With over 2 billion monthly active users, it’s no surprise Facebook is a top priority for many marketers - yet a key question that's regularly asked by B2B businesses is whether Facebook is worth the investment for them.
It may seem like Facebook only makes sense if you’re marketing a consumer-facing product or service, but consider these facts:
- HubSpot found that 74% of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes.
- Facebook is the top social media platform across B2B and B2C marketers - with 95% of B2B marketers using it, according to Clutch.
- And most importantly, at the end of the day, we're all consumers anyway, so it's important to speak to and treat each other as consumers, not faceless businesses.
There's definitely opportunity for B2B brands, as well as B2C. Here are four ways B2B companies can use Facebook successfully marketing:
1. Get visual
Social media is getting more visual across the board - and that's definitely the case on Facebook, too. Boost your appeal News Feed scrollers by using eye-catching photos, videos or GIFs to either accompany your posts or as the post itself.
Whether it's a photo of your product, a video tour of your office, or even a repost of a popular meme, visual content captures attention much better than text. In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it does text.
2. Be real
Showcase your company culture to prospective employees and customers with photos and videos of your team.
This is especially important for companies that say they're extensions of their clients’ teams - you can use Facebook to demonstrate your culture, to help prospects can get a sense of who you are, who they’d work with and whether you’ll have chemistry when working together.
3. Go live
A great way to show off the human side of your business is through a live video.
You can provide a behind-the-scenes look around the office, tour an industry tradeshow, or broadcast a live product demo through Facebook Live.
Because anything can happen when you’re live and it’s typically a less-scripted and polished video, Facebook Live feels more authentic to viewers, opening up an opportunity for you to use it to shape your brand image.
4. Get your audience involved and active
Combine this tip with the previous three and get your audience involved.
Ask your customers to share their photos, then repost the best ones. Answer audience questions during your Facebook Live stream. Pose a question when posting a photo of your team potluck.
And once you've started that engagement train moving, keep the dialogue going – when people (employees, partners, customers or fans) reply to your posts, react, comment back or 'Like' their posts. Small acts like these can go a long way towards show that your business is community-minded and invested in its customers.
One of our clients’ Facebook Pages has become a hotbed of customer engagement, where customers share photos of their projects and installations, and other fans reply with questions or their own pictures.
Word-of-mouth marketing via your Facebook Page can be an ideal solution – and one that doesn’t require too much work, if you go where your customers already are.