What’s the best social media platform for your business’s growth goals? Here we evaluate four of the most popular social media networks and how you can use them to increase brand awareness, engage customers meaningfully, and convert followers into leads. 

What’s the best social media platform for a B2C vs B2B audience? 

Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that your approach to social media marketing will depend heavily on your audiences. 

If you’re a B2C brand, Facebook may be the best platform for you (according to 51% of marketers). If you’re a B2B brand, LinkedIn could be the top choice (according to 44% of marketers). 

But as with any marketing strategy, you should dig deep into your target audience to determine which social media platforms to use and how. 

Consider who you want to engage with. Where do they get their news, share their opinions, or get influenced the most? What do they like to see on LinkedIn vs Instagram?

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How to use each platform to further your growth goals 

Here are five of the social platforms we recommend experimenting with, and how they can help you achieve your specific growth goals. 

LinkedIn 

People use it to expand their professional networks, follow businesses, recruit talent, and keep up with industry news. 

You can use it to: 

• Increase awareness of your B2B brand. A great example of this in action comes from our work with OSL Technology. By sharing content of interest to OSL’s target audience, we achieved more than 30,000 LinkedIn impressions in just three months. You might replicate these results by posting carousels with top tips, or sharing links from trusted third-party sources with your own perspective, for instance.

• Generate high-quality business leads. LinkedIn is geared towards professional users (with four out of five members driving business decisions) meaning there’s a huge audience of prospects to tap into. If you want to get in front of them quickly, consider putting some spend behind lead generation content with LinkedIn Ads.  

Instagram 

People use it to see ‘behind the scenes’ of brands, follow influencers, and talk about products or services they’ve had a positive or negative experience with.  

You can use it to: 

• Advertise products and services visually. Why not show off happy customers using the product, offer demos, or promote discounts? Don’t forget to include links in your bio so that prospects can click through to your website quickly.  

• Build industry authority. Partnering with relevant influencers or getting featured by industry-leading pages on Instagram can help you build authority in your field. You don’t have to be a B2C brand for this. Just look at these partnerships between Salesforce and NVIDIA, or Semrush and HeyTony. 

Source: salesforce Instagram

Source: heytony.agency Instagram

X (formerly Twitter) 

People use it to keep up with current affairs and industry news, communicate directly with businesses and influential users, and share opinions.  

You can use it to: 

• Establish yourself as a thought leader. X is a good place to contribute to conversations in real time, with the ability to see trending topics and create ‘threads’ of posts. Direct communication tends to get better engagement, and you can reply to keep the conversation going.  

• Increase traffic to your website. X allows you to share active links in posts, so you can start to drive users towards your website to read more from you. For instance, you might share a blog that captures your perspective on a topic in more detail.  

Facebook 

People use it to share their opinions with family and friends, look for events, join community groups, and get in touch with brands. 

You can use it to: 

• Create and nurture a community. We’ve been using Facebook to achieve this for a volunteering organisation we work with. By posting people-focused content from volunteers themselves, and sharing proud moments like award wins, we increased the number of new accounts reached by 300% in one month.
  
• Provide customer support. More than a billion Facebook users reach out to businesses via the network’s Messenger tool every week. Make sure you’re actively monitoring your inbox for queries or complaints, and respond appropriately.  

YouTube 

People use it to watch interesting videos, keep up with personalities (i.e. by watching vlogs), or get how-to demonstrations. 

You can use it to: 

• Establish your brand as a go-to educational resource. Can you help your audience find the solution to their challenges by sharing helpful videos, or educating them on a timely topic by hosting free webinars?  Make sure to optimise your videos for search by choosing relevant keywords and adding them into the title and description.

• Help customers ‘serve themselves’. By creating a series of how-to videos for your products, you’ll give customers the chance to answer their questions without needing to get in touch. You could offer tutorials for each of your products, for instance, or insider tips for getting the best from them. 

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Start achieving your growth goals via social media 

Whether you want to position your CEO as a thought leader with personal branding, or you want to use paid media to start filling your pipeline, we’re here to help. We offer social media management rooted in strategy, and designed to help you see measurable results. You can read more about our processes, and find some real-world case studies, here. 

If LinkedIn sounds like the best social media platform for your business, we also recommend downloading our ‘Set up your LinkedIn for success’ guide. In it, I share my advice for creating an optimised page that’s ready to engage audiences. 

Get closer to LinkedIn growth by downloading your copy today.