Marketing Your SaaS Through Social Media

Tracking allows you to adjust your efforts as necessary so you can maximize exposure for your SaaS.

You should consider choosing Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter if you’re interested in promoting your SaaS through social media. They are the most popular networks available and are the most conducive to content sharing, which can educate potential customers about the applications of your SaaS and earn you more brand recognition.

Compared to all others, Facebook is the platform used most for marketing purposes and has the highest number of users. Both Twitter and Facebook are useful for responding to customer feedback in addition to marketing purposes. If you market your SaaS directly to consumers, these platforms are the best choices for you.

If you market your SaaS to professionals and other business, you’ll want to focus your efforts on LinkedIn.

Before promoting your SaaS through social media, you should identify which platforms will work best for you. Professional marketers can help you make an informed decision. Here is a breakdown of your possible social media channels:

Facebook

Facebook is ideal for marketing B2C SaaS products and for remarketing both B2C and B2B SaaS products. There are currently over 4 million brands actively advertising and marketing on Facebook. It may sound like a cluttered marketplace, but the beauty of SaaS marketing is that you only need to find your niche audience to reap the benefits of Facebook marketing.

You’ve likely developed your SaaS to address a problem or make life easier for a specific group of people. As the most popular platform, there’s a good chance some or all of those people are on Facebook.

Facebook’s algorithms will help you find users who are likely to engage with and promote your product. Through a catered mix of original content, article shares, and other types of posts, you’ll soon establish you market on Facebook so you can bring in more followers and create more brand exposure.

The first step is creating a business page. After that, you should post regularly and track your progress.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is an ideal space for marketing if your SaaS caters to businesses. Usually, the content you post to LinkedIn will thrive if it is written and designed to be useful to professional audiences. Content on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can be more fun, entertaining, and inspirational.

LinkedIn’s article writing feature lets you post your own insights into industry trends. This grants you the opportunity to establish yourself as an authority in your field.

Of course, LinkedIn’s most powerful feature is its networking capability. You can use LinkedIn to create a vast network of contacts, followers, and professional friends to whom you can then push out marketing material. You can also take advantage of LinkedIn’s email marketing feature, or you can use your LinkedIn contacts for your own email marketing campaigns. 

Twitter

Twitter is especially useful for branding. The average user follows at least five different businesses on Twitter and 79% of users recommend the brand that they follow. Use Twitter to build brand awareness, amass followers, and gain more visitors to your SaaS website.

Because the microblogging platform only gives you 140 (correction: 280) characters to work with for each tweet, you must be very strategic about how you word your posts. You should start by completely filling out your Twitter profile.

Before you start tweeting, consider following some industry influencers so you can keep track of their tweets, respond, and retweet them in the future. Promoting your SaaS through social media should always include some sort of engagement with other businesses, brands, and organizations, even if you are only sharing their posts.

Doing so helps you cultivate your brand as part of a business community instead of a stand-alone exponent. As with any type of social media marketing campaign, the key to Twitter marketing is consistency. Tweet often and tweet smart.

YouTube

YouTube can be a powerful platform for SaaS businesses. If you’ve created any promotional videos for your SaaS, they should already be on YouTube. You can also upload any software education videos and training courses to YouTube as a series, as these can also serve as marketing materials.

Once you have a YouTube account and start posting videos, you can promote those videos on your other social media platforms.

Instagram

Instagram is primarily for image sharing. You may not think image sharing would be useful for promoting your SaaS through social media, but depending on how creative you can be, Instagram can be a powerful tool for building your brand and expressing your company’s culture.

74% of marketers use visual assets as part of their social media efforts and visual posts that include images and video get more engagement than those that don’t.

Images can include anything from stock photography to infographics and charts, but Instagram’s main focus is photography. Regardless of whether you choose to use Instagram, you should still include visual marketing as a part of your social media strategy.

Snapchat

Although Snapchat was originally a conundrum for many marketers, others saw a unique opportunity to humanize their brand and reach younger audiences. If your SaaS is geared toward the younger population, you may want to use Snapchat. Snapchat is particularly useful for the sharing of short videos and photos.

The tone of most Snapchat posts is casual and fun. You can use the short-lived videos to provide followers with tidbits of information about new developments in your software, or you can use it to let followers in on your company’s culture.

Pinterest

Like Instagram, Pinterest is all about images and photos. If you choose to create a Pinterest account, create themed boards. Pin your own images and other users’ images to garner more awareness for your brand. Whether you use Pinterest or not should depend on the nature of your SaaS.

For example, Pinterest is extremely popular among foodies and folks who like to share recipes, but it’s likely not the most popular platform for hedge fund managers.

Free Resources

Looking for more ways to promote your SaaS? Here are some free resources that can help:

• Easel.ly: Need to make an infographic but you forgot to renew your Adobe subscription? Don't have a designer on your staff? Use Easel.ly to create infographics for free. It's so easy, anyone can do it!
• Hashtagify: Hashtagify has a free tool for looking up hashtags. The free version doesn't give you as much info or data as the paid version, but it could tell you if #MySaaSRocks is actually a thing. (it isn't).
• Medium: More than a blogging platform, Medium has become a prime space for high-quality content. It has a built-in audience and is almost spam free, so even the small guys can get noticed. It's widely used among techies, startups, entrepreneurs, storytellers, poets, and everyone in-between.
• SoftwareFindr: SoftwareFindr.com attracts of 100,000 monthly software buyers and it's free for SaaS companies to list their product. Once listed, products are sorted algorithmically by user interaction, reviews, shares, and more.
• Website Grader: HubSpot's Website Grader is a free and easy tool for identifying problems on your website. It won't give you as much detail as a paid service, but it could tell you why you can brew an entire pot of coffee in the time it takes for your homepage to load. 

Social Media Management

Promoting your SaaS through social media can get you more brand exposure, more visitors on your website, and more customers. You may choose to use one, some, or all of these platforms for marketing your SaaS. To market effectively, you should post consistently so you’re maintaining an active presence on each platform.

Managing your social media accounts can get time-consuming, especially if you don’t have an in-house digital marketing team. If you’re falling behind on social media, consider partnering with a group of third-party marketing professionals.

Outsourcing your marketing is less expensive than maintaining a marketing staff. It can help you free up more time for networking, closing sales, and managing your team.

Regardless of your marketing choices, don’t pass up promoting your SaaS through social media. It’s a particularly useful tool for SaaS marketing, especially since most SaaS customers are already active in digital spaces and are looking for tech solutions for their lives and their work.