Two Paths to Building a B2B Audience on Twitter & LinkedIn

Welcome to PROse! This newsletter is all about helping B2B marketers (you!) improve their content and build an engaged audience.

I don't have a long intro to give to day, so let's get to this week's deep dive! 🫡

If you’re looking to build a social media audience, two platforms stick out for B2B companies: Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have increasingly active professional audiences that span most industries. Beyond that, they’re also synergistic: what works on one platform, typically works on the other without needing to do too much customization.

The difficult part for most brands I’ve worked with or talked to is figuring out how to break through the noise. With more and more people deciding to build personal brands, it gets harder and harder for corporate brands to build an engaged audience. It doesn’t help that algorithms are rewarding them for it.

I can say from personal experience that it’s much harder to build a brand account than a personal account. But hard doesn’t mean impossible. In fact, I’ve discovered two proven paths for building a B2B audience.

Before I jump into them, I want to say that there are more than two paths, but these are the most accessible for most brands. For example, if you’re running a typical demand gen playbook, it’d be relatively easy to fit it into the second strategy.

The two proven paths are:

1. Leverage your founder’s or team’s personal accounts to augment the brand account

2. Do a lot of cool IRL/off-platform activations.

Let’s break them down.

1. Leveraging personal accounts

Honestly, most brand accounts are boring. Often they try too hard to be professional and educational. Problem is, no one wants to consume content from a “professional and educational” brand account.

When people are scrolling through Twitter and LinkedIn, what they want is entertainment. Something that gives them a dopamine hit. Your “5 [Insert Competitor] Alternatives” blog reposts or generic platitudes are not interesting. Every time I see content like that, I just imagine a dingy office with people in suits and ties.

What works way better is a brand with personality, self awareness, and a group of associated personal accounts to help break the fourth wall. The key lever pulled by personal accounts is attention. 

In the beginning, nobody is paying attention/knows your brand. So your content probably won’t get much engagement. But 9 times out of 10, your team has people with personal accounts where people will engage with them because they already know, like and trust them.

This is a strategy I try to implement for every company I work with. It’s a win-win for everyone: it helps the brand grow faster; and as the brand grows, it provides legitimacy and social proof to the personal accounts. Think about it: who wouldn’t love working at Gong and having that in their LinkedIn bio?

HOW-TO:

Prime your brand account

• Write a clear bio so people know what you talk about and why they should follow you

• Stick to 2-3 pillar topics to publish content around

• Find an emoji that represents your brand and add it to your name to build name/brand recognition

Meaningfully engage with the brand account

• Like tweets you see, but consider retweeting what makes sense for your account

  • If the founder is leading these efforts, they can retweet practically anything because their followers are interested in the company’s progress

• Don’t just say “nice tweet!”, try responding with something humorous

Give your brand a personality

• Nail down your voice

  • Speak as an individual when you’re creating your foundational content. Speak as an entity when you’re talking about business/product updates

    • “me/my” - foundational, humorous content

    • “we” - business content

• Use gifs and memes where appropriate (almost always)

• “Humorous” lands better than “smart” unless you’re already a recognizable brand and it fits your general brand ethos (e.g. Stripe)

An example of a brand that does this well is Triple Whale. Just a few months ago, no one knew who they were. Now, it’s practically impossible to miss them in the DTC space.

2. IRL/off-platform activations

There’s an adage growing in the social media sphere: “the best way to grow an online audience is to do something interesting offline”. Well, it’s true. People will flock to the brands that seem to have momentum.

“Activations” is an ambiguous word, but it’s just a way of saying “things that bring your brand to life”. It can be mini product launches, online or offline events, or even experiential campaigns. The goal is to create an experience that your community can rally around and share with their like-minded friends and peers. When done well, the novelty factor of an activation can create its own virality: everyone in your niche will know what you’re doing.

The magic really starts working once you become consistent. I recommend creating a “tentpole activation” every quarter. It creates a level of consistent momentum and conversation that compounds your brand’s awareness and affinity in your niche.

Now, before you get nervous and write this strategy off because it sounds expensive, understand that it doesn’t have to be something grand. If you’re running a traditional demand gen strategy (ebooks, webinars, etc.), you can give those things a makeover and they become the activations you create. The key to making them work is turning the focus to your audience. 95% of webinars and ebooks I see from B2B companies are just product pitches wrapped up in a lot of words. That’s not exciting.

HOW-TO:

Product extensions

• Build tools and products that can be extensions of your main product

  • Create things that give away 80% of the value that your product does for free

  • A perfect example is a manual/spreadsheet version of your core, automated product

Rally your space

• Create an event for your niche

  • Curate a specific space so your audience feels special. Be exclusive about the people who should be there. 

  • Create 2-3 specific factors every guest must have to be invited

• Seed the event with recognizable names for that group

Co-op with a synergistic brand

• Do a content or product collab with a non-competing brand to tap into overlapping and new audience segments

An example of a brand that does this well is Party Round. They consistently create cool new mini-products and collaborations that get early-stage tech founders talking and joining their ecosystem.

That’s all I’ve got for today. Next week I’ll break down a framework for creating content that gets your audience’s attention and moves them to action. See you then!