Social Media for B2B

Every business wants to be on social media. Social media is a virtual extension of your brand. It is an essential input into your communication mix. To make it work, you however need a plan. If nothing at the least, a method to the universe of social media.

The social media world is both tricky and challenging. Tricky because your business can attract a wide range of comments – positive and negative in no time. Challenging as it holds a mirror to your overall branding approach. Well done social media illustrates the power of your brand and how it is relevant to your potential and existing customers. Gains of social media are of course evident in customer experiences and employee endearment too.

Whatever may be the application and thrust of your social media efforts, you still need a method. For, you may not realize but social media is a virtual extension of your brand. Shall we call it a social extension…

Brand is what people think of you when you are not in the room. Brand is also a set of perceptions that form a collective narrative on what the brand’s story and deliverables are. Those same brand parameters have to be captured in social media.

Perceived barriers to B2B social media

Technical and difficult subjects. Social media for seemingly technical and difficult subjects – those that require time and space to be adequately explained, may be the first mind barriers that you will encounter amongst your teams and leadership.
Business objective misalignment. The next could be a lack of exposure on how to align business objectives to social media. How to dovetail the sales and marketing enablement efforts through social media?
Not exploiting the role of content. Social media managers often under-appreciate the crucial role that the assortment of content can play in establishing a cohesive and well articulated social media posture. All the while ensuring that every post, blog, profile and video adds to the brand and the customer nurturing process.
Lack of a strategic roadmap. Most social media strategies falter for want of a clear roadmap. Leads, feedback, experiences, reviews all can come your way through social media – but how to harness each of those to meet your goals is the challenge.Essential is to have an approach. Here are some easy-to-understand steps and some dos and don’ts.

7 smart steps towards B2B social media presence

1. Align business objectives to social media efforts

Social media is a part of your marketing and communication mix. Important therefore is the lucid articulation of the business objectives.

What do you need social media for?

To build awareness about your business?
To reach more prospects?
To explain and describe your offerings in detail?
To enable service and mitigation through social media?
To profile the leadership?
To build a values – driven internal brand
To share with audiences behind the scenes happenings?

List them all. They are your first pointers to creating a content strategy and the approach for social media.

2. Brand first in social media

It may be relevant to reiterate the importance of knowing and communicating what your brand stands for in social media.

The brand’s purpose, its accompanying values, the proposition(s) and how they actually impact a customer’s business and enhance credentials + trust, capturing the voice of the customer within the brand. Brand is a set of perceptions that form a collective narrative on what the brand’s story and deliverables are. Those same parameters have to be captured in social media. It is important to be in social media for B2B businesses. What is even more important is to have the brand in social media. Remember social media is merely a channel option. It is not the story. Your brand is the story. Social media can at best be a smart enabler.

3. Have a distinct brand voice

Your business may be all logic, your concepts and relevance – based on reason and facts – that doesn’t stop you from being conversational, articulate and well-argued on social media.

Do you think that your B2B business is boring, stuffy, rigid and only lends itself to business-like, rational communication? People don’t buy a drill because it’s an engineering marvel, they buy it for the sharp and precise hole it can make. Benefits precede. They are your handmaidens for B2B communication. Which brings us to the aspect of brand voice. While you communicate your brand, its benefits and what it stands for to your identified and targeted audiences, you need to ask yourself if the brand has a unified voice? Are you communicating with the same brand voice across all the mediums and channels?

In doubt about brand voice? Here’s a simple definition: Brand voice is the personality of your brand.

“A passing thought here… in the B2B space our experience has been that businesses who can induce a bit of gravitas into their brand voice and narratives appeal more than the ones that force themselves to come across as being what they are actually not – forcing humor, or that ‘Wassup bro‘ attitude. Well reasoned and argued story telling works in the B2B space. And your brand voice can communicate what you actually stand for – that you are knowledgeable, passionate, inventive and so on.”

4. Focus on the right platforms

Social media has many choices. For the social media strategist in your business, it is important to understand which of the social media channels is best suited for your line of business.

Merely looking up as to what is happening on the various channels may not give you a comprehensive idea. Do diligent homework on how the large players in your space are using social media. You will find cues on which are the preferred channels. For example, in the B2B space LinkedIn is the top choice. Followed by Facebook and then the others. Each of these social media channels have their unique characteristics. Understand them well.

A poll done on Hootsuite revealed B2B marketers’ preferences of social media channels. This is by no means statistically significant or representative – but nevertheless a good glimpse into the broad psyche.

LinkedIn B2B connects are strong. Readings are many. Length of posts could be more than 300 words. Curation of content is also welcome on this platform.

Facebook has been evolving. From being an image-driven channel, it is now appreciating long text posts, curated content and of course videos.

Instagram on the other hand is also developing a penchant for long text posts. Especially from Influencers. Primarily a visual medium. Color themes, subject themes work well here. Instagram stories to illustrate company culture and customer experiences work well.

Lastly Twitter is a person to person medium. News, announcements and something disruptive with quick reach works well here. Twitter likes videos too. But do remember that it is a person channel. More than an organization one. However, it can lend lot of heft to an organization when they deploy it as a service and complaint mitigating tool.

5. Plan your content ahead

Social media content can be diverse. So long it is aligned to the business objectives, and you have defined the outcomes of your content strategy, your approach should be to blend the topical with the foundational elements.

Under topical you have all business impacting current events. Wins, announcements, expansion, employee initiatives, visitors, awards and more. In this bucket it is critical to address issues from a business perspective for that week/month/quarter. These could be simple posts, mini treatises, videos, and interviews among others to engage customers with urgency and solutions. Content in the topical bucket can be called ‘flow’.

Foundational content is about well-known thought leadership – your ideas and thinking on the category and its trends. More than just about propounding theories, this is about actually blending trends and foresights smartly into your brand narratives and thought changers for the marketplace to establish your intellectual authority and credibility. This foundational bucket could also be labelled as ‘stock’.

Combining the flow and stock with dexterity and aligning them all to the business objectives is the way forward.

6. Integrate for exponential impact

A short reminder that whatever content and whichever bucket, you need to diligently and consciously integrate all the content.

It is critical that the potential viewer/reader sees all the content as coming from one source, however diverse their interests may be with regards to the space and your business. They should see a unified brand voice, a harmonious narrative and experience oneness in the content – across channels and pieces.

Integration is a challenge. But once you do it well rest assured your brand and business will enjoy exponential impact. One brand, one narrative one thread. It works.

7. Check and measure

Let us take a simple approach to evaluating content. Here are some basic steps on how to measure the effectiveness.

All content should be evaluated against the business and communication goals you have set out in the first place.
Content must come across with a unified brand voice.
Hire a small team with journalism/advertising copywriting background who can evaluate your content for lucidity, editorial correctness and engagement.
Check for SEO hygiene. Don’t labor over keywords and associated ranking but stay within the horizons of popular and sought-after keywords.
Tie content to outcomes. Here are some metrics to aid this:

Traffic
Overall reach
Page views
Unique page views
Bounce rates
Authority
Comments and broad engagement metrics – likes, actions and shares
Leads
Sales conversions

There you go. Now you’re all set to embark on a meaningful outing on Social media for your business.

Author : Raj Mohan Tella. August 22, 2021