Social media marketing isn’t just one of the most important tools for modern businesses; it’s also one of the most multifaceted. Many channels are used for a singular purpose. However, a company’s presence on these channels impacts awareness, customer service, product promotion, website traffic, and many more factors contributing to business growth.
Still, creating a perfect B2B social media strategy is easier said than done. We’ve all seen what “bad” strategies look like — we’re referring to the businesses that rarely engage with their audience, don’t offer any unique or visually captivating content, and use their platforms for the sole purpose of promoting their own company and products.
Fortunately, many amazing B2B brands get social media marketing right, and they show that you can build an engaging, trusted presence regardless of what your company does or what products you sell.
In today’s post, we take a look at some of the best B2B brands on social media and break down a few tips and ideas you can begin to implement in your own strategy today. Let’s dive into some of the best B2B social media examples and campaigns past and present.
Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the most well-known and successful businesses in the B2B world, and they more than live up to that distinction with their brilliant use of social campaigns. Scroll through Salesforce’s Twitter and Facebook pages, and you’ll see precisely why they frequently top the list of companies to follow.
They consistently interact with their followers, sharing helpful information and GIF-fueled jokes in equal measure. In addition, they post relevant content, both via external links to long-form written content and eye-grabbing graphics.
But the most impressive element of Salesforce’s profiles is their focus on real people — specifically, their employees.
B2B companies often struggle to humanize their online presence, especially when their product offerings are technical and business-oriented. Salesforce doesn’t have this problem, in large part because they go to great lengths to feature their employees in the content they promote on social media. As an example of best social media practices, on their Facebook page and Twitter feed, you’ll see many posts highlighting their company culture, celebrating their staff’s achievements, and illustrating how their employees participate in meaningful causes.
Other brands can learn a valuable lesson from Salesforce: social media is the best tool to show your audience that your company is made up of real human beings.
How to Humanize Your Brand Like Salesforce
- Make your content people-focused: By showing the faces of the people behind your organization’s day-to-day operations– not just company leadership– you’re showing that you stand behind your team. That, in turn, demonstrates to your prospects that they will have a reliable team to support them should they choose to work with you.
IBM
IBM is one of the largest technology companies in the world. Founded over 100 years ago, IBM has a rich history of innovation that has made them the company they are today. And their social media campaigns do a great job of explaining this history through storytelling.
It’s common for B2B businesses to embrace brand storytelling in long-form content like blog posts and videos. But IBM’s feed reminds us that a single tweet can tell a meaningful story.
In addition to exploring their company history, IBM also uses storytelling to illustrate the remarkable feats their technology has helped people and businesses accomplish. Companies have leveraged IBM technology to make significant positive impacts on communities worldwide, and IBM does a great job of highlighting these stories on their feeds.
How to Tell a Story Like IBM:
- Showcase your journey: Every company has a story. By showcasing your journey from a scrappy startup to the established organization you are today, you demonstrate that you can adapt to the times. As a result, you’ll build trust in your products and services among your audience and prospects.
Oracle
Oracle is another excellent example of brand-building on social media. Oracle excels by sharing multimedia success stories that demonstrate the power of its technology.
When selling technical, multifunctional services like a cloud application solution, it can be difficult for B2B brands to present those products in a grounded, relatable context that their audience can understand. That’s why Oracle’s feeds place such a strong emphasis on the real-world application of their tools.
Scroll their Twitter, and you’ll find a diverse array of curated stories— for example, a restaurant that used Oracle to improve their dining experience or a recent property tax conundrum that was solved with the help of Oracle’s infrastructure.
How to Simplify a Complex B2B Brand Like Oracle
- Focus on the impact: Share stories of how your product, service, or solution is making a difference in the lives of people in your community or service area are effective social media ideas. By focusing on the impact your brand’s solutions have on the real world, you’re making a complex– and often misunderstood – company more relatable and approachable.
Mailchimp
If there’s one thing lacking on the typical B2B profile, it’s variety. Companies often share worthwhile posts but never bother to stray from one style, voice, content type, color scheme, etc. Those brands can learn a thing or two from MailChimp, the popular marketing automation and email service provider.
If you don’t know what we mean by variety, just take a look at Mailchimp’s Instagram feed. For one, they update the page consistently, whereas many B2B brands consider Instagram an afterthought.
