Social media is an exciting, intricate puzzle with rising stakes for marketers. Building an audience in spaces like B2B, finance, and SaaS can struggle with standing out and capturing the attention of potential clients and customers.  On platforms crowded with creators and brands vying for focus, it can be difficult to catch and hold an audience’s attention. 

Strategic priorities, shifting algorithms, and platform engagement standards can further muddy the waters of social audience growth that is focused on an authentic connection with your ideal customer. Business-focused sales often have longer sales cycles and involve more stakeholders than the average B2C purchase. Creating a dedicated community offers the chance to maintain strong connections with potential clients or customers, and keeps your brand top-of-mind when it’s time to make a purchase decision. 

If you’re looking to refresh your audience growth strategy and position yourself as a leading B2B brand, you’ve come to the right place. Discover how to improve audience and community growth on social media to foster authentic engagement and cultivate brand loyalty.  

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Deeply know your B2B audience and their habits 

What content types speak to your ideal audience, and how do they typically engage with that content? Once you understand that, explore where they’re searching for and engage with conversations that concern or include your brand.  

With platforms like Reddit, X, and TikTok working as mainstays for social conversation, and disruptor-hopefuls like Lemon8 and Threads constantly rolling out, it’s important to understand how your audience may be branching out from their typical social media habitats.  While they’re largely imperfect fits for messaging, they’re great resources to improve your social listening efforts. When you truly know your audience, you spend less time out-right selling to them and more time communicating and demonstrating your overall value.  

Creating social listening dashboards on platforms like Brandwatch Consumer Research is essential to continuously monitor and refine your content marketing strategy. These dashboards consolidate brand mentions, industry conversations, and audience sentiment in real time. That said, it’s important to remember that social listening tools aren’t the be-all-end-all of audience monitoring, and should be supplemented with observational insights from platforms that social listening tools may have yet to tap into, like Threads or Discord.  

Combining social listening dashboards with active observational monitoring can help you continually identify emerging trends, understand shifts in audience preferences, and quickly pinpoint potential issues or areas for growth.   

Exploring customer conversation by improving your social listening can help in several ways, including:  

Brand/product sentiment 

Are you testing a new strategy or launching a new product? Understanding consumer conversations can help you better understand how changes may be perceived before making any adjustments.  

Competitor analysis 

Get a better sense of how competitors are engaging with their audiences across platforms, as well as the sentiment and pain points voiced by their customers. This can help you speak to aspects of your brand or product where your competitor falls short.  

Pain points 

Response rates to online surveys can be hit and miss. In conjunction with the rate of response, combing through industry-related forums and conversations can help you better understand your business’s pain points.  

Refresh your keyword and hashtag research 

Social search is becoming increasingly important as more users turn to social media platforms to start their search efforts. Social media platforms are also increasing their search features and algorithms to help users discover information, products, and services based on their interests and social interactions. Optimizing your social media profiles, leveraging relevant hashtags, and engaging in community discussions can significantly improve your brand’s discoverability.   

Refreshing your keyword and hashtag research can help you routinely update your strategy to reflect how and where your audience is discussing industry or brand-related issues. With the social landscape in a constant state of evolution, keywords and hashtags can fall in and out of favor.  

When you regularly refine your preferred keywords and hashtags, you can keep up with how your audience is searching, and ensure you’re at least monitoring the discussions that your audience is participating in. 

Aligning your keywords and hashtags can also help you improve your content creation and relevance. 

Create high-quality B2B content 

Content is the bread and butter of any good social media account, but as important as posting is to algorithms, quality is far more important than quantity. With the number of posts and ads ticking up on social media every minute, content that’s well-crafted, visually engaging, and informative can help you cut through the noise.  

Remember that what high-quality means will vary from brand to brand. For some, it may be visual composition, while others may want to focus on the information provided—it all depends on what you can provide as a product or service. Additionally, there is a major industry-wide push about moving away from overly-polished, glossy content that is being published less frequently, and moving to more lo-fi, quick and dirty content that allows brands to increase the velocity with which they can publish. 

Focus on creating content that addresses the audience’s pain points, showcases how brands understand them, and communicate the brand value, as well as the brand’s values. 

Quality content can also help to foster your credibility with your audience. When a brand consistently delivers valuable and well-produced content, it can help signal to consumers and competitors alike that you have authority in your community. It can also improve the likelihood of consumers actively seeking out your page or profile. Higher post and profile engagement can improve your KPIs, and boost overall visibility.  

It may take half the time to make five so-so pieces of content than making one great piece, but that great piece is more likely to build a sustainable foundation for quality content repurposing.  

Repurpose your high-quality B2B content  

Understanding what content types are in vogue across platforms and how your audience likes to engage with them will help you maximize the ways in which you repurpose your high-quality content. From video clips to gifs to educational or long-form content, the ways in which you repurpose your content can help extend your impact across platforms and audience segments.  

Repurposing your most robust pieces of content can also help maximize your ROI by delivering several different uses for a single piece of content. This can help you maintain consistent output without constantly needing to create new work.  

