B2B businesses are proof that any business can be successful on social media. Why? Because they’ve turned a niche industry that admittedly isn’t the most exciting into a playground for social content.

B2B Social Media Strategies for Any Industry

Set SMART goals

Like any other marketing channel, a social media strategy needs to be based on goals to be successful. Defining specific, measurable KPIs for your company’s social media — whether they’re based on brand awareness or acquisition — will be the key to measuring success down the line.

To determine KPIs, you have to decide what success means to your brand. Are you trying to use social media as an acquisition channel? Do you want to increase your reach, or gain more traffic on your company blog? This will decide what metrics to track.

Here is a good example of a SMART objective for an enterprise that is just beginning to get momentum on social media:

Goal: To build brand awareness on social media.

Specific: I want to boost our company’s brand awareness by posting regularly and frequently on Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, and Facebook. I will increase our posts on Twitter from once to four times a day, post daily on Instagram, and increase weekly publishing frequency on LinkedIn and Facebook from four to seven times per week. From generating two articles a week to three posts a week our content creators will raise their effort and our designer increases their workload from a given asset a week to two things a week.

Measurable: A 4% increase in engagement rate across the board is our goal.

Relevant: By increasing the engagement rate, we’ll boost brand awareness and generate more leads, giving sales more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: End of this month.

SMART Goal: At the end of this month, our average engagement rate across our social media channels will see a 4% lift by increasing our post frequency and concentrating on a thoughtful, engaging copy.

Use multimedia

There’s a reason social media marketers get excited when a social platform launches a new feature — it’s because it adds a new medium to play with and test with your audience.

Instagram Stories, Twitter polls, and LinkedIn documents are all perfect examples of utilizing the multimedia formats that are unique to each channel.

The creation and release of multimedia content on your social media platforms add to your attention an interesting aspect.

Share original content

This may seem like a no-brainer to some, but many businesses establish their social media presence by curating content from other sources. The fact is that your audience can discriminate between unique and creative articles vs anything, just to claim that you were active on the web that day.

If you’re having trouble coming up with original content every day, it’s okay to scale back your operation. If you don’t have the bandwidth to post on every platform, spend your time on the channels where your audience is the most developed.

Keep an eye on competitors

Social media opens the door to your competitor’s marketing strategy, or at the very least, their social media marketing strategy. For larger companies, keeping tabs on your competitors is part of the territory. You want to know what campaigns they’re running to see if they’re successful. And if that company’s target audience is similar to your own, you can take inspiration from that campaign.

But keeping tabs on your competitors on social media isn’t at all about copying their strategies. Being involved in the same industry will lead to crossover with your audiences and their interests. Perhaps it makes sense for your brand if you observe your competition is not responding to the current news. You will be unique from your competitors by looking for these changes.

Highlight your employees

Many B2B companies do a great job of spotlighting their employees, which allows the audience to put faces to the company and personalize the brand. This is important for small and large companies alike, because whether you’re selling computers to businesses or opening a neighborhood restaurant — people are the heart of your business.

Additionally, highlighting your employees is a good opportunity for employer branding. Employer branding increases your employees’ advocacy by giving them the ability to spread word-of-mouth about their place of work.

Experiment with content and posting times

This is a step to take after you’ve proven that you can maintain a regular posting schedule and want to dive a little deeper into audience insights. There are always best practices for when and what you’re posting on social media, but the truth is that every audience is different, so you’ll want to run experiments to figure out what works best for your brand.

There are endless experiments you can conduct on your channels. Here are some ideas to inspire you

• Test different link positions to find out if it makes users more likely to click.
• Alternate between using questions and statistics in your copy to see which one pulls your audience in more.
• Add emojis to see if it increases interactions.
• Postless frequently.
• Post more frequently.
• Segment a different part of your audience to test how they react to an ad.
• Put paid behind a video post and a still image to see which performs better.
• Spend more time replying to posts to find out if it increases your follower count.
• Test different amounts of hashtags to see if it affects impressions.

Experimenting with your content is how you figure out your own best practices, which will always be more personalized than industry standards.