The New Best Practices for B2B Social Media Marketing

Social media is entering its 20s.

No, really. LinkedIn was founded in 2003, Facebook in 2004. There are people in the workforce today who can’t remember life before social networking sites existed.

And like most 20-year-olds, social media is having a quarter life crisis: a questioning of purpose, a lack of cohesive identity, and uncertainty about the future.

All of which makes marketing on social media more challenging than ever. We’re not just contending with new channels, algorithm updates and pay-for-play (although all of those are at work, too). We’re contending with social sites defining and redefining themselves. And at the same time, people are re-evaluating how they use these sites, too.

Amid all of these shifts, one thing remains certain: B2B brands need to be showing up for potential customers on social media.

Here are the latest B2B social media marketing best practices to help you reach your audience.

B2B social media marketing best practices for 2024

These are helpful general guidelines for success on any social media channel.

1. Show up on the right channels in the right context

It’s important to put your time and resources towards the channels where your audience is already spending time. For B2B, LinkedIn is a given. Your mileage may vary for the other channels, however. We have seen financial services and technology clients have great success on Facebook, for example — counterintuitive as it may seem.

It’s really a case of knowing your audience demographics and how they overlap with the channel. Pew Research’s Social Media Fact Sheet is a great place to start.

Context is also key: While LinkedIn’s algorithm promotes multi-slide document posts, a wall of text will send Instagram screaming for the hills. Behind-the-scenes videos of office life or “day in the life” content could take off on TikTok, but might seem less relevant on LinkedIn.

Channel + context + great content is a good foundation for a successful social media strategy.

2. Tailor content to different audiences

B2B buying committees are made up of people at differing levels of seniority, in a wide variety of roles, each with their own pain points and questions. There’s no such thing as a single audience for your B2B social posts — one-size-fits-all messaging won’t fit anyone.

It’s important to understand your audiences, develop personas, and target content to each one.

Luckily, creating content for five different personas doesn’t mean 5x the workload. Imagine you have a PDF report that you’d like to share on LinkedIn: “The Comprehensive Guide to Our Industry.” Take that content, add 15-20% more new content targeted at a persona, and repost as “The IT Leader’s Comprehensive Guide to Our Industry,” and so on.