As a B2B marketer, what are your most successful social media platforms?
I collaborated on this answer with my friend Adi tmdPineapple, and it is part one combined with this answer: Alex Glenn’s answer to What is the most effective Quora marketing strategy?
Listen to the episode here:
The top B2B social platforms:
- Quora.com
- Linkedin.com
- Twitter.com
- Facebook.com
- Reddit.com
- Stackexchange.com
- Github.com
- Stackoverflow.com
First, let me explain how social media ‘bots’ work. This will help add context to our answers;
Stage 1 (of a social media startup/platform):
Growth hackers are invited to create anywhere from 20 to more than a few hundred fake accounts, most of us do this using a combination of python and JavaScript or some other code to automate it. The founders of the startup give us what we need, so we can create the scripts hella fast.
Stage 2:
The social media platform founders go to their next investor meeting boasting about all of the new accounts on their platform. They get more funding and everyone is happy.
Stage 3:
Real people begin to use the platform. The startup team that created the platform engages with the new human users, but also showcases the growth hackers as influencers on the platform. (Ex: if John Pineapple was invited to participate in stage 1, he will be a featured platform influencer, but all of the fake accounts that he created, will not be). The growth hackers continue to use the fake accounts to make themselves seem hella important on the new niche platform.
Stage 4:
The platform gets traction and passes critical mass. There are now more humans than bots and 100s of new users are joining every day. The platform has “gone viral”. People who are less experienced with using bots covertly start spamming the heck out of human users on the site.
Stage 5:
The human users get annoyed with the bot users and the platform’s founders have to determine if it’s better for public perception and key stakeholders, if they shut down the bots (hurting the people who first helped to grow their platform) OR ignore the humans who are annoyed with the bots. Usually, they shut down the bots that are newest to the site, but let the bots created in stage 1 stay on.
This is why Twitter had a ton of people lose followers a few weeks ago. But this was not the first time it happened. It is the circle of life in the startup world of social platforms.
- Reach – last reported, approximately 470M members
- Tools – Lead capture, scrapes, automations….
Adi’s favorite tools:
In the early days of my company I tried out a few automation tools that are no longer around. This morning I was speaking with a fellow growth hacker who informed me that the easiest tool on the market for this now is Home – Meet Leonard – Lead Generation & Growth Hacking Tool For LinkedIn
Alex’s favorite tools:
My personal favorite tool is hubsell – sales automation which allows you to add a LinkedIn connection request to the start of you cold email sequence. I like LinkedHub for automated messaging sequences.
Linkedin growth tactics
Adi’s favorite Linkedin Growth Strategy
- at this point in the game, 80% of my clients come in via referral, so do not look at my LinkedIn and copy what I do, we do not have the same goals.
- For those new to the LinkedIn growth games, I’d suggest forming a pod with members you can collaborate with. A lot of people make the mistake of just adding a bunch of random people on LinkedIn, hoping this will get them somewhere. This tactic yields less than 8% success. Meaning that for every 100 people you randomly add (if LinkedIn doesn’t shut your account for spam activity) a maximum of 8 of them will actually acknowledge your existence.
- So what does work? Social media algorithms measure your content’s value by looking at your engagement to follower ratio. (How many of your connections engage with each post). The more connections you have, the more people you need to have engaged with your post, in order to trip the algorithm. So the best thing you could do, forms a group on telegram where you all agree to engage with each other’s content. The size of the group should be equivalent to at least 10% of your total number of connections. Post at the same time each week and cross-promote, like and share each other’s posts. After a few weeks you should begin to develop a following.
- Once you have 30% of your following engaging with your post, then strategically add specifically targeted people. Watch your engagement: follower ratio. Once it drops to 10%, focus on boosting engagement until it reaches 30% again. Then just rinse and repeat.
- Again, don’t just look at my profile and copy what i do, I don’t have the same goals as you. I’ve worked with over 300 startups across 5 continents, at this point in the game, startups apply to be my client, I’m not chasing people the way I used to have to.
Alex’s LinkedIn tips
Use LI to build channel partnerships, recruit, or connect to prospects so they see your posts… but not to sell to them. LI is at a stage in it’s business life cycle where those of us who have been using LI for client engagement have done more than abuse the platform. And this has caused most LI members to ignore any persistent attempts to sell. So, my strategies are meant to be used to connect, build thought leadership, create channel partnership or referral relationships, and cross-promote with like-minded individuals.
- Never send inmails. Ever.
- When sending connection requests, don’t add anything about you or your company. Keep it about them.
- Your goal is to connect so you can nurture the relationship, so mention something about them or simply that’d you’d like to connect.
- Then, the real strategy is nurturing the relationship through publishing thought-leadership-showing content on LI and other platforms your prospects are active on. See What are some good lead nurturing strategies and proven tools?
Now let’s discuss the bell of the ball, my personal favorite social platform for B2B marketing:
Quora.com
Here are some facts about Quora:
As of April 2017, Quora has claimed to have 190 million monthly unique visitors, up from 100 million a year earlier.[8] By most logical guesstimates, we are above 300 million monthly uniques today.
Adi, why don’t you fill everyone in on how Quora’s algo works?
Quora’s Algorithm:
Quora has developed its own proprietary algorithm to rank answers, which works similarly to Google PageRank.
Currently, Quora has different ways to recommend questions to users:
- Home feed questions recommendations with “interesting” questions that are relevant to the user’s preferences.
- Daily Digest email containing a set of questions with one answer that is deemed the best answer given certain ranking requirements.
- A set of questions that relates to the current questions the user is viewing.
- A user can request another user to answer a question.
Quora User Demographics:
According to Experian Hitwise, a large share of Quora’s audience is college-educated professionals living in college towns.
Quora for SEO:
According to Alexa – 63% of Quora’s visits were generated from searches.
Are links in Quora answers nofollow? Yes, Quora links are marked as “nofollow” which means they don’t pass any “link juice” to your site.
Then why would I post on Quora? Quora answers rank everywhere – for specific long-tail keywords (questions). Therefore, if you answered a question that is ranking, your answer could be seen by those searching for that term. Further, if the reader finds your answer valuable, they are likely to click your CTA link to learn more.
We are all now acquainted with the stats on Quora and on the same page that Quora is a great place for you to promote yourself and your business. So, let’s talk strategy… This next section is dedicated to effective marketing strategies for Quora.
About The Author: Admin
I work with founders and teams to build intuitive marketing automation systems, execute creative growth strategies, and scale processes.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) | Marketing Automation | Growth Marketing | Lead Generation | Email Marketing | User Acquisition | Rapid Prototyping | Personal Branding | Thought Leadership & Subject Matter Expertise
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