More importantly, their feed is remarkably diverse. Mailchimp features just about every type of content you could imagine: slideshows, short video clips, fun animations, and employee spotlights. But if you look closely, you’ll notice that the common theme across all of this seemingly unrelated content is that it showcases Mailchimp’s values.
The result? Over 168,000 Instagram followers, impressive engagement numbers, and lasting connections with their customers and followers.
How to use Showcase Your Values Like Mailchimp
- Show where you stand: Feature content related to causes, issues, and happenings that are important to you. While it can be scary to do this for fear of alienating prospects, it can help you grow and reduce churn by attracting customers aligned with your values.
- Go behind the scenes: Mailchimp often shares content related to managing their internal interactions and their interactions with their customer base. By giving your audience a peek behind the curtain, you show that you value transparency.
General Electric
Everyone recognizes the name General Electric, but most people would be hard-pressed to identify the actual projects the multinational conglomerate is responsible for.
Rather than push out overly-complicated technical jargon, GE uses its pages to inject humanity and relatability into its complex projects.
The brand’s Instagram page features stunning images and videos of the machinery they help power and photographs and stories about the real people behind their groundbreaking innovations.
Your B2B brand might not have the reach and resources of GE, but you can learn from their approach and bring your complex products and solutions to life.
How to Make Your Company More Relatable Like GE:
- Focus on storytelling: Create content centered around how your services and products benefit your customers on a day-to-day basis.
- The Hero’s Journey: Even if you’re not working on innovating the global power supply, your products and services are still helping businesses serve their customers in significant ways. Showcase the challenges your clients faced before your solution and how you’ve helped them win.
Slack
Interaction is the most critical element of social media. A platform like Twitter provides customers with direct access to companies, enabling them to ask questions, make suggestions, and submit complaints.
Few B2B brands handle interaction better than Slack.
If you’re not familiar, Slack is a business collaboration tool that thousands of companies use for daily interaction between employees. Because of its popularity, Slack receives many Tweets every day — ranging from minor questions about a specific feature to full-blown rants stemming from a technical issue.
Slack doesn’t just respond to their incoming Tweets promptly — they also respond with specific, helpful feedback that addresses each person’s problems to the best of their abilities. Contrast their interactions with the boilerplate responses we see from many other businesses (“We’re sorry you had an issue, we’ll be in touch”), and you’ll understand how Slack earned its reputation as a company that cares about its users.
How to Interact With Your Followers like Slack
- Don’t be afraid to address complaints: Negative feedback is a part of doing business, but it doesn’t have to hurt your reputation. Showcase your customer service skills by responding to complaints with compassion, and providing actionable, helpful resources.
Hootsuite
Even if you’re familiar with their popular social media management platform, the size of Hootsuite’s audience on Twitter might still shock you. To date, they have 7.4 million followers. Hootsuite has earned its massive following by consistently sharing valuable, engaging content.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that they are one of the leading B2B content scheduling tools on the market.
From clever Instagram hacks to more in-depth strategy advice, Hootsuite’s posts are as entertaining as they are helpful. In addition to sharing content, Hootsuite promotes engagement by asking its audience questions and encouraging anyone on Twitter to join in on the fun.
They also run a separate Twitter account dedicated to customer support, which prevents their main feed from getting bogged down with troubleshooting interactions.
Remember: an effective B2B social media campaign relies on substance, not style. There’s nothing flashy or overly unique about Hootsuite’s Twitter feed. They succeed because their posts provide their audience with relevant content and information every single day.
Recently Twitter has been making big waves in the news. With significant changes to the platform on the horizon, B2B brands must evaluate their presence on the channel and stay up-to-date with best practices.
How to Utilize Twitter Like Hootsuite
- Keep your users informed: Share exciting product or service updates with your following to keep existing customers informed and showcase your newest, most innovative updates to the world.
- Join the conversation: Seek out industry influencers who host or participate in regular Twitter chats and become a regular participant. Not only will you get in front of key decision-makers in your industry, but it can also earn your website some great, high-quality backlinks since many of these Twitter chat transcripts are published on influencers’ websites.
HubSpot
If you work in the B2B space, you’re familiar with HubSpot and its inbound marketing and sales software. But, you’re missing out if you don’t already follow HubSpot on Instagram.
Like all platforms, Instagram constantly adds new features and capabilities, and HubSpot excels at adapting to these changes. For example, when Instagram added functionality that allowed users to highlight their Stories on their main page back in 2017, HubSpot reacted by grouping their Stories into several distinct categories. These include “Community”, “Product”, “Tips”, “Sales”, “Marketing”, and more. As a result, followers can click on HubSpot’s profile and immediately find the most relevant content.
