Social media for software companies is becoming increasingly popular. Social media provides a platform for SaaS companies to engage with their customers, grow their brand, and more. Most businesses nowadays partake in an unspoken rule that being active on social media is a necessity.
Social media strategies for software companies should be customized to fit your needs. Whether you are a B2B or B2C SaaS company, you will have goals and objectives that are unique to your company and brand. Establishing a presence on social media takes time, patience, and strategy.
Social media marketing for tech companies is an important part of developing your company, especially one whose main activity is software implementation and development. As a software company, showing your clients that you are in tune with modern-day communication and technology helps deepen your credibility in your industry.
We understand that social media management may seem like a big undertaking. But not to worry! On this page, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about creating and building your social media presence. We even provide social media marketing services so you don’t even have to do it yourself. Let’s get started!
Social media is full of unspoken rules. Let’s take a look at what social media possibilities are available for software companies.
B2B SaaS companies absolutely have—and need—a social media presence. Social media marketing for software companies is not limited to B2C. Businesses—all businesses—can connect with clients online, whether those clients are individual people or entire companies.
Think of it this way: B2B software companies can use social media to advertise their products. Instead of doing so either one-on-one in client meetings or to a random audience using a television commercial, you can now use social media to target an audience. Sending advertisements directly to your target audience makes for efficient marketing; your product can now be seen by the right people and companies.
Social media can also be a starting point from which to lead people back to your website. Social platforms are a great foundation for inbound marketing campaigns, guiding your followers down your marketing funnel to obtain a goal.
One of the main purposes of a social media strategy for software companies is to build your company branding. When people who are active online see your brand, you can start to build brand awareness and consumer trust.
Think of your brand as an extension of your company’s personality. Brands are much more than just a logo. Your brand is your tone, how you visually portray yourself, and how you communicate your mission and vision overall. Social media has the unique ability to help you build your brand because you can consistently voice your personality through words and graphics.
The great thing about social media for software companies is that social media is—obviously—not just for software companies. This means that you can engage with your audience on an individual level.
You can ask people to “comment below,” and when they do, you can respond. You can answer DMs and follow the people who follow you. By communicating with others on your social platforms, you can create a community around your business.
B2B and B2C e-commerce has skyrocketed in the recent few years. Using e-commerce features on social media has seen a similar rise. There were nearly 80 million people who made a purchase on social media in 2020.
In a study done by Forbes, researchers found that 77% of millennials and Gen Zers shop on social media. Use these trends to your advantage. Social media provides easy access to products. If you have the capacity, try to implement sales into your social media strategy for software companies.
The best social media platforms for software companies are the ones on which their clients/customers are active. The best use of your time will be to direct your efforts toward your users. One of the top goals of social media marketing is to establish your brand with your audience. Your audience needs to be aware of you, thus the best platform is where you can gain that awareness.
One of the best social media practices is versatility across platforms while maintaining brand consistency. You’re allowed to experiment and test which platforms work best for your company. Find out which platforms your competition is most active on. Which platform can you drive more sales on?
Though the best platform for your own business will be determined over time, there are a few platforms that meet the needs of most SaaS companies. These are the platforms that social media marketing for IT companies use the most often.
LinkedIn is one of the best places for social media marketing for software companies, particularly if you are a B2B SaaS company. LinkedIn has just over 800 million users worldwide. Its main purpose is professional networking, making this a great platform to connect with people and companies who are your target audience. LinkedIn is also the top platform for B2B companies to gain lead generation, aided by the LinkedIn paid advertisement feature.
LinkedIn’s features allow you to effectively establish your brand because they have industry-specific descriptions that can be referenced as relevant keywords for users. You can also include your products directly on the platform.
Social media marketing for tech companies can be accomplished on LinkedIn alone, although diversifying your social media presence can benefit you greatly and allow you to reach a broader user-base.
Facebook is another great platform for reaching both B2B and B2C audiences. You can create a Facebook business page to post relevant content and connect with your followers. Facebook Business also allows customers to rate your business, which can significantly boost company morale and establish trust with audience members.
