How to Grow Your Social Media Following for B2B

4 minute read

When you create a new social media account, what’s one of the first questions prompted?

“Do you want to sync your contact list to find followers?”

It’s pretty simple. Your photos, tweets, statuses, and updates won’t be shared with anyone if you don’t have followers. With so many different social networks, it’s crucial to utilize each one correctly.  Some networks are business focused, some are more entertainment-driven, and some are in-between the two.

The biggest piece of successful social media management is having a foundation for followers; you need to grow your social media following by making people curious about what you post. Here at Kapost, we focus on developing successful individual social media accounts so that we can excel regardless of the social network.

Making the Most of Your B2B Social Media Accounts

When creating our social media accounts, we had four primary goals in mind:

  • Test better posting times
  • Implement more visual images and videos
  • Incorporate external Twitter handles
  • Display brand personality

Here’s how we put these four-phased goals to work.

#1: Test Better Posting Times

Oddly enough, this goal came from an unexpected error.  While scheduling social, one single post was randomly placed in the 9 pm time slot. Without knowing this happened, it was impossible to ignore during the next week’s social audit. What did we learn?

That a 9 pm post brought in some of the best engagement, we have had all month. The takeaway from this is not to schedule every post to publish in the evening, but to spread your social posts in a bigger time frame. People are on social channels late at night, early in the morning, and everywhere in between. Weekends are still very popular times to scroll through Twitter or LinkedIn, as well. If you can experiment with times and see what works best for your company, you will have better engagement and reach overall.

#2: Implement More Visual Images and Videos

When it comes to social media feeds, we all know an image or GIF stands out amongst any text-only posts.  Tweets with any visual attachment have at least 5x higher engagement rate, and if humor is incorporated, the engagement increases even more. People don’t want to read boring business posts all day; add in some company personality, and you will get your followers hooked.

We’ve seen this approach first hand. While scheduling blogs, Tweets, Facebook posts, or LinkedIn posts, an image goes a long way. One of our best image related Tweets was posted when we were looking to hire. By incorporating a meme, we related more with followers and didn’t blend into the sea of text-only posts. Followers enjoyed the post and were more inclined to click; resulting in more interest to apply for the job.

#3: Incorporate External Twitter Handles

Do you have any collaborations coming up? Want to include someone specific? By tagging someone’s personal Twitter handle in a relevant tweet, you immediately connect with them regarding the topic. One of our more successful campaigns, ‘Ask the Experts,’ helped us realize the benefits of directly tagging Twitter handles.  We asked specific questions to marketing professionals that stood out as leaders, once we had their answers, we turned their advice into an ‘Ask the Experts’ tweet. By tagging each expert’s handle, we were able to reach a wider audience that we knew would be interested in the content. The rest is up to your followers; the more retweets and likes a post gets, the more engagement it will have.

#4: Display Brand Personality

When I hear about a new brand or upcoming company, one of my first instincts is to look them up on Instagram.  No, you won’t find their best-performing blogs, annual marketing awards, or amount of total revenue.  But, you will find photos of Taco Tuesday, office dogs, and the Halloween contest winner. Those are the things people want to see on an Instagram account. Instagram allows users to take a look into the less serious side of a company and get a feel for the culture personally, not just professionally.

Takeaway

In the end, we were able to individualize our social media accounts and specify the content by channel. By doing so, followers can connect with Kapost on the social network of their choice and share an interest in the content we put out.  What we learned is that saturating a social network with superfluous content isn’t the way to go.  If you’re able to hone in on the specific content your followers want, a successful social media account will follow.

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