), not everyone in your audience will log in every day, so you have to ensure you’re in their feed when they do.
Additionally, try publishing your posts at different times to see what gets the best engagement for your audience, and then create a schedule based on that. For example, maybe you get a lot of engagement in the mornings on Tuesdays, but on Wednesdays, it’s all in the afternoon. You’d want to follow those trends to make sure you get as many eyes on your posts as possible. You may also want to sponsor certain posts to get them in front of even more people.
You should also use images and videos in your posts to make them pop. Text can easily get lost in a feed, but visuals catch the attention and make people more likely to take another look. And using two to three hashtags in each post can help you grow your audience by putting relevant content in front of people actively looking for it.
Compare the effectiveness of social media vs. email marketing.
While Pinterest may not strike you as a place to market B2B products and services, it does have some advantages. For one, pins can stay relevant for a very long time — about 1700% longer than Facebook and 7665% longer than Twitter. This means that Pinterest doesn’t have to be your driving strategy for social media marketing, but you can post every couple of weeks or so to gain some additional eyes on your products.
Additionally, the Pinterest algorithm doesn’t have the same disdain for links that other social media algorithms do. Almost every pin links offsite, meaning you can link back to product or lead-generating pages with little to no penalty. And because those pins are staying around longer, you’re getting more potential value per pin than you would per post on Facebook or Twitter.
Consider your captions carefully, and make sure you’re using language that matches the intent of your audience. The site does also require some visual element, so make sure your photos and videos are high quality. Plus, you’ll need to make sure they’re interesting enough to convince someone to click on the pin and visit your site.
TikTok
TikTok is rapidly growing, but like Instagram, it requires video content and may not be a good option if you’re just starting out with your social media marketing efforts. You’re going to have to create original content, and it’s going to require a lot of time because you’ll need to follow the trends which change rapidly. Hashtags can help you see what’s trending currently, and you can include them in your post to reach a wider audience.
If you can afford it, paying TikTok influencers to promote your content can help you build trust and reach more people. There are tons of technology influencers on TikTok, as well as influencers in other niches that might be relevant to your product, like HR, project management, and growing a small business.
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You also have to post often and engage with other creators. TikTok, like other social media platforms, rewards users who are active. Make thoughtful comments on other people’s posts to get more visibility for your own account and encourage the algorithm to promote your account more in the discover feeds.
Twitter is one of the easiest social media platforms to get started on because it doesn’t require photos to be successful (although you can include them). Keep messages short, conversational, and to the point — you only have space for 280 characters, after all. Additionally, not all your tweets should include calls to action. Some of them should simply be about sharing information or even making a joke about your industry.
Your ads, however, should include clear calls to action. Although avoid putting links in ads when possible because the algorithm is designed to keep people on Twitter, meaning it won’t promote posts that want to take a user to another site as well. The same is true for your organic posts. While sometimes you’ll need to include links, try to keep it to a minimum.
Look at the trending events and topics to determine if there’s a topic you should comment on, and follow and engage with other accounts in your industry to help build a following for your own brand. Additionally, include one to two hashtags in tweets when appropriate to help reach a wider audience. And remember that liked tweets are public, so don’t like anything on your business account that you wouldn’t want customers to see.
YouTube
YouTube is basically a combination of both a social media platform and a search engine, drawing an audience looking for information and entertainment. Additionally, because Google owns YouTube, searches on Google often return relevant links to YouTube. Like TikTok, it requires video, although the videos on YouTube can be longer and still get engagement, so it’s a great place for product demos if you have them or can create them. However, it may not be a priority for all businesses.
Because YouTube doubles as a search engine, you’ll need to optimize your videos for SEO best practices. That means creating a title and meta-description that includes your focus keyword. You should also do research on thumbnail options to determine what kinds of pictures will perform best for that keyword. Pictures of people perform well for a variety of topics, but they may not be right for everything.
Additionally, approximately 70% of people claim they’ve made a purchase after seeing the product or service on YouTube. Therefore, even if you don’t want to make full videos for YouTube, you should consider running video ads to reach people already researching topics related to your product. Alternatively, you can work with YouTube influencers to promote your product. This will help you build trust within the community, and you likely won’t have to handle much, if any, of the video production.
Which Sites Does Your Brand Belong On?
There are a lot of social media sites out there, and it’s unrealistic to attempt to market on all of them. B2B software vendors should focus their efforts first on LinkedIn and Facebook, then add others that fit their needs as they get more comfortable. If you have high-quality photo and video content, definitely consider expanding your reach to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. And if not, but you still want to reach a larger audience or your brand has a more casual voice, add Twitter to your lineup. Or if you do have photos and videos but not much time, consider Pinterest to extend the life of each post.
Social media is great for building brand awareness and engaging with your audience, but it can’t stand alone as a marketing strategy. For help meeting your buyers at every stage of the funnel from brand to demand, contact TechnologyAdvice. We have a host of marketing and lead generation solutions that can help you meet your buyers where they are and give them the information they need to buy effectively.
