With the potential for increasing brand awareness, improving visibility, and developing stronger relationships with prospects and customers, social media has too many benefits to ignore. Although B2B brands face greater challenges than B2C companies, there are ways you can stand out and gain attention.
1. Be Interesting (Even If Your Products Are Boring)
If you have the idea that your brand is boring, you’ll only convey that message to your followers. You may find it hard to believe, but any brand can be interesting when you employ a little creative thinking.
Many brands have already turned what may seem conventionally uninteresting subjects into something fascinating to reach a wider audience. For instance, General Electric uses its social media accounts to focus on the latest developments in science and technology. The brand invites users to join in the conversation and discuss innovation in these areas by asking questions and posting links, videos, and pictures related to new development.
2. Show the Personal Side of Your Brand
Just as consumers like to know the people working for their favorite brands, businesses feel a greater connection with B2B companies if they can see the faces behind the brand. There are several ways to add a human touch to your social media efforts: you can write in first person, post photos showing the employees at your company, and respond to followers comments, for instance.
One B2B company took humanizing its brand to another level. Oracle posted photos of its employees raising money for charity at the Bay Area Heart Walk —- showing both real people working for the company and the brand’s commitment to the community.
Another example is Intel with its “I look like an engineer” campaign. Intended to destroy stereotypes about who are engineers, Intel posted photos of women and ethnic minorities who work for the company.
3. Align Your Social Media and Content Strategies
B2B brands are also failing to take full advantage of content marketing. A content strategy goes hand in hand with social media efforts, providing you with regular updates for your profiles that are highly shareable and will increase visibility.
Key to this strategy is the right type of content. As a B2B brand, you can learn from American Express OPEN, a branch of Amex that provides credit cards to businesses. The company creates content to help small businesses and entrepreneurs stay afloat with expert tips and resources and shares these posts across numerous social media accounts. By adding images, questions, questions and quizzes to the content, it becomes engaging as well as useful.
As you can see through the above examples, becoming active on social media is possible whatever your brand is. All you need is a little creativity and your B2B brand will gain numerous followers, ultimately leading to a much higher number of sales.