Working with influencers creates an amazing opportunity to co-create and co-promote content for B2B brands. The brand can promote the influencer and vice versa. It’s a win-win.
Along with the win comes a responsibility to promote your B2B marketing content in a way that captures attention. It’s social media marketing after-all. To help you get the most out of your investment in content collaborations with influencers, here are 5 tips to spice up your social media posts. Follow this advice and the valuable content your influencers have helped you create will better reach, engage and inspire your customers.
Tips for co-creating share-worthy influencer content
Tip 1 – Tag, tag, tag
It’s important to give credit where credit is due, so be sure to mention and tag all influencers included in the content piece within the copy of your social posts. It’s a great way to spotlight and highlight your co-creators and add third party credibility to brand content. If an influencer is not on a particular social platform, you can mention them and tag their company.
When you @ tag influencers on platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter, the post can create a notification to the influencers and prompt them to engage and share. When influencers interact with brand social content, it can trigger the social network ranking algorithm to show the brand post in your community’s feed more frequently helping you stand out and reach even more influencers and customers.
Extra tip – having a hard time tagging an influencer on LinkedIn? Follow them first, and post it natively on the platform.
Tip 2 – Be concise
Social media, especially Twitter, is short and to the point. Think about social posts like you would a headline. If you were asked to write 3-6 headlines and subheadings for your post, what would you include?
You don’t need to call out that this is a blog post from MY BRAND. If it’s coming from your handle, readers will assume it is your post, unless you call out another source.
When writing for LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, just because you can use more than 280 characters, does not mean that you should. If your goal is to get someone to click on a link, think short, sweet and to the point.
Tip 3 – Start with an engaging opening line
Have you read a social post that started with “Our latest post…” or “We spoke to…”?
I have.
Did it drive you to read that post?
Probably not.
The first line of your social media posts need to stand out and pull the reader in, so give them a reason to pick and click your content out of the hundreds of thousands of posts in their feeds. It’s just like the opening line of an article. Here are some ideas on optimizing the title of influencer social content:
- Start with a statistic
- Call out a great quote from the thought leader
- Tease out an interesting point
Here is an example of a social post on LinkedIn that leads with a statistic and showcases influencers
If you start with the most interesting points from the content co-created with influencers in your promotional content on social channels, it will stand-out more for both customers and the influencers.
Tip 4 – Create engaging visuals
Your images need to be as engaging as your copy. Use the great content you co-create with thought leaders to find a stat, line or quote that you can use in visuals that will entice the reader to stop and read your post. Jeff Bullas calls out that tweets with visuals are retweeted 1.5x more than text tweets in his post on visual statistics.
When you include a great thought leader, ask them if you can include their headshot in the visual. It’s nice to show that your content contains great thought leadership.
Here is an example of a gif image that promotes our State of B2B Influencer Marketing research report that features statistics and a key contributing expert, Rani Mani from Adobe.
Tip 5 – Repurpose on Purpose
Many content collaborations with B2B influencers result in substantial content like an ebook, report or blog post as well as involve content opportunities like events. To maximize the promotion opportunity of including the most credible experts in your content, think about going beyond pulling out influencer quotes and sharing them on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
When you plan your brand content and where influencers will contribute their expertise, think ahead about how you might repurpose that content in different formats and on different channels. For example, you might pull all the influencer quotes from an ebook about a certain topic into an infographic that also includes key industry statistics.
Or you might have someone livetweet/blog a webinar given by an influencer, then create social graphics out of compelling comments the influencer made during the presentation. Those comments could be re-used in a wrap-up blog post and even added to articles about the topic contributed to industry publications.
Creating a Meaningful Experience
When working with influencers, you want them to understand you value their content and want to share it with your brand’s community. Taking that to the next level with great social content they will want to share with their followers is key. Giving them a good experience will lead thought leaders to want to work with you again, and help to drive positive outcomes.
If you would like to learn about B2B influencer marketing from the B2B brand marketers who are doing it every day, be sure to check out the Inside B2B Influence podcast.