You can also post paid advertisements directly through Facebook Ad Manager, targeting ads to your primary audience and ultimately boosting your return on investment (ROI).
Facebook is a platform that allows you to build your brand for a large audience. Its 2.91 billion monthly active users mean your scope for reaching target audience members—B2B and B2C alike—just got a whole lot bigger.
Instagram—which was acquired by Facebook back in 2012—is an evolving platform for visual digital marketing. An Instagram account brings dimension to your company by providing a platform for photos and videos. Instagram allows for creative freedom while connecting with relevant audience members.
Social media can be a tool for building your brand identity. The goal of this is to capitalize on exposing your differential advantage on social media. While the comparative advantage is tied to product pricing, a differential advantage shows your consumers that your product is superior to those of your competitors.
Your differential advantage relies on one key practice: audience engagement. Of course, audience engagement involves tactical actions, including:
If you’re not sure how to do this, don’t worry, you’re not alone. As a software marketing company, part of our job is to support, educate, and involve our SaaS clients in building their social media marketing strategy for the purpose of customer engagement.
If you’re interested in learning about building your SaaS social media marketing strategy, schedule a call today!
One of the best ways to market your brand is by using it—remember, you have a product that is a useful tool for your clients and customers. Social media is the perfect place for teaching opportunities.
Create and post short “how-to” videos, walking your users through different aspects of your software. This results in engagement, support, and learning combined. Posting tutorials also gives a voice and face to your company, which further personalizes your brand.
Paid social campaign advertising is a strategic way to rapidly gain visibility. Many social media platforms have paid advertising options that let you set a budget and the attributes for the audience(s) you want to reach.
Paid advertising can be used for numerous reasons, including:
Paid advertising is a useful tool on social media, especially for software companies. When your competition is also on social media, you want to get to your shared target audience first and make a lasting positive impression. Do so with the help of paid advertising.
If you want to learn more about paid advertisements outside of social media, visit our paid search campaigns page.
Who knows your product best—other than you, of course? The loyal customers who are already using your product!
When your customers continue to have positive experiences with your company and product, ask them to share their experiences. When prospective leads see satisfied customers, you show that you are building a reputation of effectiveness and credibility.
Customer reviews are a strong tool that can lead to trust and relationship building with current and potential customers alike.
Social media posts for tech companies don’t have to be cut and dry. Social media is always brimming with new trends. Don’t be afraid to participate! In fact, posting about trends can expose you to a whole new side of your audience. Just be sure to stay on brand, and have some fun! Our team at Metric Marketing knows firsthand that social trend videos can be a blast.
We’ve found that the best SaaS Instagram accounts are those that stay true to their brand. In each of these examples, the SaaS companies’ personalities shine through every post.
Even if you haven’t heard of MailChimp, you can immediately sense their community advocacy and silly point-of-view. MailChimp has found the perfect balance between professionalism and fun.
One of our favorite parts of their brand is how they shine a light on their own clients using mini-films and spotlight features about the people using their software. This draws their customers into topical conversations while simultaneously personalizing their brand.
MailChimp put faces to names to quite literally show off their successes. They support their clients in a mutual relationship and affirm those relationships through active social media engagement. Well done, MailChimp!
Trello has basically perfected the use of visual tools and is one of the best SaaS Instagram accounts when it comes to using the platform as an informational tool while remaining attractive to their audience!
Most of their posts are from real Trello workspaces that their customers use. For a SaaS company, this tactic is genius. They get engagement by showing the possibilities their product offers without having to explain why their product is useful. Trello uses the show-don’t-tell approach, which works extremely well for their product’s purpose.
If you haven’t seen Shopify’s Instagram channel, now’s the time! They’ve adapted to the platform’s spatial confines and continue to create a glamorous, alluring feed.
Instagram can be tricky because of the dimensions users must adhere to. If you do not, that can be okay for an individual post, but your overall feed can look a bit distorted. Although you can post landscape or portrait photos, they will always show up in the collective feed in a 1:1 aspect ratio. In other words, all visual content is shown as a square.
