Top 9 Tips for B2B Social Media Marketing 2024

April 1, 2024

We love adorable cat videos just as much as the next person—but social media isn’t just for posting about pets or reconnecting with old high school friends. It’s become a pretty lucrative business tool, too. These platforms offer incredible opportunities for organizations to connect with their target audience and build a name for themselves.

Think about it—how do people find businesses to partner with or buy from? It’s largely online, which is really where your B2B brand lives. The key is knowing how to share that brand, which is why B2B social media marketing is the big ticket item these days.

Even if you scroll through your personal socials every day, professionally leveraging these platforms is a totally different ballgame. How often do you post? Do you follow trends or focus on original content? What platforms should you focus on?

Take a load off—we’ve got all the juicy details. In this article, we talk strategy for B2B social media marketing in 2024.

What is B2B Social Media Marketing?

B2B social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to promote products or services to other businesses. Because it’s business-to-business marketing, organizations aren’t necessarily trying to reach individual consumers.

Instead, your brand is completely focused on creating and sharing content that caters to a business audience. This helps an organization engage with potential partners or clients, build relationships, and potentially drive leads.

Some of the most successfully-used platforms include:

LinkedIn: This social media channel offers a B2B space for organizations to showcase their products and services, share industry insights, and connect with other businesses.
Twitter: Twitter is a fast-paced platform that helps organizations quickly share industry news and updates about their products or services. Participating in relevant hashtags and Twitter chats can also generate some traction with other businesses.
Facebook: While often associated with B2C marketing, Facebook also offers opportunities for B2B marketing through targeted advertising, business page creation, and participation in industry-specific groups.
YouTube: Businesses can create and share video content to educate other businesses about their products or services, demonstrate their expertise, and provide valuable insights into their industry. (Seriously, don’t underestimate this one: YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world!)

The benefits of social media marketing are diverse and exciting. The perk most organizations are looking for is increased brand awareness and visibility—it’s an excellent way to reach potential clients and partners. There are also benefits like targeting advertising, SEO content, and valuable analytics that result in higher conversion rates.

But honestly? The best part is how organizations build credibility and foster trust within their industry. Here’s a little insider tip from the pros: B2B social media marketing isn’t even about sales. People are tired of being pitched to every time they open LinkedIn. The real strategy is all about creating authentic connections with your ideal audience.

So what does this mean for businesses in 2024? For the most engaging B2B social media marketing, you need a media brand. If this is a new term for you, don’t worry—we’ll connect all the dots.

Best Practices of B2B Social Media Marketing

Social media can feel personal or even playful to your audience in many contexts, but it still needs to be used strategically by a business. Here are some best practices that will keep your marketing intentional and streamlined.

1. Align Goals and Objectives

What is your endgame in using social media marketing in a B2B space? How will this type of marketing move the needle? For most organizations, the main goals are to:

Create brand awareness
Build trust and credibility
Educate audiences

As we mentioned, generating sales can be a part of your overarching strategy but isn’t going to be as effective if it’s the driving force of your plan. Focusing on your brand and providing objectively valuable information to your audience is the key to lead generation.

Instead of setting goals like: “Generate 300 leads in Q2.”

You can try a goal like: “Increase brand mentions across social media platforms by 25%.”

This can still get you those leads, which is part of your long-term strategy. But it’s just as important to have brand-based objectives for your social media marketing.

Take time to map out how each tweet, post, or share contributes to your broader goals—whether it's expanding brand awareness or establishing authority in your industry. When your social media efforts align seamlessly with your business ambitions, you're setting yourself up for success in the digital arena.

2. Understand your Audience

You also won’t make your mark if you don’t understand your target audience, including their challenges and preferences. This goes beyond surface-level demographics, too. When you can better understand their motivations and aspirations, you can better solve their pain points.

Imagine sitting down for a cup of coffee with your ideal customer and genuinely listening to their story. What keeps them up at night? What challenges do they face in their industry? By empathizing with their needs and concerns, you can tailor your content to resonate on a personal level.

Client and buyer personas are a great place to start—some research into your ideal audience can help you create these profiles and help you market to real people. This will also help you understand what channels your primary audience uses and what content resonates with them.

Give relevant career tips and industry updates

Your social media content can reflect the awareness and concern you have for your potential clients. It looks like providing applicable career tips, industry trends and updates, and insights that address their pain points and interests. Don’t use cheap click-bait tactics—get in the weeds and cover relevant topics. This is how you foster engagement and trust.

3. Be Mindful of Competition

While it's essential to keep a finger on the pulse of your industry, remember that imitation isn't the sincerest form of flattery in social media. Rather than mimicking your competitors' every move, focus on understanding broader industry trends and finding your unique voice.

What are competitors doing that you can do better? What specific client pain points are being left unaddressed? Listen to your shared audience and see what people appreciate about your competitors—or what frustrates them. This can give you some insight into what your content should cover or what people want to see from brands like yours.

You can get technical, too, with analytics and other types of data. This helps you analyze how often others post and the content that gets the most engagement. From there, you can benchmark your social media performance against organizations you compete with.

