5 Business-to-Business Social Media Practices That Can Improve Your Personal Profiles

​By Audra Gormley
We see it everywhere. Brands are all over social media. It has become a key element in the success of companies’ branding, advertising, marketing and sales functions. As society increasingly embraces the use of social media as an important business channel, many more Business-to-Business (B2B) companies are jumping on board.  I had an internship opportunity this summer with a global industrial/engineering based B2B company as a Social Media Intern. I was tasked with doing social media platform audits, building out its Instagram channel, and researching social media for business best practices.

After a whole summer working on the company’s profiles, I picked up some important lessons that I thought were important for my own personal profiles and thought I would share these more broadly.


Use these business tested best practices to boost your personal profile.

1. Be Active, Post Frequently: It is vital to the success and growth of a social media profile to engage with the platform frequently. Posting to your personal profiles one or more times a day can help to provoke more engagement. Experimenting with different post times can also help you reach a broader audience, as not everyone will be accessing social at the same time every day.
2. Include Multimedia: Brands use photos, graphics and video to greatly increase the likelihood of engagement with their promoted social content. Click through rates on images, graphics, videos and charts in social content ware typically an order of magnitude higher than just using text.  Posting a photo results in more clicks, so keep that in mind when posting to your social media profiles. Some social media platforms are more multimedia friendly like Instagram or Pinterest, however, it is just as easy to incorporate multimedia into a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook post.
   
   
3. Create a Personal Brand: Companies are often using logos, campaign themes, taglines and other branding tools in order to create brand recognition on social media. This technique is a great way to create a common thread for your personal brand across social platforms. This can be as simple as creating a simple and consistent bio message or using the same profile pictures on different social channels to help you unify your identity and encourage followers across the board.
   
   
4. Re-Promote Old Content: In order to reach the most amount of people, companies often repost and promote old content. This allows that content another chance at gaining your followers’ attention. Pinning old tweets to your Twitter or doing throwback days on Instagram are ways to incorporate this business best practice on your own profiles.
   
   
   
5. Being Professional: Always remaining professional, using proper spelling/grammar and staying positive on your personal profiles, is just as important to your personal brand as it is to any company protecting its reputation. This shows others that not only do you know how to write properly, but that you take pride and care with your online presence, which ius something any employer would expect of their content. When creating content, double check for bias, spelling and grammar mistakes or possibly inappropriate remarks. This will clean up your profiles and help you maintain a strong reputation.

Bonus Tip: Just be sure that you are active on all of the social platforms that fit into your life or career. Example: If you are a photographer, it is probably a good idea to be promoting your work on channels like Instagram or Flickr.

There are always new things to learn about how to better your personal profiles. Creating an identity for ourselves online, in this digitally driven world, is vital to promoting our abilities, talents and skills. So maybe it’s time to reevaluate how you use your profiles using well tested practices from business.

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