SaaS Startups’ 12 Step Guide To Building Stellar Social Media Presence

The Indian SaaS market is growing exponentially at a whopping CAGR of 55-70%, with its net revenue expected to grow up to $116 Bn by 2026. 

However, despite such a boom in the SaaS ecosystem—companies face more challenges than ever, especially with brand awareness and customer acquisition. While paid channels are a great option to grow presence, one can only get results if the organic presence is strong. Here, social media plays a massive role in engaging the target audience and demonstrating the product’s value in a competitive market.

But social media consists of multiple platforms with unique audiences, so deciding which platforms you should be on and building a solid presence isn’t a cakewalk.

The solution? In this article, we will discuss the most effective and action-driven steps to create an outstanding social media presence that grows your online presence and drives product sign-ups. But first, let’s see how SaaS companies can start using social media.

How SaaS Companies Can Use Social Media

Social media offers diverse opportunities to build an organic presence and engage the audience. It helps you reach a niche audience, promote products and services, and turn them into paying customers.

Here’s how you can leverage social media marketing as a SaaS company:

Build Brand Awareness

Currently, there are over 467 Mn social media users in India. So, if you have a SaaS company like Freshdesk or Zoho, rest assured there are plenty of opportunities for you to build your presence on B2B platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. 

Not just this, many companies like Later have also started embracing Instagram Reels to promote their SaaS offering and further advance their social presence.

Thus, a strong social media presence helps you spread awareness, enhances discoverability, and makes it easier for users to engage with your brand and make purchase decisions.  

Explain Your Product’s Utility 

You can use social media to create engaging content around how your product works, what it offers, how users can benefit from it, and how it solves significant problems—pushing users further down the funnel.

Zoho, for instance, uses Instagram videos to show how customers can schedule work messages with the help of its platform and avoid forgetting to send an important message at the right time.

Engage With Your Community

More than anything, social media is an excellent way to build and engage with your community. 

This can help you gain more insights into user needs, problems, and complaints and address them better through product modifications. ClickUp does a great job responding to every tweet they’re mentioned in as a sign of appreciation and community response.

Drive Traffic And Boost Visibility 

Let’s do the math—the more you leverage social media, the more brand awareness you create and the more customers you acquire. 

Targeting your customer’s pain points and urging them to click on your website link like Chargebee does can help you drive traffic, boost business visibility, and turn visitors into customers. 

Establish Your Authority 

Sharing high-quality educational content is an excellent way to establish your brand authority, position your company as a thought leader, and stay on top of your customers’ minds to build recall value.

Zoho, for instance, shares informative Instagram guides on business and thought leadership—enhancing its brand authority on the platform. 

12 Steps To Build A Stellar SaaS Social Media Presence 

Now that you know how a social media presence can benefit you, here’s a step-by-step plan to build a credible presence on socials, and drive product sign-ups and awareness:

Strategy

For your SaaS business, creating a social media strategy means being crystal clear on your messaging, tone, branding, and key KPIs so each piece of social media interaction takes you closer to your goals.

Here’s a checklist to create a SaaS social media strategy:

Perform Market Research And Competitor Analysis

The first step in creating the strategy is understanding your customers so you have a clear idea about who you’re targeting with your marketing efforts and what kind of content you can develop to trigger an action from them.

Begin by defining your audience demographics and creating a social media persona—a semi-fictional representation of your ideal user that will validate each social media action you take.

Next, spy on your competitors and analyse to understand who they’re targeting, what type of content they’re creating, how the audience interacts with their content, and what you can do to one-up them. Analysing won’t do much good if you don’t document it. Here’s a handy template to get started:

Analyse each channel and define your audience

We’ve gone past the days when B2B was restricted to Twitter and LinkedIn, and B2C belonged on Instagram and Facebook. However, many other platforms have entered the social media arena since then, like Twitch and Discord. 

But truth be told—you can’t be on all social media platforms and spread yourself thin. It’s best to analyse where your audience lies and choose a social media channel accordingly.

Here are the top social platforms and their use cases: 

• LinkedIn is a professional business platform where you can target display ads, share professional knowledge, and position yourself as an industry expert. 
• Instagram is a visual-focused channel with engaging elements to build an audience. 
• Facebook is best to share a mix of customer-oriented and business-specific content—especially to run awareness and conversion-focused ads. 
• Twitter is best for sharing news and announcements or stirring meaningful conversations with your audience to make your brand more discoverable. 
• YouTube is excellent for creating marketing, product, or promotional videos to build an audience base and encourage viewers to try your product.

Define Your Brand Voice And Create A Brand Style Guide

Whether you’re creating a blog post, writing a tweet, creating an Instagram guide, or refreshing content on your website—you need to have a consistent and professional tone throughout all channels to make your messaging on-brand and help customers relate better with you. 

As a SaaS company, it’s best to maintain a professional brand voice and establish clear guidelines for your teams to refer to whenever they create any social media content, from the captions they write to the colours they use while writing ad copy.

For example, Paperflite—a sales content management software, maintains the same colours, logo, and terms across each page and channel. 