Long story short, keep an eye on what others are doing but don't be afraid to blaze your own trail. By staying true to your brand and offering something distinct, you'll stand out in a crowded digital landscape.

4. Engage with Audience

Social media is a conversation, not a monologue. One pitfall in the B2B space is focusing on the organization itself a little too much. Keep in mind that you’re not talking to brands—you’re talking to people. Humanizing your content, being personable, and having real conversations with your audience can go a long way.

Your brand doesn’t have to just be about posting industry content, either. You can also post about your employees, their accomplishments and insights, and your organizational work culture. Doing this reminds businesses of the people behind your organization, which makes you more relatable.

Respond to Comments and DMs

Be sure to respond promptly and warmly to comments, messages, and inquiries. Show your audience that you're not just a brand but a friendly, approachable ally ready to listen, help, and engage in meaningful dialogue.

5. Create a Media Brand

We’ve talked about creating B2B social media marketing for industry topics, thought leadership content, and even company highlights. What about promoting your products or services? There is a time and place for this, but this part of your strategy is not a part of your media brand. Let’s clarify.

It takes two distinct brands to grow your audience: your media brand and your corporate brand. Your media brand is for the 97% of your market who are not yet ready to buy. Your corporate brand is for the 3% of your market ready to buy now.

You have to build trust with your audience and discuss topics and challenges they care about before giving them your sales pitch. When that 97% is ready to buy, they will more than likely choose your brand if they see you as a thought leader and trusted expert.

This is the most impactful move a B2B brand can make. Media brands are current and inspiring in their messaging and social media posts. They dive into lively topics that are 100% about what users are interested in. Some ways to achieve this is by embracing variety in your content—mix articles, videos, podcasts, and more to keep things fresh and exciting. You can even encourage user-generated content and encourage interactions in your posts to foster a sense of community and authenticity.

Take Shopify and their attempt to generate two-way conversations when they say: “If software developers named cartoons. I’ll go first.” Shopify’s tweet is casual and a little bit silly, but it piques the interest of their audience and invites them to share their thoughts and ideas.

Learn more about why you need to start a media brand.

B2B Social Media Marketing Tactics

Now that we’ve got you in the right headspace regarding B2B social media marketing, how do you actually build your strategy? The Content Marketing Institute reports that 57% of B2B marketers agreed that creating the right content for their audience is a challenge. Best practices aside, it’s time to dive into tactics that help you curate effective social media content.

6. Create Original Content

The point of having a media brand is to add real value to your market without pitching to them. Instead of covering “commodity content” where you do what everyone else in your industry is doing, see past the campaign and figure out what your audience really wants to talk about.

Original content is key to this strategy. One of the best ways to be organic in 2024 is through content splintering. By splintering your content into various formats—articles, videos, podcasts, infographics—you're not just sharing information; you're creating an immersive experience that keeps your audience engaged.

A lot of brands are starting with a podcast, a platform that feels extra authentic to listeners and can create quite the following on different social media. Then your team can write articles, create infographics, and post videos about the topics you cover in your weekly podcast episodes.

7. Polish your Brand Voice

Your brand voice is your digital personality—it's how you communicate with your audience and differentiate yourself from the competition. Whether it's witty and irreverent or professional and authoritative, consistency is what matters most.

By honing your brand voice to perfection, you become recognizable and even likable to your audience. Keep in mind that the more genuine you can be, the better. People can tell when companies are pandering to their audience instead of empowering or engaging them. The key here is to be memorable, authentic, and consistent.

8. Use Mixed Media

Gone are the days of relying solely on text-based content—reading is great and all that, but you’ve got to make it interesting! Today's social media landscape demands diversity.

Images, videos, infographics, podcasts, animations—these all capture your audience’s attention and make your content more digestible. Some formats are going to be better at conveying your message than others. Most of the time, though, you want to take that content splintering to heart and have a mix of all of these formats, even for the same topics and content.

For social media marketing especially, you’ve also got to leverage features like Stories, Reels, and live video to add a dynamic element to your content strategy. It’s a quick way to share short messages or clips that highlight your thought leadership—and by extension, your media brand.

9. Consider Influencer Marketing

In the B2B market, media brands blend their corporate branding with influencer marketing to find a perfect balance. This stat from James Carbary, founder of Sweet Fish, says it all; the exponential growth of the creator economy is valued at $250 billion today and is projected to nearly double by 2028. It’s pretty clear: businesses need influencer marketing to thrive now and moving forward.

By partnering with industry influencers or thought leaders, you can amplify your brand's reach, credibility, and authority within your niche. Look for opportunities to collaborate with influencers whose values align with your brand's mission and vision, and watch as your social media presence skyrockets to new heights.

How Can Sweet Fish Help?

Want to improve your B2B social media marketing but don’t know where to start? Want to level up your brand awareness? Like the idea of making your content go further? Like working with fun, experienced marketers that make your life easier?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then Sweet Fish Media can help!

Sweet Fish is a full-service media brand agency specializing in growing demand gen and thought leadership for B2B brands.

We do everything from social media management to white-glove podcast production, newsletter creation, and more.

Essential to any marketing strategy and media brand, learn more about our social media services here.