If you don’t think TikTok is for B2B companies, think again!
VILPE has recently changed its social media strategy. We now believe that TikTok and LinkedIn are the platforms through which we have the best chance to get good organic reach and genuine engagement with our target audience. We use LinkedIn to reach professionals in the business, whilst TikTok is best for building our brand.
TikTok gives the best reach
Currently, we post on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn, and only started posting on TikTok in August. In our experience, the organic reach of both LinkedIn and TikTok far surpasses that of Instagram and Facebook. More specifically, what we have seen so far is that reach, comments, likes, questions and shares on TikTok are at least 3-30 times what we get organically on both Instagram and Facebook.
It seems that the potential for organic reach is greatest in the growing stages of a social media app, and therefore firms might want to seek out channels which are still in the early growth phase. We consider Instagram and Facebook to now be saturated, meaning that the number of brands and the amount of sponsored content on them is too great compared to non-sponsored content. This means that it is very difficult to grow on these platforms if you are a new player.
Social media is a long-term strategy for brand building
One of our engineers recently asked: “Why do we even need to be on social media? Can’t people just go on our website and read about us?” These are fair questions, because how can ventilation, screws and pipes ever compete with all the fun things people consume during their free time?
The simple answer is that the very large majority of people do not go to a website in order to read about a company. We want to reach people before they even know that they need our products. To do this, we need brand building, and social media is one tool in the marketer’s toolbox to help create a long-lasting impression and reach the top of peoples minds. Social media can be used for tactical marketing and to find leads for sales, but above all we believe that social media is about making our brand known to a larger audience. When building brands, it is important to focus on creating engagement, meaning that our audience should feel there is a real value in communicating with us on social media platforms. For this reason, our posts are seldom (if at all) directly linked to the products we are selling.
Social media ROI
Anyone running a social media account for a business knows that it is a resource-demanding task. There really is no point posting on social media if the post only reaches a few people and there is no engagement. We believe that in order to effectively use our marketing resources, firms need to consider the ROI of social media posts. Engagement has been a tough nut to crack on some of the platforms, but we have found that the TikTok algorithm is phenomenal at finding the right target group. We noticed that after just one week on TikTok, engagement with our account rose and we received more views, comments and questions than ever before.
Authenticity on social media
The current trend on social media is for short-form videos. But more than anything, people seem to appreciate authenticity, which is very challenging for companies used to stylish and photoshopped pictures and carefully considered communication. To put yourself out there on TikTok and risk making a fool of yourself feels scary, because you can’t control the outcome. But you need vulnerability to have creativity: if failure is off the table, so is innovation. This is why LinkedIn and TikTok are our primary social media channels. After a decade of scrolling through perfect facades on social media, TikTok’s insight is that people want authenticity. Marketing gurus have been talking about authenticity for a long time, but although it is easy to write into a strategy, it can be daunting to actually put into practice.
