What are the best social media platforms to promote your whitepaper ?

Are you looking for an effective way to build your brand, to demonstrate thought leadership, and to position yourself to the next level? Hold on!

There is no better way to do this than writing a whitepaper.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B companies rank whitepapers as one of the most effective forms of marketing content above videos, blogs, newsletters, and online presentations.

But do you think only writing will help? You better know, it’s a ‘NO’.

A whitepaper is one of the valuable content marketing tools to generate leads and attract interest from potential customers. They are created by marketers to educate their audience about any issues or explain a certain solution or methodology to solve problems faced by them, based on research, current industry data, and statistics.

But spending hours writing an excellent and authoritative whitepaper cannot automate people to download and read it as well. As a result, it gathers dust in some hidden corner of a website. Not anymore!

It’s time to blow the dust off and get it in front of your target audience. That means PROMOTIONS — A common area where marketers go wrong in whitepaper marketing and look for answers on — How to promote whitepaper on social media to generate valuable leads and get more people to download it?

The good news? Here are the top 4 social media platforms with awesome marketing tips for promoting whitepaper resulting in more downloads and shares. Sounds interesting? Let’s demystify these.

1. Boost Your Whitepaper Reach with Facebook

Your B2B whitepaper is published, now your objective is to drive traffic to that content to move the leads down the sales funnel until they convert to a sale based on the whitepaper contribution. Let Facebook take over from here.

Start a discussion about your whitepaper on your Facebook page. Create a landing page for your whitepaper on Facebook, this will boost more downloads. Facebook ads are also a great way to start with your whitepaper marketing strategy. They are economical than other alternatives and offer the right amount of tweaking to get your content seen by the right target audience.

Firstly, target your Facebook audience. Your Facebook fans are people (or organizations) mostly interested in listening to what you have to say. So, make sure you are showing them the best of your content. Install the Facebook Pixel on your website, so you can create custom audiences that you can retarget with Facebook ads with your whitepaper content you know they will like. Facebook will algorithmically optimize your advertising budget to drive more conversions (downloads) of your whitepaper.

You can also reach a mobile audience through Facebook Instant Articles for your whitepaper promotion. You can add a sign-up form for your whitepaper directly within the article.

Give your network a sneak peek of your whitepaper by interviewing one of your subject matter experts or talking about a topic related to your whitepaper. Stream this video live on Facebook and once live streaming ends, promote this video through your social networks and email marketing. These tips work best with your Facebook fans, lists of customers, and people visiting your website.

2. Use LinkedIn Effectively to Promote Your Whitepaper

B2B buyers rely on in-depth information on whitepapers to make informed purchasing decisions. So, it’s time that you embrace all of the opportunities that LinkedIn has to offer. With more than 150 million users and about 80% of them being decision makers in companies, LinkedIn can be a great platform to promote your business. For getting your whitepaper in front of your target audience, let LinkedIn take it from here.

If your whitepaper is for the B2B audience, you could start discussions about your whitepaper and ask people to download it.

Post a link to your whitepaper on your company page. Mention it in your status update, and ask some of your employees to do the same.

If you’re a member of any relevant LinkedIn Groups, it can be a great place to share your whitepapers. You need to mention some key statics from your whitepaper and share it in related LinkedIn groups. Just be sure that you’re an active member of these groups. Also, avoid being too self-promotional. Spend time talking about how the whitepaper will help solve the audience’s problem. Why they should devote time to download and read it.

Use LinkedIn Publisher, a great way to engage with the top B2B social network. Write an article based on your whitepaper content, basically about its offerings and upload it to LinkedIn Publisher. Link your whitepaper at the end of your article, doing this will make it easier for readers to download and learn more. If done right, your audience will discover your whitepaper and all the roads will lead to conversion.

3. Harness the Strength of Twitter to Promote Your Whitepaper

With over 100 million active users, Twitter is the second most popular social network. 43% of business decision makers use Twitter to discover new products and solutions.This gives a strong platform for your whitepaper to reach a larger audience.

Every day thousands of tweets are going out to people’s feeds, where one little tweet about your whitepaper won’t make a big impact on your followers. For the challenges that come while promoting whitepaper, let Twitter take it from here.

Whitepapers are lengthy and dense pieces of content. Twitter is where microinteractions take place. So, what you need to do for developing a whitepaper promotion strategy on Twitter, is to understand how your audience is likely to engage with your company.

Create a schedule of posts for your content, develop a series of influential tweets, and use these tweets to promote your whitepaper that gives more information than just the title. Make sure to tweet once a week, it is always good to avoid being self-promotional especially on Twitter.

Send out tweets and incentivize them with ‘pay with a tweet’ schemes. It is a safe way to ensure that your message is seen by the right people on Twitter.

Always use hashtags while posting your whitepaper on twitter. It is very effective in giving your tweets more exposure. Make sure to use relevant hashtags. If your whitepaper is based on a technical topic, tag it with #Tech, #Technology, etc. If your whitepaper is on marketing, use tags like #Marketing.

Add Tweet buttons to the landing page as well as to your whitepaper documents. Having the button in the document will make it easy for the audience to share the whitepaper.

If done right, your whitepaper can reach a larger audience with Twittersphere!

4. Leverage YouTube Video Ads to Promote Your Whitepaper

Video is an influential way to demonstrate the concepts in a whitepaper and share the takeaways. B2B whitepaper marketing process drives the audience/readers to contact you to learn more information or request product demo. So, to engage more audiences and drive more downloads let YouTube take it from here!

Create a video teaser demonstrating insights from your whitepaper. Then upload it on YouTube, your company’s website, your blog, and on all your social networks. Video is taking over social media and Google search. You can optimize the video with keywords to drive a lot of views for people searching business-related or maybe your topic on YouTube. Many apps can assist you to create customized and more professional-looking videos. You just need to be a little creative while creating it. When done right it can generate a lot of views and downloads.

Wrapping Up

As you launch each of these marketing strategies, make sure you record those strategies and track your KPIs over time. For a whitepaper, you should track leads generated, sales, and ROI.

If you do all of the above to promote your whitepaper on social media channels, it can help you reach a wider audience, attract more leads, and convert them into customers.

How have you promoted your whitepapers? What has worked best for you? Do let us know in the comment section below.