How To

February 10, 2023

How to create a B2B social media strategy

Having a well thought out strategy will ensure you reach the right people with the right content


Whereas B2C brands use social channels to reach consumers and drive sales, B2B brands use social media to build brand awareness and create relationships with businesses, decision-makers and industry influencers — with the hope of landing sales agreements further down the line. 

Having a well-thought out strategy in place will ensure your social media efforts are reaching the right people with the right content. Laura Weidner, communications manager at HR tech Personio, gives her top tips for doing just that. 

Outline your business goals

Start with figuring out your aims for social media and how they reflect your broader business goals. That could include increasing brand and business visibility ,  establishing thought leadership or building and strengthening relationships with customers and partners. Having clear aims will help you create relevant and helpful content for your audience.

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Clearly define your target audience

Make sure you know who they are, what they want to see and like to engage with and on which social platform you can reach them. Your target audience on social media usually matches the target audience and buyer persona of the general business, so you can analyse current customer data to find out who they might be.

To further pin down the social target group, research industry-specific hashtags, keywords, topics, accounts, key influencers, articles and media directly on the social platforms via the search function. You can also learn about already existing followers and their demographics, industry, company size, job function etc. Most social networks have these insights available on their platforms.

Choose your channels

LinkedIn is popular with professionals and businesses, making it a good choice for B2B brands — you can create a comprehensive company page, share content with your audience and connect with other businesses and industry experts. We reach most of our target audience (HR community, European SMEs, decision-makers, talent, etc) on LinkedIn and it’s the channel where we get the most engagement on our posts. Plus, most of our employees are active there so they can help us amplify our content.

Even though Instagram is not used as heavily by B2B brands, we use it for more behind-the-scenes content of events, less polished posts and to engage with a wider audience.

Find your content angle

To figure out what kind of content could be useful and enjoyable to your audience, conduct social listening via tools such as Hootsuite (it can help you track keywords, hashtags and mentions about your brand and its specific products.) This will help you find out what your audience talks about, what type of topics they are interested in, what their pain points are and what content resonates with them. If you can’t afford to invest in a tool, manually follow and monitor accounts (Google Alerts can help here), hashtags and pages and see what people are saying about your company.

Take a look at industry trends and incorporate these into your content. We often do posts related to HR trends on onboarding, employee benefits and hiring.

Think “conversation” not “broadcast”

When it comes to content creation, talk less “product” and more “people”. Think of ways to make the content more intimate and tell a story.  For example, instead of simply showcasing a product feature on its own, create a video of one of your customers using a new feature and show the value it brings them. You could also design posts telling stories about your employees or office life, and give insights into your company culture.

Make use of experts on your team and get them to contribute to content creation: we asked two female managers to speak on the importance of supporting women in the workplace. We also did a technical how-to on managing teams in 2023 during a tough macro environment.

Don’t just post for the sake of posting though. Think about what content would actually give value to your audience.

Use social media analytics to track performance

This will help you identify what types of posts are getting the most engagement and which might need some adaptation. We look at our metrics on a monthly basis by using LinkedIn’s own analytics feature, as well as Hootsuite. Besides “impressions”, our most important measure for success with our posts is engagement, as this is an indicator of whether our content really adds value to our audience or not.

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On the subject of ... designing a social media strategy

🐦 82% of B2B marketers use Twitter. The platform can help you generate leads, build a community and create brand awareness.

🧱 Building a social media marketing strategy. Hootsuite has some helpful tips.

👂 Social listening as a B2B brand. Here’s why it’s important and what tools you can use.

🆙 Level up your Linkedin game. Here’s how to optimise your content for Linkedin and make the most of its marketing and sales tools.

🤝🏽 Get employees involved in social media. Showcasing employee stories can show potential candidates what they can expect from your company culture.

Miriam Partington

Miriam Partington is a reporter at Sifted. She covers the DACH region and the future of work, and coauthors Startup Life , a weekly newsletter on what it takes to build a startup. Follow her on X and LinkedIn