HubSpot’s Instagram is an excellent example of another critical element of social media: repurposed content. HubSpot posts repurposed elements of blogs, infographics, news articles, and other content types on their Instagram feed, along with original videos and graphics.
And unlike some of the more buttoned-up (in other words, boring) B2B brands, HubSpot’s not afraid to make their followers laugh with a well-timed meme.
Because Instagram is such a visual platform, it’s often overlooked in the B2B space. But these days, Instagram is becoming a hub for B2B marketing. It’s no longer just pretty pictures and influencers, and it’s time for businesses to get on board.
How to Repurpose Content Like HubSpot
- Increase Blog Engagement: Turn the key points in your most popular blog posts into an Instagram carousel. Even though you can’t link directly to your blog from your Instagram posts, you can share your post to Stories and use the link sticker to help move your users over to your owned properties like your website.
- Repurpose YouTube Videos: Use a tool like Headliner to break up your longer videos into short, captioned, snack-sized videos. This is a great trick for creating engagement-boosting Instagram Reels without learning the latest viral dance moves.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, and it’s no wonder why. Not only does Shopify make it easy to create and manage an online store, but they also offer a wide range of features and options to help businesses succeed. But one of the things that set Shopify apart from other e-commerce platforms in our eyes is their focus on social media.
But they’re not just using their platforms to sell their product. Instead, they’re using it to connect with their customers and build relationships through storytelling.
This deep understanding of the power of storytelling for a B2B organization has helped Shopify create a community of passionate online shopkeepers who are excited to engage and share their insights and tips.
So, what channel is the Shopify team leveraging the most? Well, one of their key channels is YouTube. Here’s how you can learn from their B2B YouTube marketing strategy.
How to Leverage YouTube Like Shopify
- Post consistently and keep it organized: Shopify posts new content to its YouTube channel every week, and that content is organized beautifully into themed playlists like “My Shopify Business Story” and “Business Ideas.”
- Utilize new YouTube features: If you’re already creating Instagram Reels or TikToks, why not hop on the YouTube Shorts bandwagon? Shopify sure has! Their fun, engaging, how-to videos inspire would-be entrepreneurs to take the plunge and open up shop.
- Feature customer stories: You don’t need a cinematic camera to reap the benefits of videos featuring your happy customers. Even a simple recording of a Zoom conversation can be a powerful testimonial.
Adobe
Adobe is a B2B software company known and loved by creative professionals worldwide, and they have been killing it on social media. They’re so good, in fact, that they’ve even been named one of the top 10 B2B companies to follow on social media by Forbes.
So, what makes Adobe’s social media campaigns so effective? It all comes down to their audience.
As the leading name in software for creatives, it’s no surprise that Adobe’s channels are full of eye-catching, scroll-stopping visuals. But the real magic is in their community, which helps to feed Adobe’s content machine with the most coveted type of content there is–user-generated content (UGC)
UGC is the ideal way to showcase what your product or solution can do! Sharing content created by your customers provides the necessary social proof that your prospects need to move them further down the marketing funnel. It also fosters goodwill among your existing users and boosts loyalty.
In short, Adobe is winning at the UGC game, and it’s a win-win for both the company and the businesses that rely on it.
How to Encourage UGC Like Adobe:
- Use social media marketing to build relationships: Engage with your B2B audience on social media, connecting and building relationships with professionals worldwide. Share the content those professionals create with your product to foster goodwill and loyalty.
- Make it easy for users to share their content: Consider using a hashtag representing your brand and include it in your social posts and print materials. Encourage your audience to share their experiences doing business with you, and use the hashtag to track and re-share content.
Final Thoughts
There’s a common belief that B2C companies get to have all the fun on social media. But, the ten B2B social media examples above prove that belief to be a total misconception. You might sell technical products to a sophisticated audience, but that doesn’t mean your social media feeds have to be by-the-book, dry, and overly “professional.”
Remember, social media strategy is unique to your other marketing and branding channels. It’s not a place to push your products and generate direct sales. Instead, learn from the best B2B social media examples and start offering valuable information, engaging with your audience, and experimenting with fresh ideas and content types. Above all else, be consistent! Give your followers a reason to visit your social media feeds every day. You’ll see your audience grow in no time.