Here’s how their website looks: 

Here’s how their Twitter profile looks: 

Set Up A Social Media Calendar For Seamless Collaboration

The last stage in the strategy is to create a social media calendar using a tool like Asana to plan, create, schedule, and assign content for all your social media platforms. 

This will help you strategise your content better, allow your design, copywriting, and marketing teams to collaborate efficiently, and ensure you don’t miss out on important campaigns or struggle with consistency.

Execution 

Now that you’ve done your research, identified the right platform for your marketing efforts, defined your brand voice, and gathered the necessary tools, assemble these resources and put them into action. 

Here’s a checklist to start building your social media presence:

Optimise Your Profile On Each Channel

The basics of a good social media profile are:

• A clear profile picture, preferably your company logo.
• An optimised bio that clearly explains your SaaS offering or which problem you help customers solve—using keywords your potential customers are likely to use to find you.
• A CTA (Call To Action) link (preferably a UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) link you can track for clicks and conversions) that takes your customers to your website or a registration page as per your social media goals.

Playtonia does a great job optimising its Twitter profile through an attractive cover picture, short and crisp bio, relevant and popular industry hashtags, and a social media reference landing page with multiple links.

Create Different Content Assets For A Niche Audience

Based on the platform you choose and the content calendar you strategise, begin creating content. The best would be to do a mix of different content formats. For example, if you’re creating a presence on LinkedIn, don’t just stick to text posts. Create case study videos, use case image posts, a talking-head interview video, or even an educational carousel post.

WebEngage does a great job of combining video, image, and text posts to interact with their audience on LinkedIn and advance their brand further.

Host Engagement Activities To Expand Your Network

Hosting engagement activities such as Instagram lives, Twitter spaces, LinkedIn polls, or Clubhouse rooms and virtual meetups help you engage your audience, interact with them on a one-to-one basis, and show a more human side of your brand to encourage engagement.

Paperflite, a content tracking SaaS software, hosts a regular talk show where they invite industry experts and offer their audience a unique learning experience through fun and educational interviews.

Leverage Social Display Ads To Spread The Word

According to Statista, the total ad spending on social media advertising is $1.13 Bn as of 2022, with a growth of 12.2%.

This shows the massive potential of social media advertising, especially on visual platforms like Instagram and Facebook. While paid social is often looked down on, it’s a great way to level up your organic presence and reach your target audience in a better way.

While running ads on social media is a whole different ball game, ensure you’re laser-focused on your target audience, branding your visuals, creating intriguing ad copy, and tracking your metrics the right way to make the most out of the 49% of Indian customers that purchase SaaS via social media. 

Collaborate With Industry Influencers 

You talk about social media, and influencers/creators are the first to come to mind. There are over 37 Mn influencers on social media, with a huge fan base and the power to blow up your business.

So, there’s no doubt that influencer marketing is a great way to reach your audience. 

But wait, is there such a thing as influencers in the SaaS space? You bet.

Hiten Shah is one of the most popular Indian SaaS influencers who endorse campaigns on LinkedIn, apart from being a SaaS cofounder himself.

Follow Relevant Trends To Increase Virality

Social media isn’t anything without its trend and virality potential. Many things suddenly blow out of proportion and go viral on social media, which you can cash in on to boost your brand awareness and get in front of potential customers.

Recent SaaS social media marketing trends include feature marketing, video marketing, AI and ML-based campaigns, native advertising, partnership marketing, aspirational selling, and usage-based pricing. 

Backlinko, an SEO training website, was recently acquired by online marketing leader, SEMRush. Instead of acquiring and dissolving, SEMRush retained the Backlinko founder, Brian Dean, to engage in partnership marketing and benefit from the broadened reach.

Evaluation

You can’t just strategise and create content and call it a day. If you want to build a rock-solid presence on social media and drive customers through social engagement, you need to proactively measure the effectiveness of your efforts and tweak your strategy for better performance.

Here’s what you can follow:

Review Performance With Relevant Metrics

Find tools that help you evaluate your social media marketing performance, gain in-depth data and insights, analyse your audience, and track relevant performance metrics. The purpose of this analysis is to see how you’re faring against your competitors and identify improvement opportunities to optimise your social media profiles for better performance.

Zoho Social provides the easiest way to monitor performance metrics, create custom reports to analyse performance, and leverage in-depth analytics to optimise your marketing strategy. 

Iterate Your Strategy Based On Audience Preferences

You need to create a system to collect user feedback, regularly ask your customers what kind of content they want to see, and how best you can provide a great social media experience and address their needs. 

You can conduct polls, ask questions, do an interactive live feedback session or circulate a survey to gauge their feedback and optimise your social media strategy accordingly. 

Level Up Your Social Media Marketing Game

Social media is a crucial marketing tool for industries of all shapes and sizes, and SaaS is no exception. 

Building a stellar social media presence is about building a strong brand identity, creating high-quality content, and making users feel connected to your brand. While there are many social media platforms to try your hands on, remember to choose the ones where your target audience is most active and that you’ll benefit from the most—considering your marketing and larger business goals.

Use this extensive guide to boost your SaaS social media marketing game and get a winning edge over your competitors.