Social media channels are critical to being successful in B2B marketing. From Twitter and Instagram to Facebook and LinkedIn, each channel has its own unique capabilities and audiences. But which one is best for a B2B audience? In this article, we’ll detail the reasons why LinkedIn is the best channel to use for reaching your B2B audience.
Why do B2B businesses need social media channels?
B2B businesses need social media to build an audience, grow their brand, and generate leads. The pandemic has made digital interaction all the more vital for growth and business strategy. B2B businesses can leverage social media to generate leads and communicate with their audience through content and online discussions. Social media is one of many marketing channels to drive inbound traffic for your company.
What is the social media platform, LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a social media platform for business professionals with a massive audience in the B2B market. People looking for opportunities, be that new careers or growing their brand, congregate and connect on LinkedIn. This makes it an ideal channel for B2B businesses’ to build an audience, post regularly, and build targeted profile connections.
10 Reasons to Make LinkedIn Your Top B2B Social Media Channel
Here are ten reasons you should try LinkedIn as your B2B social media channel.
- It’s where B2B business professionals spend their time. When choosing a social media platform, you want to be where your target audience is. Making this conscious effort to locate and network with your target audience will yield the best results and ROI. With so many professionals in one place, LinkedIn is truly geared towards forming B2B business relationships through content.
- It’s a great place to show your thought leadership. According to Hootsuite, “96% of content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing”. Creating and sharing content on LinkedIn gives you the chance to be a part of your audience’s conversation. The more you post about your industry’s topics and trends, the more opportunities you have to become a thought-leader as you attract, engage, and delight your audience through content.
- It drives traffic to your website and business. Related to the previous two points, another benefit of using LinkedIn is sending people to your business’ website and brand. According to Hootsuite, “companies with a complete, active LinkedIn page see 5x more pageviews” than those that do not. Using links carefully in your posts is one way to show readers where your information is coming from and point out your site. In other words, displaying thought-leadership and your product or services through your content can generate organic views and conversions for your brand.
- LinkedIn’s data gives you a clear picture of your audience. Because LinkedIn is a site dedicated to providing networking to businesses, it comes with built-in audience tools like Sales Navigator to create targeted contact lists for your B2B industry.
- Create engaging content on LinkedIn. Use emoticons and hashtags to draw in prospects and retain current viewers to your posts. Tagging your business’ name and the topic of the posts helps people easily locate your content in searches. Just like your website’s content, you want to make sure that your hashtags are consistent and specific to your post. Another helpful feature is the ability to join groups relevant to your industry.
- LinkedIn has a comprehensive ad program for lead generation. Where simply generating content has its perks, paid advertising targeting a specific market is yet another one of the platform’s mighty tools. With LinkedIn’s built-in tools you can target specific sectors of your audience (Dynamic Ads) or craft an ad using an inhouse creator (Text Ads) to attract new customers to your business.
- LinkedIn can fuel your own learning. One of the ways you can continue to create original and useful content for your audience is by expanding your own horizons and staying up-to-date on your industry. Reading other businesses’ content and findings on LinkedIn helps you write not only relevant content but shows that you’re part of and care about the industry.
- Your connections can spread your content. From the people you work with to community members and influencers, LinkedIn makes it easy for your connections and followers to distribute your content. Like the branches of a tree or web, one of your connections sharing your content with their followers will increase your visibility.
- LinkedIn helps you build and maintain relationships. This point directly corresponds with a B2B business’ need to not only market a human-centered message but directly engage with audience members. LinkedIn’s commenting setup and groups are helpful ways to develop relationships.
- Learning about your individual audience members is one click away. Another boon for social media platforms is being able to view the profiles of those that are in your circle. It’s literally as simple as one click on their profile. This gives you an idea of who your audience is, what groups and industries they’re involved with, what their experience is, and who they’re connected with. It’s a great way to build connections and expand your network in the industry.
Time to try LinkedIn!
Remember LinkedIn is a social media platform, a place tailored towards delivering human-centered content, quality engagement, and networking. By telling a story, showing your personality, delivering a simple but effective message in your content, you can achieve your inbound growth goals. Keep reading about LinkedIn marketing best practices in these additional articles.
If you’d like to learn more about whether LinkedIn is right for your team — and your greater company brand strategy, review our packages or book a meeting.
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