Executing effective B2B social media is often similar to B2C social media, but also completely different. In the B2B world, it’s not as relevant or acceptable to post memes or use the “cool best friend” voice to grow your audience and engagement. Your legal team may be strict on content approvals, your starting material is often dense and technical, and leveraging influencers does not come as naturally. Within the wider social media community where everyone follows everyone else’s social media playbook, B2B social media requires some additional touches.
Sure, the B2C-influenced Social Media Best Practices you might find by way of Sprout Social or a post on LinkedIn (both of which are great resources) can be effective. Posting times, hashtags, dimensions, post formats, keywords, how to engage and how often to engage, and tone of voice best practices have helped us increase follower counts, engagements numbers and other KPIs. But for B2B social media, over-emphasis on best practice can hinder long-term B2B social media success, because best practices alone aren’t enough to overcome algorithm changes, bored followers, or little market differentiation.
What’s a B2B Social Media Manager to Do? Swapping Tactics for Strategy
Here’s the thing: best practices serve as an important foundation to your social media strategy, but they’re only tactics – tactics that everyone else, including your competitors, are using. Over-reliance on them holds brands back. A full social media strategy is necessary to have a successful growth journey and to stand out amongst your peers. Here are two common best practice tactics and how you can reframe them to build a successful social media strategy.
Strategy Swaps for Hooks and CTA’s
Every post must have a compelling hook and a call-to-action, right? Generally, this is true: you want people to be pulled into your post and leave the post with something. Here, we need to remember two things: 1) the Rule of Seven, which asserts that a customer will need to encounter your messaging seven times before taking an action like making a purchase, and 2) that many people have an aversion to being sold to.
If every post is an ad, people will stop caring and won’t hit that seventh exposure where that inspires them to act. So, then what? Strategically speaking, everything about your organic social presence should tie together to tell a consistent, meaningful story.
As humans, storytelling is hardwired into our brains and is fundamental to who we are. If we’re in the middle of being told a story, we want to know more and will come back for those additional exposures. Each post and comment are chapters and sentences in the overall story you’re telling.
If you tell your story thoughtfully while encouraging action, you’ll build a lasting your brand loyalty and engagement.
Strategy Swaps for Post Timing and Cadence
If you’re subscribing to all these best practice rules for LinkedIn, you’re likely trying to post every weekday at mid-morning for your time zone. And it makes sense – that’s when your audience is most likely to be online.
People aren’t interacting with your content because of what time it was posted, but because it’s interesting to them. Too often, too much emphasis on posting time and cadence leads to posting subpar content for the sake of meeting a quota. If you’re posting just to post, you may end up losing your audience’s interest. You’ve heard it before but less can really be more.
The strategic way to approach the question of post timing and cadence is to set goals for your content and ensure that each post meets one of those goals before posting. If you don’t have something ready yet, it’s not worth posting yet. Questions for your content can look like:
- Is this relevant to my audience’s interests?
- Does it align with the persona we want to have?
- How does this tie back into our business goals?
- Does it continue the story we’re already telling?
- Does it feel finished?
Are Best Practices Sometimes Too much of a Good Thing?
To be clear, we love a best practice. At Big Valley Marketing, we call them proven practices for a reason: they work. But a practice doesn’t make for a strategy, especially in the dynamic B2B organic social landscape. As you develop and evolve your social media strategy, we recommend you consider breaking at least some of the social media best practice rules to unlock the opportunity for you to tune your approach for your unique B2B audiences (who might secretly love a Tik Tok dance trend but don’t really have space to express that in their enterprise tech work environments).
