What is one creative social media idea that a B2B company can actually pull off (and for which platform?)
To help small businesses with creative social media ideas, we asked business leaders and marketing professionals this question for their best ideas. From digital detoxes to hosting a webinar, there are several ideas that may help your business with its social media.
Here are eleven creative social media ideas that a B2B company can pull off:
- Use Your Social In Email
- Reddit Forums
- Create an eBook or Ultimate Guide
- Make Youtube Videos
- Employee Social Media Profiles
- Get All Your Partners Involved
- Write Articles on LinkedIn
- Giveaways On Twitter
- Host a Webinar
- Highlight Your Behind-The-Scenes Moments
- Start a Podcast
Use Your Social Posts In Your Next Email
One of the smartest things you can do as a business is repurpose content from your social media in your email campaigns. You could take one of your Instagram posts and make that into an entire email, using the photo and caption. Or your last 5 tweets could be a fun email — “Look what we’ve been up to on Twitter…” Your social media is full of great posts which equals great content that would work well in emails. No need to always create new email content — pull from your other platforms.
Emily Ryan, Westfield Creative
Reddit Forums
Find your target market on Reddit and engage in the community! Reddit is untapped territory for B2B, but if done right, can be very effective for inexpensive acquisition. Forums can get very niche and specific, so if you can find one that pertains to your business, you will likely be able to start valuable conversations with potential customers. Just make sure you aren’t trying to sell directly, moderators will kick you right out. Be genuine, ask questions, respond to others, and establish yourself as a trusted member of the community.
Zack McCarty, Qwick
Create an eBook or Ultimate Guide
Because they are low cost and are great for generating qualified leads, a great social media tactic would be to create an eBook or Ultimate Guide around a niche topic for B2B and share it on LinkedIn! You could always recycle old blog content into an eBook to create an easier path to executing this social media marketing strategy.
Kayla Centeno, Markitors
Make Youtube Videos
Our Seattle criminal defense firm Will & Will has an extensive library of YouTube videos we’ve created over the years. While YouTube isn’t the first platform a B2B company thinks of for “social media,” we’ve found that YouTube videos have helped effectively brand our firm. Videos can personalize a firm, and communicate why a client should consider doing business with a company. I’d recommend to any business owner to consider shooting a video about the company, or about a core service offering.
Court Will, Will & Will
Employee Social Media Profiles
B2B companies should be very cognizant of the image employees have on sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. The reason? Prospective customers buy from people, and many sales activities include checks on social media profiles. For example, a cold email may result in a check of a LinkedIn profile. Or, an introduction to a new Client Services representative may be followed by a check of an Instagram profile. The single most important thing a B2B company can do when it comes to social media is to have a polished uniform presence online. Educate employees about how customers may be looking at their LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media profiles to make decisions about your business.
Ben Walker, Transcription Outsourcing
Get All Your Partners Involved
An easy social media idea that we do to encourage referrals from the people we work with is by simply tagging other trades on social media platforms, like Instagram to grow exposure. Let’s say we finish designing a beautiful, luxury kitchen, we make sure to tag the cabinet company that followed our plans and installed the cabinets into the kitchen, we tag the lighting company that sold the builder the pendants we picked out over the island, and we tag the granite company we worked with to make the design come together. By taking an extra minute to tag all the people that made the design happen and having them share it on their own pages, we get triple the exposure! Tag the companies you work with and encourage them to share your content.
Alisha Taylor, Alisha Taylor Interiors
Write Articles on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has become the place to network now that person-to-person, live networking events have been quashed by COVID. First, be sure your personal profile is up to date with a nice, professional-looking headshot, and all the sections are complete as well as skills using relevant keywords. Next, make sure your company profile page is complete and well-branded like an extension of your website. Make sure all links, including the ones in your contact info section are working properly. Now, you write an article–300 words or more. Hopefully, you’re blogging on your website at least once a week. All you do is copy a blog from your site into LinkedIn’s blogging feature. At the bottom, put, “This article first appeared on…”, then link it to the original article on your site. Share it on your personal feed and company page, Facebook and Twitter. This helps with exposure, building trust and credibility and helps with SEO.
Giselle Aguiar, AZ Social Media Wiz
Giveaways On Twitter
Twitter is an incredibly powerful social media channel. Unfortunately, as usual, building up an audience is a slow and time-consuming process. Twitter Ads are a good option to give yourself a boost. But there is an organic alternative to PPC: You can speed up the process with a giveaway. Identify a product that your audience is interested in. This can be a generic mainstream product such as a MacBook or a product from your own business. Next, identify the value offered and divide it by the average cost of your PPC campaign as a reference. When this value falls below the realistically achievable number of engagements you are in the positives. Make sure to give the campaign an initial boost by tagging some people from your audience. Here you can also fall back to Twitter’s PPC offerings: a small campaign can kick start your organic giveaway and trigger an avalanche.
Peter Thaleikis, Bring Your Own Ideas Ltd.
Host a Webinar
Hosting a small webinar with a guest book author is a great creative social media idea that a B2B company can pull off. For example, invite an author of a sales or marketing book you enjoy to a webinar and invite 10 people from your LinkedIn to join a special Q&A session. From idea to execution, you could run this campaign in a month and deepen relationships with a set of key prospects.
Bruce Harpham, Technology Marketing Consultant
Highlight Your Behind-The-Scenes Moments
If you ever spent any time watching your favorite TV show’s bloopers reel you know – watching behind-the-scenes real moments is a lot of fun. There is something about those moments when actors stop being actors for a second and screw up, laugh, and make fun of each other in touching, purely human moments. Somehow we connect with them more during those times. We can replicate similar emotions and connections when we share behind-the-scenes moments with our customers. As B2B entities companies often get stuck in the professional space, limiting their personal, human connections with their customers. Sharing engaging, entertaining, and real behind-the-scenes moments can facilitate these connections. While that can be done on any platform, the best fit for behind-the-scenes content is Instagram. Using stories, posts, and other interactive tools of that platform can be of great help.
Natalya Bucuy, LiveHelpNow
Start a Podcast
While that idea might sound daunting to some, it doesn\’t have to be. Your podcast episodes could be as short as five minutes every week. Just talk about industry trends, news topics, and what’s happening in your business. It doesn\’t have to be perfect and sites like Anchor allow you to record, edit and publish all in one place. Once your show is live then you have some great content to share on social media. You can share new episodes on your social channels while repurposing episodes into PDF slides, audio snippets, and blog posts that can all be shared too.
Liam Quinn, Reach interactive