Nat Lennox is a B2B Marketing Advisor & Consultant at Nat Lennox.
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In part one of this series, I briefly discussed how B2B startups can use social media to create positive business outcomes by driving revenue. In this follow-up, let’s discuss using your socials to attract success through talent acquisition, earned press and easier funding rounds.
If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend reading part one, "Six Ways Social Media Fuels B2B Startup Growth: Generating Revenue," as a primer to this piece. It details three ways social media drives revenue to accelerate growth for your business.
OK! Let’s dive in. Here are three more things social media can help achieve for your B2B startup:
1. Attract top-tier talent to your organization.
The economy ebbs and flows, but the highest caliber talent is always well sought-after, even in a down market. Especially for startups, it can be hard to compete with larger competitors that can throw top salaries and lush perks at prospective employees. However, social media can help startups even the talent playing field.
The best way to attract top-tier talent—on and off social media—is by leading your current team with integrity and creating a positive culture within your organization. On social media, you can easily highlight these aspects of your business. Social gives potential employees a chance to discover what working for you might be like.
Ready to use social media to land top candidates? Here are some tips:
• Showcase and celebrate your current team members’ wins. Tag them by name (with their permission) and show genuine gratitude for their efforts.
• Like and engage with current employees’ posts. Support their thoughts and opinions at every opportunity.
• Always treat previous employees with integrity and kindness. Wish them well and celebrate their new professional adventures on socials.
• Nominate your talented team members for awards. Celebrate and share any industry recognition they receive.
• Share educational achievements and team activities that made a difference. Off-sites, team-building sessions and conferences that enhance your team’s professional development are great opportunities to share.
2. Generate interest from the press.
Earned media can accelerate a startup's success through increased exposure and brand reach.
When a company secures positive coverage from reputable publications, the credibility earned can build significant legitimacy with potential customers and partners. Well-crafted press proliferates a company’s narrative into the market, building trust and enhancing reputation.
However, many fledgling startups lack the financial resources needed to hire high-powered public relations firms to secure media connections.
Luckily, journalists continually look for stories and sources on your social platforms. Social media allows startups to reach the media with less investment. By sharing thought leadership, investing in video content and encouraging your senior leaders to share their expertise on social platforms, you place your company in the landscape where journalists source material.
Ready to use social media to earn some press attention? Here are some tips:
• Make sure you’re investing time and energy into developing your creative content. Similarly to your customer strategy—engaging thought leadership pieces, industry insights and visually appealing posts will help you stand out in a journalist's feed.
• Use relevant hashtags or occasionally tag journalists in posts related to their areas of interest to increase visibility. Don't overdo it; you want to get their attention without hounding them.
• Stay engaged by actively participating in industry conversations online and responding promptly to comments.
• Focus on building relationships through genuine interactions.
• Steer clear of shameless self-promotion. Journalists seek valuable resources for reliable information and are likely to be turned away by sales-like language.
3. Make fundraising fast and easy.
Venture capitalist funds want to invest in winning businesses that enhance or improve their current portfolios—but from a financial and reputational perspective. VCs are paying attention to which startups are rising fast, who’s grabbing headlines, and which founders are the “ones to watch” with fresh ideas and perspectives. Beyond the numbers, all of these factors help inform their investment decisions.
When founders enter a funding round, they don’t want to feel like they’re begging for pennies.
The most successful rounds start with investors approaching the startup proactively—typically because that investor has already heard the hype about said company and is intrigued by the potential investment before ever meeting them.
Social media is the perfect platform to prime the pump for easy fundraising. By encouraging each of your founders and senior leadership team members to build their brands, you can elevate the VC community’s perception of your business so that they’re primed and intrigued long before you’re talking dollars.
Ready to entice VCs via social media? Here are some tips:
• Take time to develop and build out your founders’ and senior leadership members’ individual social presence. Let them craft their voice and share their genuine interests. Resharing company content is great, but senior team members should be sharing beyond that, with a regular cadence.
• Make sure your company pages and senior leadership pages are connected to relevant VCs in your area to increase visibility.
• Regularly send out a Slack or email reminder to senior leadership with links to earned media articles for easy sharing.
• Encourage your senior leadership team to engage in like-minded communities.
• Measuring social media’s impact on your fundraising efforts will be a breeze—either you’ll have interested parties approaching your business with investment inquiries, or not. Learn as you go and adjust. If you have a hard time during Series A, for instance, it might be prudent to double down your social visibility efforts far ahead of Series B.
Hopefully, this two-part series can be a reference for making social media an integral part of your B2B marketing strategy. Whether you are using your social channels to shorten the sales cycle, generate demand, enhance the customer experience, attract investment, entice the press or woo top-tier talent, thinking strategically and investing properly in socials can accelerate your growth and lead to incredible outcomes.
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