Social media is essential for any B2B brand, with 75% of B2B buyers using social media to make purchasing decisions. From nurturing customers to increasing brand awareness, social media has much to offer for B2B brands. However, there is no denying that developing a successful B2B social media strategy is difficult. 

But the good news is that many B2B brands have developed successful social media strategies and processes from which we can take inspiration. 

One such B2B brand is Shopify!

This guide describes Shopify’s social media marketing strategies and tips on leveraging these strategies for your B2B brand.

Introduction to Shopify 

Shopify is a leading e-commerce platform. It offers the foundation for a successful e-commerce business. The minute you step into an online selling space, you’re expected to open a store, showcase your products, engage with customers, and accept payments—Shopify offers all the above tools.

Not only that, but Shopify is an e-commerce brand that follows the best social media practices. We’ll talk about this later. But first, let’s discuss Shopify’s brand persona.

Shopify’s Brand Persona on Social Media

Understanding your brand persona is critical to a successful social media strategy. It helps you create content that engages your customers and makes your brand recognizable as genuine and authentic. 

Shopify reflects the following brand personality types:

Integrity: Shopify is honest as the brand is transparent about its practices and policies. It ensures that its customers and employees know what to expect.

Excitement: Shopify emerges as an imaginative, youthful and bold brand. It uses marketing strategies that portray it as adventurous and encourage customers to take action.

Competence: Shopify has developed this personality by creating high-performance products and services. Customers find Shopify efficient, reliable, trustworthy, and responsible.

Shopify’s Social Media Strategy In Detail 

Creating a social media strategy from scratch can be daunting as there are many different channels to build exposure and, thus, engagement. But above all, a good social media strategy serves all kinds of functions for your business, including driving traffic, building brand awareness, providing support, and connecting with existing and potential customers. So let’s discuss Shopify’s social media strategy and see how they market themselves differently.

Shopify on Instagram 

Instagram is expected to hit 2.5 billion users in 2023, making it one of the most popular social media platforms. More and more B2B brands are using its video capabilities. 42% of users check Instagram multiple times daily. It means people are spending a lot of time on Instagram. 

Here’s how Shopify is using Instagram for social media marketing:

The second you land on Shopify’s Instagram account, it is vital to observe visuals and copy. All the posts have beautiful visuals with compelling copy.

It’s not just about posting on Instagram. You also want people to stop scrolling and read your posts. Good visuals are the most effective strategy for grabbing someone’s attention.

If humor lends itself properly to your B2B brand, then, by all means, make room for social media content that elicits a laugh. Shopify has used a viral content format to reinforce engagement. You can likewise use memes and viral videos to add humor to your Instagram posts.

Shopify knows that leaning too heavily on sales posts might turn off customers. So they experiment with different content formats such as using popular meme templates, trending audios, quizzes, behind-the-scenes, etc. Again, this is a good strategy for engaging customers with your Instagram posts and humanizing your brand. 

Shopify is leveraging the power of Instagram Reels to drive more engagement for its brand and build awareness about its products and services. If you haven’t experimented with Instagram Reels for your B2B brand, there’s no harm in testing the waters. 

Shopify has harnessed the use of Instagram to give their customers a spotlight. Featuring your customers is important to emerge as a reliable and trusted brand. 

Takeaways from Shopify’s Instagram strategy

• Make your Instagram posts fun and engaging by using high-quality images and compelling copy. 
• Adding humor can go a long way to keep your audience engaged.
• Experiment with different content formats on Instagram: Reels, Carousels, and Single image posts. 
• Publish user-generated content or feature customers to make them feel valued.

Shopify on Twitter 

As of today, Twitter has almost 400 million active users. Since Twitter is primarily based on short, text-based posts, it differs from social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. To win on Twitter, you need to engage in conversations.

Let’s dive into the bits and bobs of Shopify’s Twitter marketing:

While maximum B2B brands struggle with writing an attractive bio, Shopify has kept it simple, quirky, and engaging. The brand has used phrases like “SaaSy” in the bio to add humor. “Everywhere” is the brand’s location tag on Twitter to say that Shopify can be used by anyone, anywhere. Additionally, we think that Shopify might also be hinting at the fact that they’re a fully remote company with this location tag. 

Twitter Polls are a great way to boost engagement. Like Shopify, you can also use Twitter polls to ask questions and get feedback on new products, features, branding, or content. You can use this information to improve your product or guide your plans. 

You don’t have to be promotional always with your content. Even if you’re talking about your product or services, try to make it fun and engaging. It helps humanize your B2B brand on social media.

Twitter is a great platform to inform your audience about the latest news, upcoming products, or events. Look at this tweet by Shopify, where they have talked about the ‘Shopify Collab’  feature and made it more exciting by asking users to join their waitlist. Following a similar approach for your upcoming products or features can help you achieve great results.