Shopify has taken this dimensional constraint and made its grid visually appealing. They make use of space and bold colors. The balance throughout the entire page is, in a word, pretty! Not only is the overall visual content easy on the eyes, but each post also has bold statements about their core values and beliefs. A+ job, Shopify.
Digital marketing key performace indicators (KPIs) are individual metrics that follow and track your marketing efforts, specifically your SaaS social media analytics for the specific platform’s purpose. When it comes to tracking social media for software companies, there are a few KPIs that should be your top priority.
The first and most important SaaS social media analytics to track is the number of impressions each post gets.
A social media impression is the number of times one of your social posts is seen. No direct engagement—like commenting, liking, etc.—needs to happen. It is simply how many people “consume” that piece of content. This is particularly important when comparing metrics for your paid social media versus organic posts (aka, paid advertising versus non-paid advertising).
For an off-screen example, think about it this way: Whenever you’re driving on the highway and see a billboard, your viewing of that billboard counts as one impression. All of the other eyes that pass the billboard are additional impressions.
Of course, physical billboards are viewed by lots of people, but there is really no way to determine the exact number of impressions a billboard gets. The advantage of social media impression KPIs is that, regardless of whether or not your potential lead interacts with your post, you are able to numerically track the views your post gets.
From here, you can make decisions about what works and what doesn’t. Ask questions like:
Tracking your social media impressions can give you a visual of just how many people are aware of your social presence. Then, by tracking other KPIs, you can see if that impression makes a lasting—well—impression on your audience!
A conversion is when an audience member reaches one of your goals. In many cases, this can be measured through sales. In reality, a conversion is completed when a marketing goal is met. Thus, conversions depend on the specific goal you have set.
For example, if you are running a PPC (per-per-click) ad campaign, one of your conversions may be a click on the ad. Another conversion may be if the user completed the desired goal on the page the ad sends them to. Maybe you want to get more contacts, so another possible conversion could be a potential customer subscribing to your newsletter or providing contact information. A conversion may also be moving from a qualified lead to a purchasing customer.
Remember that most customers active on socials respond positively to the ability to purchase directly from social media platforms. Tracking your social conversions from active social media users to paying customers will give you a view on how to construct and prioritize your advertisement and social media functions.
We’ve been speaking about customer engagement being one of the most important components of social media for software companies. With KPIs, you can actually track metrics on your engagement with users, including:
Tracking your engagement will show your growth over time while also allowing you to keep tabs on qualified leads. You can even use them to more fully develop your buyer personas.
Even though the previous KPIs are important to track, it’s also important not to get too hung up on vanity metrics, which are the metrics that show numbers that don’t necessarily correlate with the success of your business. For example, number of followers, post likes, and subscribers.
Your metrics should be impactful for your company’s success. Although increasing your number of followers is great, number of followers doesn’t mean that your product is being sold. You can have positive metrics, but it’s the actionable metrics that really count.
It can be easy to get lost in the endless feed of social media. You want to be flashy, but not too flashy. Be sure to always come back to your values. Before every post, ask yourself does this communicate my company’s mission, values, and brand? The answer should be yes—every time.
If you’re ready to take the leap into the world of social media for software companies, you’ve come to the right place! Working with Metric Marketing’s team of experts can give your SaaS company a huge advantage over your competition.
Running social media can seem like a full-time job, and for us, it is! With our experience combined with your mission, we can collaborate to excel on social media.
Social media platforms are necessary in today’s technology-driven world. Simply having a social media account does not cut it. You need to engage with your audience, whether that’s another company’s social, employees of the companies who are your target audience, or your e-commerce customers.
Full engagement and social media immersion for software companies is one of the best ways to boost your marketing success. It’s time to take your social media SaaS platform to the next level. Start today by contacting the social media marketers here at Metric Marketing.
Our team here at Metric Marketing are expert at what we do. Let us help you find your voice on social media as we have for so many other clients. Having an active social media presence gives you an advantage over your competition and provides unique ways of engaging with your clients.
For any questions about setting up and managing your social media accounts, contact us today at (734) 404-8714 or by filling out our online contact form. We’re excited to work with you on building your social media SaaS platform!
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