Is Having an Organic Social Media Presence Important for a B2B?

The future of marketing has evolved greatly over the last decade. The presence of social media has taken the world by storm. When it comes to marketing, many examples of social media success typically include B2C content. But B2B companies shouldn’t brush off the chance to utilize social media. In fact, organic social media is a great way to get your content out there and generate leads.

What is B2B organic social media?

B2B social media marketing uses social channels to market products or services to business clients and prospects. It looks a little bit different than it would for consumer-based marketing, but still has the same goal. 

When it comes to social media marketing, there are two common strategies: Organic and Paid. 

Organic social media is free and generated by you for your followers. Organic social media should be informative, educational, inspirational, and generate traffic to your web pages. Whereas, paid social media can help you reach audiences beyond your current followers to better assist with lead generation or brand recognition, but at an additional cost.

As stated above, maintaining an organic social media presence is free. However, a B2B can invest in services that will help produce and promote your content. Examples of these services include HubSpot and Buffer. With these tools, your team can write social media posts ahead of time and schedule them to be automatically posted. This is always an option if your team sees that this could be a good fit.

In this blog, we focus on the importance of an organic social media strategy for your business.

Why is it important to have an organic social media presence?

There are plenty of benefits to using an organic social media strategy in your B2B business. I’ll outline a brief summary of the top pros below.

1. No cost
1. Because you’re posting organically, rather than using a paid advertising strategy, posting on the top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are completely free to utilize. Even if you are not successful at first, there is no loss. You have time to see what works and what doesn’t. 
2. Generates website traffic
1. Most B2B social media posts include CTAs (calls to action) to view educational articles, downloads, resources, and services. These can lead clicks back to important pages and generate more potential leads!
3. The possibilities are endless
1. There is a lot of creativity involved in creating social media. It allows you to figure out what aligns with your values and marketing strategy. Furthermore, the amount of content is endless! Repurposing old content is one of the best ways to utilize social media and what you already have. Check out this blog to read more about repurposed social media.
   
   

A Common Misconception

Organic social media still gets views and traction, even if your business doesn't pay for ads or promotion for your posts. For social media platforms (especially Facebook), businesses have to pay in order to get views/traction. However, that's not always the case. For example, an organic social media strategy on LinkedIn still works really well for businesses and produces engagement. Marketing takes time, but the results are worth the time and effort that is put in. Curious about how leads actually come from organic social media? Check out this 1 Bold Step blog to see real data and the return on investment that comes from organic social media. 

Tips and Tricks for Posting on Social Media

Before you go ahead and try out an organic social media strategy, you need to know the basics. Getting started will be easy once you read through this list of the main tricks on how to generate successful social media content!

• Know your audience
  • What is your service or product? What are your company values? Display these to fit your audience. One way to help do this is by creating buyer personas for your target audience. 
• Produce quality content
  • Quality is always more important than quantity. Take the time to create good content instead of trying to release as much social media content as you can. Although it is free to post on social media, it might be worth investing in a system such as HubSpot to help keep things organized and on track.
• Optimize landing pages and CTAs
  • Link your social media back to important pages for your company.
• Create a solid plan to figure out where your opportunities lie 
  • Try utilizing the S.W.O.T framework to dive deeper into your competitive landscape.
• Plan how to measure your social media success 
  • How can you do this? It depends on your business goals. You might focus on response time, clicks, impressions, engagement rate, conversions, etc. The important thing is to set realistic and achievable goals.
    
    

Important Trends to Keep in Mind

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of utilizing social media for your business, check out these infographics for further information. By keeping an eye on trends, you’ll stay on top of the latest social media success stories.

• 31.3% of global Internet users use the Internet for business-related research.
• 22.7% of internet users use social media for work-related networking and research.
• 96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.
• Twitter is next at 82%.
• Social media is the top distribution method for B2B content marketers, with 89% using social tools for this purpose.
• 76% of B2B organizations use social media analytics to measure content performance.
• By 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur on digital channels.
  
  

Final thoughts

There is no reason why B2B companies shouldn’t utilize an organic social media strategy. The possibilities are endless and it does more good than harm. 

Need help or are curious about how to implement these techniques into your B2B marketing strategy? Reach out to us here at 1 Bold Step and we’d be more than happy to help. For more marketing tips, be sure to subscribe to our blog.