Creating a B2B Social Media Strategy in 2024

Social Media Strategy for eCommerce Marketplaces

Social media marketing is a valuable asset for eCommerce marketplaces. Depending on the type of marketplace you have, such as a B2B marketplace, B2C, C2C, D2C, etc., those social media marketing strategies are going to look different.

Here we’ll have an in-depth look at B2B social media strategies.

These same strategies can be altered slightly as needed and applied to other types of marketplaces as well. So even if you have a B2C, C2C, or D2C marketplace, these social media strategies can still apply.

Why Develop Social Media Marketing for B2B

For a B2B marketplace, or a business that is communicating with other businesses, social media offers a powerful way to reach individuals outside of traditional means.

In a B2B marketplace, oftentimes the goal is to find a specific offer, set of products, niche offering, or unique functionality within the marketplace. Therefore, these specific qualities are what you want to showcase, rather than simply going for general brand awareness, though this can be helpful too.

These unique features are what make a business purchaser’s or seller’s experience a positive one, when they find just what they need for their business. If they can interact with your B2B marketplace business via social media in addition to other B2B marketing channels, they’ll be able to learn more about what your business can offer and the company ethos.

This is the first step toward getting people to connect with your business and become invested in what you do, which is how you build a loyal customer base.

How to Create a B2B Social Media Strategy

To create a B2B social media strategy, use these best practices to have a successful marketing campaign.

Align Content with Your Business Ethos

When creating a B2B social media strategy, consider the ethos of your marketplace, and how you want to convey that.

The type of content you post in social media will influence perception of your business and your brand a whole. That’s why you want to make sure your social media content aligns with the ethos you want your business to be associated with.

Your business ethos, which is woven into your brand, includes your company culture, what’s important to your company, what your business stands for, and the feelings and ideas you want to portray.

Learn More About What Makes A Brand Successful

Be Aware of Changes Happening in the B2B Space

The B2B space is changing, and marketing campaigns for B2B companies are becoming more and more like marketing campaigns made for consumers.  Because in the end, even business professionals are still individual consumers of other markets, and they are exposed to the type of marketing that caters to them as an individual.

It’s only natural that they’d transfer those feelings over and start expecting the same individualized approach in the B2B world, too. It’s still business-to-business, so you do want to present your marketplace business in a professional manner. But it’s just as essential to focus on what your audience wants and expects in your marketing content.

To have a successful social media strategy for your B2B marketplace, be ready and willing to adapt to changes such as this and implement these key considerations into your strategy.

Post Interesting, Unique Content

Which marketing method and social media platforms will work for you depend on your business and what your marketplace is offering. You may find that certain niches within the marketplace do better in certain mediums. For example, you might look at doing advertising through Facebook, or running social media campaigns through Instagram or Twitter, depending on where your audience is.

Wherever you decide to post, it's also best to come up with some ideas that are unique to your business, that disrupt the status quo a little in a positive and interesting way, as this gets people interested in following you.

For example, let's say you're selling brake pads for various types of trucks on your marketplace platform. You could make a video where you put the brake pads into different situations and tests and compare ones from different manufacturers.  In your video, you could test how much force each one needs before it breaks in half, or how cold it has to be before it becomes brittle and shatters when a weight is dropped on it.

This type of video wouldn’t be to inform viewers about which brake pads to buy, but rather to be fun and interesting, and informative in a different way, to get people engaged in your business. This is just one example, but these types of things can be powerful for those in the industry.

When they see you on social media, they might think, “Oh, wow, that’s really cool! I want to see what the results are.” If you can get people curious, this can be a powerful mechanism to get them interested in your business and go to your B2B auction, marketplace or eCommerce site.

Alternatively, your social media strategy could be a long-term strategy of bringing value to consumers over a long period of time with insights, resources, and eventually a mechanism to deliver on their needs for brake pads, for instance.

With either method, you can take this same philosophy and workflow and apply it to any industry or niche. But fundamentally what you’re looking to do is break up the monotony, or as it's commonly referred to, the "brick wall of marketing," which includes the standard slogan: “Want some brake pads? We’ve got the best brake pads on planet!”

While this method can work with some types of marketing, you’ll get more engagement on social media if you do something interesting and creative.

Another thing you could do is go interview people in the industry. You could talk to them about what brake pads they would choose and why. You could do a video interview, or do a survey where you provide the aggregated, anonymized results. You could start a useful discussion about it.

Provide Valuable Insights

At the end of the day, what you want to think about with B2B social media marketing is putting yourself in the shoes of the people that are in the B2B area, and asking yourself what they are going to be thinking about, what do they think would be interesting, and how can you help them?

If you can focus on that, then you can build a strategy campaign that’s going to be focused on this value addition to your customers and answer your sellers’ questions.

For example, perhaps you conduct a survey and post it on social media, and you find out that many people who buy brake pads for these large trucks or vehicles prefer them to be longer lasting, and aren’t as concerned about them potentially overheating.

This is a valuable insight you can offer to the vendors, sellers, and manufacturers in your marketplace, and it delivers values to the buyers as well because then they can get the qualities they want in the products.

Those operating in your B2B marketplace will want to continue getting this type of information so they can adapt their business based on what their customers are saying.

You’ll be able to make an impact with the creative pieces and the baseline industry knowledge about your niche that you put out. You’ll become a resource where people can go to get valuable, consistent information.

Choose Which Social Platforms to Engage In

For B2B, a great social media platform is LinkedIn. This is a great place to start, whether you are just starting out your social media journey or amping up an existing one.

TikTok is also becoming a popular B2B social media platform in 2022. For both LinkedIn and TikTok, videos are popular content types, though the length and format of the videos will differ for each platform.

While what works for one business may not work for everyone, you can still get some ideas by looking at what others in the industry are doing successfully. It’s also important to examine your business goals and how practical it is for you to develop a B2B social media strategy for several platforms versus one or two.

Format Content for Each Social Media Platform

Depending on the social media platforms you decide to market on, it’s important to ensure that your content fits the format of that platform.

Don’t just copy and paste your content from one platform to another—in order to fully get the benefit of your social media campaigns, you must alter your content and formatting to fit that platform’s expectations.

Some social media is focused on video content, podcasts, or chat interactions. Other types are focused on quick, engaging headlines, among other formats.

Fully Leverage Your B2B Social Media Strategy

At the core of all of this, you want to make sure you are delivering value to your viewers or followers.

To put it into an analogy, you could say that you have the choice to focus on the outward appearance or the inward character, and you want to focus on the inward character of your B2B marketplace and what is it that you can offer information-wise and resource-wise that’s valuable in this community that you’re serving.

If you can identify what it is that you and your team can provide with your organization that is genuinely valuable, and keep interacting with that, then social media will be a powerful marketing tool for your business.

It lets you be pervasive with this constant stream of baseline information and then you can have a lot of fun and get a lot of positive attention by having these creative moments that you share about as well.

Use Marketing Tools for Better Efficiency

Other common elements of a B2B social media strategy include automation platforms and tools that make it easy to publish content to several social media platforms in the appropriate format.

Then you wouldn’t have to login to each social media platform one at a time to post a piece of content; instead, you could use a syndication tool that will publish to all of them for you and set up a content calendar to schedule these pieces to go out.