As you can probably tell by how much has changed over the past few years, social media is no longer a place where people simply share updates of their day or connect with new people.
If you are a B2B looking to utilise social in your marketing strategy, firstly, I congratulate you - as B2B social can be daunting.
It's a lot more complex than B2C... but it's well worth implementing as part of your long term marketing strategy.
There's also a lot of opportunity for your brand if you can create content that is optimised for your ideal buyers "search" on the platforms you are operating on.
Hang on. This is social media, why are you talking about SEO?
Great question. Well, with an ever-growing number of users keen to discover new places, faces, brands, trends and locations, social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and particularly TikTok have become search engines in their own right.
Let's take a closer look at how the landscape of "content discovery" on social media is changing, and what you can do as a B2B to benefit from that:
First things first: Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research is now just as important for your social media as it is for your website. When constructing your marketing plan, be sure to conduct keyword research to understand relevant topics that are currently trending in your industry. This information is especially useful in crafting your content, to ensure it is in line with the popular search queries currently being discussed. Including the resulting keywords in the captions of your content pieces will help your content reach the top of social media search bars.
Hashtags Are Key
If it ain't broke, don't fix it! Keeping track of and consistently utilising hashtags that are relevant to your industry/offering into your social media captions and posts is a very important aspect in optimising your content for search. The correct use of hashtags and keywords increases the visibility of your content across multiple social media platforms. This is what helps users to find your content easily from search queries on the platforms. Just be sure not to use any "dead hashtags" as this can downgrade your content or depending on what platform you're using (LinkedIn, we're looking at you) can even result in shadow-bans.
Accessibility Matters in B2B Social Media
By ensuring that your content is accessible to everyone, regardless of their impairments, you will boost your content rankings in a big way. Social media platforms are taking this (quite new) feature very seriously, as it not only makes your content and brand more accessible, it makes social media platforms more accessible on the whole. This should be a key part of your social media marketing strategy no matter what industry you are in. A simple example of this would be including descriptive alt text for your images on Instagram, to make sure that screen readers can understand the content.
It's Not Just Business - It's Personal Too.
This concept is not just for brand pages. If you are a B2B thought leader, currently building your personal brand by posting content on TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter etc. then this concept applies to you in the exact same way. Help people discover you on social by keeping these simple points in mind when creating your content.
In conclusion, just like the old adage goes - when it comes to social media "the only constant is change".
As a B2B brand operating on social, people do business with the people and brands that they know, like and trust. So it's important to stay ahead of the curve and keep your brand in the spotlight as much as possible.
By keeping SEO in mind when creating your next batch of content, you'll be able to capture more your target audiences eyeballs when they are searching for relevant terms on social media.
Are you getting the results you want from social media?
If not, book a call with us today to give your brand the Social Advantage.
https://zcal.co/i/vCKpqNaz