Sometimes it can be overwhelming to create original content. In this case, you can use the existing content and repurpose it. For instance, this Twitter thread is about BFCM and holiday season sales. Shopify has promoted its blog content related to BFCM and the holiday season. Benefit? More views on the blog content and increased website traffic. 

Note: You can even break the blog content into smaller chunks of information and share it as a tweet or thread. 

Takeaways from Shopify’s Twitter strategy

• Making your B2B content quirky and fun is the key to boosting engagement. 
• Leverage Twitter polls to gather audience feedback and improve.
• Use the trending content format (video, meme) and incorporate it into the brand voice. 
• Promote blog posts on Twitter to drive traffic back to your site. 
• Convert large content information into short, digestible Twitter threads. 

Shopify on Facebook 

With approximately 2.96 billion monthly active users, Facebook is currently the largest social media network. This makes it an effective platform for your B2B business.

B2B marketers say Facebook marketing is very effective because Facebook offers the highest ROI of any social media platform.

Take a closer look at Shopify’s Facebook marketing strategy:

Remember, Facebook covers are a great way to increase brand awareness and promote your business on the world’s most popular social network. We love Shopify’s Facebook cover photo. Short, simple, and catchy.

Customers increasingly seek prompt answers to their questions, which is why they contact brands on social media. As a result, you may offer prompt help through your B2B social media platforms. Your brand and corporate culture are customer-centric if you publicly address customer complaints. Every time a customer looks for the brand, it is reinforced.

Building reader trust is the primary goal of B2B content marketing. B2B marketers can use content marketing to tell a brand’s narrative in a way that engages the audience on a personal level. Daily insights and brand snippets can further strengthen this connection.

Video has been a significant part of Shopify’s Facebook marketing strategy because the brand is aware that video content contributes to the development of strong brand recall, which is a valuable advantage given that the B2B industry involves longer sales cycles.

Educational content is an important part of B2B marketing. The buying process takes time, so you need valuable and compelling content to convert leads. You can boost conversions by sharing valuable content with your audience and nurturing them through your sales funnel.

Takeaways from Shopify’s Facebook strategy: 

• Add an attractive cover photo to your Facebook account. It helps build brand awareness and humanize your brand.
• Provide customer service via Facebook. This promotes increased customer satisfaction and loyalty and can be a key competitive difference.
• Use Facebook video content to keep your audience informed and educate them.
• Publish educational content to build trust and connection between your B2B brand and your audience.

Shopify on LinkedIn

You might be surprised to learn that 97% of B2B leads from social media come from LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn is a treasure trove for B2B businesses. But many companies don’t take advantage of it. Because establishing an effective LinkedIn marketing strategy takes time and thought.

But don’t worry. Let’s look at Shopify’s LinkedIn to see which strategies can be helpful for your B2B brand.

As said, videos are the most engaging content format on social media, and LinkedIn is no exception to this. As per a study on video consumption on LinkedIn, posts with videos attract three times more inbound leads than text-only posts. That’s the reason Shopify has been posting videos consistently on LinkedIn. 

Don’t beat around the bush when the content ideas no longer flow. Instead, go to your most trusted asset and ask your audience a question or request to elicit responses. 

Doing so will provide a wealth of insights and a great engagement opportunities.

Shopify has let its employees take over their LinkedIn and share what it looks like to work at Shopify. Every B2B brand should experiment with this content format. Why? Because by giving your audience a look into the humans behind your business can go a long way to building trust. 

One feature that most B2B businesses often overlook on LinkedIn is LinkedIn Articles. LinkedIn articles allow you to not only showcase your expertise but also help you connect with potential customers. You can even generate quality leads for your business if written for the right audience.

Shopify hasn’t left any opportunity to leverage employee advocacy. Because they know that people don’t buy from brands – they buy from people. And that goes double with B2B.

Employee advocacy is the key to getting your employees to spread your brand message in their unique voices. With brands using employee advocacy earning 25%-40% more overall engagement over brands that don’t, it’s easy to see why.

Takeaways from Shopify’s LinkedIn strategy

• Promote video content on Linkedin to target top-of-the-funnel customers by addressing their most pressing pain points.
• Establish trust by sharing your company culture on Linkedin.
• Use LinkedIn to promote content that encourages the audience to engage with your content, i.e., polls, Q&A, etc.
• Create LinkedIn articles written by thought leaders to establish authority and emerge as an industry expert. 

Shopify on YouTube 

With more than 2.6 billion monthly active users, YouTube provides B2B businesses a huge opportunity to expand their audience, increase brand and product awareness, and—most importantly—increase conversions.

However, B2B businesses use YouTube as another social media channel to boost social engagement. But, there are still other things that B2B marketers can do, like creating a community around their brand and expanding their target markets.

But if you don’t know where to start, you can choose some of the best YouTube marketing strategies followed by Shopify.

You’ll first notice an explainer video on Shopify’s YouTube account. A concise summary of your brand’s core offerings and giving your target audience insight into who you are and what you do is nothing less than a marketing strategy.

