One of the key ways of achieving success on social media is by effectively engaging your audience. Engagement involves an interaction between a customer and a business and measures how well your audience is responding to your content.
It’s quantified using different metrics across the social media channels. For example, on LinkedIn it’s measured with likes, comments and post clicks.
So, why is social media engagement important? The Content Marketing Institute found that 71% of B2B companies said engagement was the main goal of their content marketing efforts. This is mainly due to the role engagement plays in social media algorithms, making it more likely for your organic or paid content to appear in news feeds.
Furthermore, it can improve your overall B2B engagement which could result in lead generation. If you’re keen on improving your engagement, here are our top 5 social media engagement tips for your B2B business. We hope you find it useful!
1. Create and share quality content
Just because you’re a B2B business doesn’t mean your content has to be dry and technical. Your content should be varied, create an emotional connection and encourage your audience to take the desired action. Creating eye-catching images and infographics is a great way to stand out and make a point.
Video is considered to be the best performing digital content type. A study by Twitter found that tweets with video see 10x more engagement than those without. Video can also be used for various purposes including promoting your product or service, webinar replays or sharing customer testimonials.
Whilst creating your own content is important, sharing other people’s relevant content can also help improve your reach and establish credibility. If you need some extra tips on content marketing for B2B companies, be sure to have a read of our recent blog!
2. Identify trending content and start conversations
Another one of our top social media engagement tips is to identify trending content in your industry and create, or share, content on the topic. LinkedIn has a handy content suggestion tool which can be used to identify the current trending topics in your industry.
Using trending hashtags is also a great way of joining a conversation. You could even create your own unique hashtag and encourage your audience to use it.
Sharing trending content also offers an opportunity to start a conversation with your audience. This can be done by including questions in your posts and encouraging comments with opinions and ideas.
In the below tweet from our partner HubSpot, they asked their audience for their opinion on Facebook and cryptocurrency as they knew their users and potential customers would be interested in it.
3. Encourage employee advocacy
With constantly changing social media algorithms making it difficult to reach your audience, B2B marketers are finding new routes, such as utilising employee advocacy.
Employee advocacy means your are encouraging your employees to promote your business by using their own social channels. For example, this could be an employee sharing a company post to their LinkedIn.
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Even if your business only has a few employees, encouraging them to share your content can help you reach an entirely new audience. Your employees may already have large networks, so it can be a great way to generate brand exposure, increase your reach and engagement.
4. Post frequently and identify optimal posting times
Once you have developed a social media strategy for your business, consistency is required to maintain it and continually engage your audience. Rather than sporadically posting your content, it’s useful to create a content calendar and ensure you are posting a varied range of content from blogs to videos.
To help maintain a presence in your audience’s social feeds, it’s important to post regularly. You should aim for around 2-5 posts per week on LinkedIn and Facebook and ideally at least once per day on Twitter.
While there is no perfect time to post, there are certain times that are more optimal than others for each of the social platforms. It’s also worth testing this and identifying if certain times result in more engagement with your audience.
5. Use analytics to monitor your results
In order to identify if your audience is engaging with your content, it’s important to monitor your social media analytics. We recommend using a social media management tool, such as SproutSocial or Hubspot.
You can monitor all the key engagement metrics including likes, comments, shares and retweets or look at the overall engagement rate (number of engagements / size of audience). The results can be compared to the previous week or month to identify if you have made any improvements based on the content you posted.
You can also monitor your top performing posts and identify which types of content worked well and which did not engage the audience.
Using social media to achieve your business goals
Social media forms a key part of a B2B digital marketing strategy and when executed correctly, it can help you generate quality leads. However, achieving high levels of social media engagement and success requires a clear content strategy and consistency.
If you’re looking to improve your social media engagement or even your social media presence, we can help. We’re specialists in helping B2B businesses use social media to achieve their business goals.
Take a look at our services or get in touch to find out more.
