Best Social Media Platforms for B2B Businesses (Ranked)

The most important thing to remember is that it’s better to be on a couple of platforms and do them really well rather than be on all of them and do them badly.

In thins post, we’ll run through the top 5 social media platforms for B2B businesses, in order, and explain why they need to be active on them.

Let’s have a look at why in a little more detail.

1. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the number one platform for professionals and businesses to connect. At its very core, it’s Facebook for the business world and everyone on the platform is either there to do business or show off their digital resume. Making it the best platform for B2B businesses to be active on.

The newsfeed is full of people promoting themselves, news, business updates, and products and services.

Most businesses choose it as their number on platform for engaging with audiences and building brand awarness.

Why is LinkedIn so imporant to B2B marketing strategies?

• LinkedIn allows you to post content directly to your audience and build leads.
• The messaging functionality means that you can directly message people who might be interested in your business’s products or services. Meaning that you can scope out people who fit within your target market and start to build a relationship through conversational marketing, instead of spending money on ads or acquiring emails.
• LinkedIn has an in-depth ad platform, which allows you to create highly targeted ads to reach audiences you wouldn’t normally be able to target while also having really good ad campaign types such as; website visits, conversion tracking, and even lead generation forms for promoting new features or eBooks.
• There are no restrictions on the kind of content you can post, with the latest edition of being able to share pdf documents.
• A more recent feature gives you that ability to see exactly who follows your business page, giving you a list of leads that you can then use to start building valuable relationships.

LinkedIn tip for B2B digital marketers

Don’t just focus on posting content to your business page, instead try and create more personal content and posting it through your personal account. This is the best way to start building better leads.

2. Slide Share

Not many businesses know the importantance of Slide Share or even what it is.

Slide Share is a platform that is owned by LinkedIn and is used for hosting professional content such as presentations, infographics, and other documents. Slide Share has over 70 million users and generates about 13.6 million organic visits each month. Making it a powerful marketing tool for B2B businesses.

What’s more important is the types of people visiting, who are professionals within organisations searching for more information. In fact, it receives 500% more traffic from professionals than any other social media platform.

And using it is simple enough.

All you need to do is create a compatable document and upload it. Then you can promote it however you want. You may add it to your LinkedIn newsfeed, send it in emails, or use it as a reference tool for new leads.

Not only is Slide Share great for getting more eyes on your content, it also doubles as a learning platform where you can do courses on almost any subject that’s of interest.

3. Twitter

77% of B2B businesses say they use Twitter to distribute content making it the second most used social media platform for B2B businesses

Perhaps the best feature of Twitter is it’s search filters. By searching keywords that relate to your business, you’ll be able to find thusands of people and businesses who might be of interest to your business.

Just look at the above example, a search for ‘Facilities manager’ resulted in thousands of related profiles. Giving me a huge list of potential leads.

Twitter is also a great place to give you business a human touch. Allowing you to share content and interact with your audience. Just look at the example below.

4. Youtube

According to a report by the Aberdeen Group, companies that utilise video in their marketing strategies grow their revenue 49% faster year-over-year.

And 70% of marketers in B2B industries believe that video converts qualified leads more effectively than all other forms of content marketing. That means that video content has the potential to out-perform images, blog posts, statuses, and presentations when posting to social media.

Putting video as the most important form of content. Of course, this doesn’t just mean creating sales messages but it also means feature walkthroughs, pre-recorded demos, recorded webinars, and any other form of video.

The reason why Youtube is so important is that it serves two purposes. One is as a hosting platform for all of your videos. meaning that you store them there and embed them in other places, such as your website. The second is building brand awareness whether that be through organic views or paid ads.

There’s three main benefits when it comes to Youtube:

• Boost your SEO rankings — You may not know this but by using Youtube you can increase your SEO rankings. Why? Because Google includes videos in their rankings. In fact, videos sit almost at the top.
• Expand your reach — Using organic or paid marketing on Youtube allows you to expand your reach to target markets you couldn’t normally reach. It opens up a whole new channel for you to expand to.
• Grow your brand — Expanding your reach and growing your brand go hand-in-hand. And Youtube gives you the opportunity to develop a strong brand and get more creative with your content.

5. Facebook

Facebook isn’t normally where you would see most B2B businesses but it does have the potential to serve a very important role.

It’s true that Facebook’s organic reach has declined over the years and that’s all due to the increasing competition and Facebook Ads spend across industries.

But it’s still a key part of the paid marketing funnel, not so much for prospecting new leads but for remarketing to your website visitors. The cheap nature of running ads on Facebook makes it a great platform for re-engaging website visitors who didn’t convert.

My advice, just use Facebook for remarketing activities. If you want to go further, get active organically but don’t count on it paying off for a long time.

These 5 social media platforms are the best for B2B businesses and I recommend you become active on all of them but if you don’t have the resources to do that, start with LinkedIn. It’s the strongest social media platform for B2B businesses to start increasing their growth and generating more leads.

Originally published at https://hunchmetrics.co on October 7, 2020.