How to Test Content for Your B2B Social Media Strategy

When it comes to B2B social media strategies, one size doesn’t fit all. To create content that genuinely clicks with your professional audience, you first need to understand the difference between B2B and B2C marketing efforts on social media. Then, you need to know how content testing can help you consistently refine your messaging across various platforms until you find the right ones.

In this article, we will explain how to test content formats and share insights on catching the attention of your followers and cementing your industry authority. Keep reading.

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Difference Between B2B and B2C Social Media Strategy

The one mistake B2B companies make when creating their social media strategy is that they act like B2C companies. That’s why it is important to understand the main differences between B2B and B2C social media marketing.

A B2B (business-to-business) company sells products or services to other businesses. Its goal is to help organizations work better, improve their processes, and solve problems. B2B companies speak to professionals and target decision-makers. They focus their marketing social media efforts on building authority and professional relationships without much emotional attachment. Ultimately, the clicks come from informative, insightful, and industry-focused content.

On the other hand, a B2C (business-to-consumer) company sells products or services directly to individual customers. Their aim is to meet people’s needs, preferences, and desires. The B2C marketing strategy on social media focuses on creating an emotional connection with users and building a brand image for customers. Clicks come from emotionally driven, storytelling, entertaining, and visually appealing content.

Now that you know the basic differences, it’s much easier to shape the social media strategy of B2B and b2c.

Content Testing to Stay on Top of Your Target Audience

Testing your target audience is the way to continuously gain more insights and data, refining your marketing efforts. You need to know what’s going on with your buyer personas, what resonates with them, and what doesn’t anymore.

Experiment With Your Brand Messaging Strategy

Testing Educational vs. Promotional Content

Share informative articles, how-to guides, or case studies alongside promotional offers or product announcements to see which type of messaging resonates best with your audience.

Addressing Pain Points Directly

Today’s audiences are more focused on how businesses can address their pain points. They have less patience though for lengthy introductions, such as your brand history. Test both longer and shorter social media posts to determine what resonates best.

Experimenting with Customer Testimonials and Success Stories

User-generated content isn’t exclusive to TikTok and Instagram. Test your traditional case studies against more social media-friendly formats, such as video interviews, testimonials, quotes, and case study highlights.

Testing Emotional Messaging

Emotional messaging is another B2C approach that you can test on your audience. Try incorporating anecdotes at the beginning of your posts to see how they’re accepted well and then continue with a few more emotional triggers such as empathy, humor, or urgency to see if this will increase engagement or conversions.

Testing Your Thought Leadership Content

Thought leadership and long-formats often go hand in hand. However, the nature of social media platforms is to keep users engaged with constantly moving short content. Try how it performs – infographics, short videos with highlights of your longer format content, listicles of trends, predictions, etc.

Trying Industry-Specific Messaging

Address the needs and challenges of several industries within your target audience. People appreciate when you speak directly to them, so experiment with messaging tailored to what is hot in their industries now. This demonstrates your awareness as well, especially when you’re using their specific language and themes.

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More Ways to Content Test Your Audience

• A/B testing of headlines and descriptions. This is a classic approach – create multiple versions of your content and test how they perform against each other to see what resonates the most
• Testing your visual content. Experiment by posting the same content in various visual formats and see the results. For example, create a carousel post and compare its performance to an infographic and a short video.
• Ask your audience. Use polls and surveys on social media platforms to directly ask your audience about their interests, preferences, and pain points.
• Repurpose your content. Try different formats of the same content but with slight variations and track its performance.
• Try what your competitors do. You can analyze what your competitors do and try it on your target audience.
• Experiment with hashtags and keywords. Use different hashtags and keywords on your social media content and monitor how well it performs.

Test Many Social Media Platforms for Business Purposes

LinkedIn is a must for any business organization. However, it is important that you also expand your presence beyond the platform and diversify your B2B social media strategy. There are many more professional networking platforms to explore such as Meetup, Xing, and Opportunity. Niche forums such as X threads or Reddit could also perform well.

It is often a mistake for a B2B to seek a presence on popular B2C social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok).

You can test your content there but if you cannot find an original, engaging, and entertaining way to reach a specific segment of your target audience, it won’t be successful.

How a B2B Can Test Its Presence on Instagram and TikTok?

First, you can do what almost every B2B does. Post infographics and see if the engagement rates and if your following grows.

Then, test another approach. Formulate a clear goal of your presence in these social media platforms and define your specific target audiences for these platforms. For example, you might want to establish a presence as a good employer. In this case, you have to create a content strategy that specifically targets and delivers content to younger users. Or your goal might be to establish yourself as an industry thought leader and present opportunities through your organization’s Academy.

Or you might want to build your brand image around your social responsibility, etc. As you see, these goals are not directly linked to your B2B goals and not even with your main target audience. But being on such mainstream platforms would expand your authority and impact among broader audiences and potentially bring new forces to your organization.

After all, you might decide that you don’t have any reason to stay on Meta or TikTok and prefer to focus your efforts on other professional social media networks.

Pinterest

While Pinterest may not be the first platform that comes to mind for B2B organizations, it could be worth exploring.

Pinterest functions as a visual search engine, which means that by optimizing your content with the relevant keywords, your pins have a higher chance of being discovered. Additionally, pins on Pinterest have a longer lifespan, remaining visible for weeks.

Moreover, unlike other social media platforms designed to keep users scrolling within the app, Pinterest encourages users to follow external links, potentially driving more traffic to your website. You may want to test those infographics that you post on Instagram on Pinterest too and see how it goes.

YouTube

A key advantage of YouTube is that it functions as a powerful search engine, allowing your video content to be discovered through relevant keyword searches. Additionally, videos on YouTube live longer compared to posts on other social media platforms.

You can leverage YouTube to establish your organization as a thought leader and professional partner worthy of recognition and trust. Start by testing videos and shorts. Give your opinion on emerging trends, discuss industry insights, feature guest experts, and organize live events. Then analyze your work, decide if it was well received, and move your strategy forward if it was.

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Wrap Up

In today’s digital landscape, business organizations cannot stay away from social media if they want to be relevant. In fact, social media presence could bring enormous advantages if the B2B social media strategy is based on content testing, analyses, and adaptations.

With patience and substantial effort, you can leverage these platforms to establish your organization as a thought leader and professional partner worthy of recognition and trust within your industry.