Opinion: B2B Marketers, Don’t Be Desperate When it Comes to Social Media

With organic reach in decline, marketers can sometimes be grasping for ways to increase engagement through social media.

A test by Marketing Land showed that including emoji in tweets increased engagement by 25.4%. BuzzSumo, meanwhile, has recommended that brands should post to Facebook during “off-peak” times when there is less competition for newsfeed space.

A warning to B2B marketers: don’t become desperate.

Investing time and energy chasing engagement for engagement’s sake is a needless distraction. A few extra likes or retweets may nudge a meaningless metric forward, but may also distract from delivering real value for your business.

While using emoji or posting at 3am on Sunday morning may improve your engagement rates, if you’re a B2B marketer it’s unlikely to contribute to your business’ bottom line.

The last 18 months have seen social media reach maturity as a marketing channel. In reality social media is now just ‘media’ – another channel through which marketers can reach their audiences online. But social media is far more valuable than old media to the B2B marketer.

Due to the monetization of social networks, organic social content has become business hygiene – akin to publishing press releases to your website – while earlier social media KPIs such as ‘building a community’ and ‘fostering genuine conversation’ have both become minimal to the point of irrelevance, particularly for B2B marketers.

And though you need to be ready to respond and deal with incoming queries through organic outreach, most often the conversation is quickly moved into more traditional customer service channels.