With 1.94 billion monthly active users, it’s no surprise Facebook is a top priority for many marketers. But we still are asked by B2B marketers whether Facebook is worth the investment. 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 percent of people say they use Facebook for professional purposes.
- Facebook is the top social media platform priority across B2B and B2C marketers, with 95 percent of B2B marketers using it, according to Clutch.
- And most importantly, at the end of the day, we are all consumers anyway, so speak to and treat each other as consumers, not faceless businesses.
Below are four ways to use Facebook successfully for B2B marketing:
- Get visual. Social media is getting more visual across the board, and that is definitely the case on Facebook, too. Appeal to newsfeed scrollers by using eye-catching photos, videos or gifs to either accompany your posts or as the post itself. Whether a photo of your product, a video tour of your office or even a reposting 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.
- Be real. Show your company culture to prospective employees and customers with photos and videos of your team. This is especially important for companies that say they are extensions of their clients’ teams. Use Facebook as a platform to demonstrate your culture, so prospects can get a sense of who you are, who they’d work with and whether you’ll have chemistry when working together.
- Go live. One way to show off your realness is through a live video. You can give a behind-the-scenes look around the office, tour an industry tradeshow and 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.
- Get your audience involved and active. Combine this tip with the previous three by asking your customers to share their photos and then repost the best ones, answer audience questions during your Facebook Live stream, or pose a question when posting a photo of your team potluck. And 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 go a long way to show you are community-minded. One of our clients’ Facebook pages became a hotbed of customer engagement where customers shared photos of their projects and installations, and other fans would reply with questions or their own pictures. Word-of-mouth marketing on your Facebook page is an ideal situation – and one that doesn’t require too much work if you are where your customers already are.