Repurposing your content will also help improve its shelf life. Not all consumers are guaranteed to engage with it in its original form. By maintaining the core message and altering the format to suit different platforms, you can increase the likelihood of reaching your ideal audience with the form that’s most likely to resonate with them. 

Build genuine and consistent engagement with your audience 

Authenticity is a watchword for social media. If your approach to customer communications is still stilted to the point of feeling sterile, it’s time to recalibrate. While it’s still important for brands to find the line that’s most comfortable for them, it’s also important to engage with your audience in a way that acknowledges there are human beings on either side of the screen.  

Where possible, focus on personalized and proactive engagement. Instead of generic replies, address users by name (if possible) and reply to specific comments or questions to demonstrate customer care.  

Seek out and participate in relevant discussions outside of your own profile and posts. Join industry-specific groups, contribute to trending conversations, and engage with user-generated content to broaden your brand’s organic reach and visibility. Make sure that you plan for which types of conversations that you’d like to engage in, and make sure that they align with your business goals and audience needs.  

Build and highlight community with user-generated content 

There is no asset more valuable than a brand loyalist. Working with influencers can improve your brand visibility, but highlighting user-generated content from someone that is already all-in on your brand can help drive a more organic engagement and loyalty.  

Engaging with customers that are actively engaging with you is crucial to growing an audience. When possible, acknowledge creators’ testimonials, comments, videos, or posts. Personalized interactions, such as commenting on a UGC post or featuring contributors on your story, can strengthen audience relationships and bolster your authority around your community.  

Remember that people are more inclined to join active conversations. Showing how people are engaging with a brand can encourage other customers to do the same.  

While highlighting UGC can help increase your engagement with followers that look like your ideal audience, it’s also helpful to collaborate with creators that have those same audiences in-built.  

Collaborate with B2B influencers and other brands 

Collaborating with influencers and other brands in your space can help tap into similar and ideal audiences that you may have yet to reach or have lapsed in engaging with your brand.  

Cross-collaborating with brands that share audience attributes can help improve your visibility with audiences that may not be familiar with your brand, but are in a similar consumer bracket. This tactic is mutually beneficial, allowing another brand to interact with your audience where they may not otherwise, helping to drive brand awareness and tap into new markets and audience segments.  

Collaborating with micro-influencers can also help you tap into far more engaged and niche audiences, speaking to strong connections with small but highly engaged subgroups, including individuals in similar or related industries.  

Showcase your process and employees 

Highlighting the dedicated employees working on your brand can help humanize your social media presence beyond a username and profile picture. If possible, showcase product or brand innovation, tease upcoming releases, or create interactive content, such as running a live session. You can also use this to build up internal brand champions and internal influencers to positively impact your brand and brand reputation.  

Unpacking your day-to-day can help consumers appreciate the time, effort, and focus that goes into your work, and create an authentic connection to your process.  

Trend-watch—and pick and choose how you engage 

Not every trend or meme is going to be an authentic your brand. It’s important to understand what your audience emulates, stitches, and discusses in relation to pop culture–but not important that you jump in on every single opportunity. Over-indexing on trendy content can read as trying too hard, making you less of an it-brand and more of a “pick me.”  

Being nimble enough to pivot and engage with a trend when it makes sense can help your overall visibility and improve relevance with your audience, but keeping your head on a constant swivel and continually altering your plans to include the latest trending content can lead to a rocky audience foundation.  

It’s also important to have guidelines around which trends you choose to engage with. If your brand voice is more stoic, then creating content with Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please, Please, Please” is probably going to give some of your audience whiplash. Outline how you want to tie your trending content into your current content pillars and messaging strategy.  

Maintaining a consistent schedule that repurposes high-quality content and integrates product and brand-focused messaging can help build trust with your audience while allowing you flexibility to participate in relevant trends.   

Implement AI to free up time for B2B creation 

AI-driven tools can analyze mountains of data and identify areas for automation across your scheduling and implementation. AI can help you manage your frequency to avoid inundating your audience with content, improving overall interaction metrics. AI can also help adjust your schedule based on evolving trends and audience behavior.  

Most importantly, making tasks like implementation, organization, and posting AI-driven gives you more time and space to develop authentic audience connections and engagement.  

Posts, everyone! 

Growing your social media audience requires a focus on a foundation for the long-term, which can produce short-term wins when your strategy is solidified. However, it’s important to remember that what works today may not work tomorrow for several reasons, be they algorithm updates, platform popularity, or audience interest. In a landscape that is constantly chasing the next trending sound, smoothest transition, and most engagement, it’s important to anchor your strategy with audience-first focused content.  

Remember to remain nimble. When possible, experiment with your messaging while staying true to your brand’s values. If you can stay aligned with who your audience and what content they find the most valuable, you can play with content formats as they fall in and out of favor.  As you refine your strategy, remember how important post quality and consistency are, and prioritize authentic interactions over trends. This can help your brand both capture and grow attention, and build a loyal and engaged community that grows with you.  

Interested in how content creators impact a brand culture? Find out how to foster partnerships for deeper audience connection, or let’s talk about how to achieve more for your marketing—and your business.