These explainer videos can help increase conversions by up to 144%. Therefore, they should be an important part of your YouTube marketing strategy.

Another underrated feature of YouTube is YouTube Shorts. B2B often ignores this feature and doesn’t know how to use it. But Shopify got it right!

Make your B2B Shorts informative and factual. Also, never ignore the power of humor and a good pun. 

This is a Shopify YouTube playlist. For those who don’t know, YouTube Playlist is a feature that allows you to add content to your playlist. It has some advantages:

• It helps you organize your videos and group them by common themes.
• Playlists are indexed separately from videos, so your content may appear multiple times for your targeted keywords.
• Playlists signal to YouTube that these videos are related, so they can help increase your YouTube views. That’s why YouTube shows related videos in the sidebar.

Most B2B companies often fail when creating compelling images for YouTube. But Shopify did a great job here. Some cover images are catchy and might make you want to click through and watch the video.

Also, stock images are dead. Make sure you are not using them. Instead, add images that evoke an emotional response. 

Shopify has created different YouTube channels, such as Learn with Shopify, Help Center, Shopify plus, Devs, etc. Now you might be wondering what are the benefits of doing this. 

Having multiple YouTube channels makes it easier for people searching for your content to find it. And with a clear focus on each channel, you will likely attract new viewers in the long run.

Takeaways from Shopify’s YouTube marketing strategy

• Add an explainer video to your YouTube channel to help visitors understand more about your business. 
• Create more engaging content with YouTube features like Shorts, Live, Playlists, and Community. 
• Images can help evoke emotions and encourage people to take action. Use captivating cover images on your YouTube. 
• Having different YouTube channels for different purposes makes finding content easier. 

Shopify on Reddit 

Most B2B marketers avoid using Reddit for social media marketing as they find it too risky. But they don’t realize that Reddit users make purchase decisions 9x faster and spend 15% more than others. You have to market yourself strategically.

It’s important to understand that Reddit differs from other social media channels. It thrives on the sense of community. You can’t promote your content or brand. Instead, you have to provide value and engage with people. 

Reddit marketing can help you collect consumer feedback, increase brand awareness and impressions, and build a loyal community.

If you are just starting, creating a marketing strategy for Reddit can be challenging. So let’s look at Shopify’s Reddit strategy and get to the bottom of it.

The image above is a Reddit ad by Shopify.

Similar to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter ads, Reddit ads appear like native content on Reddit and are marked “promoted” to let users know they are ads.

Advertisements on Reddit reach people who are interested in a topic and actively participate in conversations about that topic the moment they see the ad.

Customers spend most of their time on social media, so try using Reddit for instant customer support. Understand customer issues and questions and resolve issues.

This shows your commitment to your customers and contributes to customer retention.

Customers continuously share their experiences with the brand on various subreddits. Discover successful customer success stories and promote them across different social media channels. This can help drive more conversions.

Reddit users who speak positively about your brand are a big plus. It helps build trust with your audience.

Takeaways from Shopify’s Reddit marketing strategy 

• Use Reddit to understand feedback and provide customer support.
• Collect and promote user-generated content to increase conversions. 
• Leverage Reddit ads to reach your desired community or subreddit through targeted promoted posts and engage users in ways they are familiar with.
  

Shopify’s Social Media Strategy in a Nutshell

Here are a few aspects that Shopify’s overall social media strategy has in common:

1. Make your B2B content fun and engaging

Looking at Shopify’s content on various social media channels, you’ll notice that most content has an element of fun and humor. Most B2B marketers think adding humor to their content might alienate B2B buyers, but that’s not the case. Instead, it helps increase engagement and make your content stand out.

You can make your B2B content fun and engaging with trending audio, video or content formats.

2. Establish social proof 

Shopify has obtained positive testimonials or content from customers/influencers who rate the brand positively and which may be used in their marketing efforts.

3. Provide customer support 

Social media support is not currently an option. Social media support is essential as more and more customers spend time on social media and use it to reach out to brands with questions, complaints, and inquiries. Shopify also leverages platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit to provide customer support.

4. Optimize your social profiles 

Shopify’s social media profiles have all the information their customers might want. Their social media bio describes what they do and what the brand is about. 

5. Experiment with different content formats 

Shopify started with 5-7 content archetypes to balance out-of-the-box post formats and content mix. You can include product demonstration videos, posts intended to sell, and posts to educate and grow your audience.

It’s time to amp up your B2B social media strategy 

As a B2B marketer, you want a positive return on your time, money, and effort on social media. This is only possible if there is an intention behind every action. A solid social media strategy can be helpful in this situation. You can even use some of the social media strategies used by Shopify that were covered in the post above.

But with constant change, algorithm updates, new channels, and viewers looking for something new, you need to be flexible and keep track of everything. You need to constantly improve without losing focus on growing your business.

However, if you’re already wearing many hats and think you need experts to help you with your content marketing efforts, you can always reach out to us.