Top Ten Tricks to Maximize Your Social Reach for B2B Enterprises

In December I was given a new area of responsibility (social media manager for a B2B start up) and since then I have been managing all organic and paid campaigns for our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts.

Millennial dream job, right?

Eh. Sort of.

It’s actually really hard. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Top ten ticks to maximize your social reach for B2B enterprises:

1. Instagram likes hashtags. You can put up to 30 (if you post that many they should be below the fold) and the best ones will have 5 – 10k other uses. You don’t want to pick an unused hashtag because no one will find you and you don’t want one with millions of uses because you’ll get lost in the noise.
2. Facebook hates Buffer and other posting apps. You will be penalized for using them. Facebook’s algorithm will kill your reach if you don’t post directly from Facebook. It is time consuming but worth it to use their native scheduling tool rather than use an outside app.
3. Twitter needs attention. Since possibly 15% of active accounts are bots the true value of Twitter is the interaction with others on the platform. A bot will like or retweet, but a bot will not converse (yet… AI is coming!). Be human and chat with the folks interacting with you. You’ll build community and relationships, and isn’t that what it’s all about?
4. Facebook will punish you for links. From my testing it is clear that the FB algorithm downgrades links. This makes sense because FB makes money by showing ads to users. If a user leaves the site, they say bye bye to their ad profit. I do a minimum two non-link posts for every post with a link.
5. LinkedIn loves partner synergy. We’ve done several blog posts and events with partners and our best reach and engagement on LinkedIn happens when those partners like and repost to their networks. This effect does not seem to happen when individuals like/repost, but when a company page shares our stuff we see a boost.
6. Everyone loves video. Seriously. Video is king and you will get a bump in reach when you post video (live or otherwise) on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram.
7. Influencers matter – to a degree. We’re lucky enough to have a few influential folks who support us because they believe in what we’re doing (ie. we don’t pay them but they advocate for us anyways!). The posts they interact with tend to have greater reach or greater engagement (for some reason not both – must investigate) but this is definitely not a magic bullet. The influencer boost is noticeable but not enough to drive crazy viral traffic.  FB seems to be the most positively affected platform but our advocates may only be influential on FB and not on the other platforms.  
8. Snapchat’s geofilters are an untapped resource. You might be familiar with Snapchat’s Sponsored Lenses (these are the ones that let you vomit rainbows, become a dancing hot dog or wear a flower crown) which are very expensive given their massive reach. Sponsored Geofilters allow you to “fence” a physical area and give users a frame to add to their snaps. This is a great way to brand an event cheaply – most of our Geofilters ran for 5 hours and only cost $5. We average a 25% engagement rate!
9. Don’t kill your Facebook wave. When one of your FB posts is doing well – do NOT post anything else until the engagement on the popular post dies down. We’ve killed a post’s momentum by posting something new too soon. Let a popular/viral post run it’s course and then use that momentum to boost your subsequent post. I schedule at least 2 hours in between FB posts.
10. Always have a graphic! If your post isn’t a video you need to have a graphic with your post. We’re visual creatures. Short attention spans. You’ve probably already skipped the rest at this point. Bla bla bla. Well, only my team members read this far. Everybody else skipped reading halfway through and shared this on Twitter. Hint.

Running a corporate social campaign is way more involved than liking your friend’s photos of their kids and posting to your personal page. B2B social media management is time consuming, requires serious strategy and a ton of data analysis.

It is a constant work in progress since the algorithms are continually updated. But through this testing and iterating our audience has grown by triple digits on Twitter and LinkedIn, 2x on Facebook, and 10x on Instagram. Expect future posts as I successfully find (and test) more tactics!