How to build an MSP social media marketing strategy

Over the past decades or so, social media has developed into one of the prime selling channels for business-to-business marketers. So much so that today most marketers believe social media marketing is the most effective tactic to use to improve lead generation quality, and drive net new leads.

With 4.59 billion social media users worldwide in 2022—and with those figures only likely to continue to grow over the next few years—it’s not hard to see why Hubspot found that 77% of marketers say social media marketing has been somewhat to very effective for their company this year.

As an MSP, social media offers you a platform to connect with businesses that are genuinely interested in what you offer, and this instant affinity can help you build stronger leads.

How to start using social media as an MSP

That’s all great, of course, but if you’re just looking to start using social media in your MSP it can seem like an extremely daunting prospect. Particularly when faced with question like: what channels to use, how often to post, what to post, how much time will it take, and how to create the content?

In this blog, we’ll help you to answer some of those core questions.

Firstly, a word of sound advice. In her marketing bootcamp, Stefanie Hammond, our Head Nerd who specializes in MSP marketing and sales, likes to reinforce the notion that first impressions are EVERYTHING! So the top three things she tells N‑able partners to do before launching any sort of online, digital campaign are:

• Ensure your website is up to date and current
• Make sure your LinkedIn profile looks polished and professional and is 100% filled out
• Confirm that your Google Business profile is complete and update and contains as many reviews as possible—because business owners won’t take your word about how great you are, they’ll want to hear what other businesses have to say about you before deciding to engage.

Your MSP social media strategy in 5 steps

You really should not skip those three important steps  if you want your social media marketing to be a success. But once you’ve got this stage sorted, a good social media strategy starts with several key points:

1. Decide what your goals are

For example, do you want to raise awareness of your services or simply gain followers or a mix of both? For your social media activity to be successful you need to make sure you have a good understanding of what you want to accomplish. Apart from anything it will mean that you don’t waste your time by being unfocused.

2. Decide which social media platforms you want to concentrate on

This can be a big question for a lot of MSPs, and the short answer to this is that you should be using the social platforms where you’re most likely to reach your target audience. This is unlikely to be every single platform, so pick the ones that are most relevant to you and your customers (and prospects). For example, although TikTok is huge right now, for most MSPs it’s probably not worth investing the time in, because it doesn’t tend to be populated with business owners.

Conversely, let’s take Instagram. If you want to reach restaurants, retail, or hospitality businesses they all use Instagram for their own marketing therefore it makes sense to use the platform to reach them, because the chances are the decision makers are on Instagram every day doing some marketing.

For most MSPs, though, LinkedIn and Facebook are your go-to social channels. Everyone should be using LinkedIn every day because it’s where businesses and business communities are; and Facebook is good as the universal catch all.

There’s a lot of uncertainty around Twitter at the moment, and if you don’t love the platform don’t bother with it. However, if you’re the kind of person who’s idea of fun is using Twitter then use it. Because, simply, if you’ve got passion for a particular channel then you’ll use it more. You could, of course, also apply this same rationale to TikTok.

3. Set out how frequently you want to post

This can vary from channel to channel. For LinkedIn and Facebook a minimum is once per week; more if you can manage it. For Instagram and Twitter the general recommendation is one to three times per day, evenly spread out. However, the key to making your social media presence consistent and sustainable is to set a schedule you can manage and maintain. There is nothing worse than starting a social program and letting it die on the vine because you set your sights too high. That is a great way to lose followers.

4. Set out when you should post

There is no hard and fast answer to this, the best thing you can do is to test different days of the week and different times of the day to determine which posts get the best/most views. And don’t shy away from weekends. Those are great days to get some thought leadership content out.

5. Decide what to post about

A regular flow of engaging and relevant content is essential, so you need to decide what is important to your customers. What are the subject areas that your prospects are going to be interested in reading about? And remember the 80:20 rule—to keep a good balance, 80% of what you post should be useful and educational to your audience, the remaining 20% can explicitly promote your business.

Finally, like any MSP marketing program you need to make sure measure and monitor your results—analytics are available in all of the social platforms to help you do this. And importantly, give it time. Social media isn’t going to be an overnight success.

How N‑able MarketBuilder can help

With MarketBuilder we provide a wide range of tailored content that is designed to help you tap into key areas of interest for your customers and prospects. There are social media posts that are dedicated to specific vertical markets as well as posts that focus on specific subject areas such as security.

When you use MarketBuilder for your social media marketing you can pre-schedule as many social posts as you want over any period of time

And, with MarketBuilder’s reporting capability, you will be able to monitor how well your social marketing program is doing.

If you have not signed up, why not give MarketBuilder a try today and get started.

Tracy Trottier is marketing manager and heads up the MarketBuilder program at N‑able