SaaS Social Media Marketing 101: Strategies, Tips, and Tools

Software as a Service, also known as SaaS, is the largest segment of the cloud market and its revenue has reached $98.9 billion in 2023.

Doubtless, SaaS businesses grow in popularity, but this also means that companies need to find new creative ways to promote their businesses in order to stand out from their competitors.

With 3.5 billion social media users worldwide, using social media for SaaS can be a powerful way to grow your business and reach your potential customers where they are active online.

For businesses choosing software solutions, this ASP model vs SaaS model guide covers everything you need to know.

Why Use Social Media for SaaS?

When it comes to SaaS, potential customers do research, seek out recommendations, and watch demo videos. At first blush, using social media platforms isn’t the best idea for promoting SaaS companies as the SaaS decision-making process is more complicated than selling physical products.

Believe it or not, there are four main reasons why you should use social media for SaaS:

• Your potential customers are active on social media. Millennials, people aged between 23 and 38 years, have become the world’s most powerful consumers. At the same time, the biggest social media user group are women and men between the ages of 24 and 35 years which means Millennials are active social media users and they are ready to discover products and services on social media platforms.
• Social media users want to get in touch with businesses. Recent statistics show that 85% of U.S. customers use social media, 74% of users follow at least one business on social media, and 1 in 3 people reaches out to a brand or business on social media for customer service. The bottom line is that people are happy to interact with businesses on social media. When building a brand from scratch, a well-planned approach can make a lasting impression.
• It’s a cost-effective marketing tool that gives great results. It’s no secret that modern customers are bombarded with ads online so they use ad blockers. When it comes to social media marketing, not only do customers use platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter actively, but they also discover brand content and follow influencers which gives an opportunity for SaaS companies to promote their products without spending much money.
• There are many business-specific features to promote your SaaS company. With the power of social media for business growth, it’s no wonder that most platforms roll out features that help both companies and customers communicate with each other better. From shoppable posts to clickable links, there are many features that can help SaaS businesses promote products and services in-app.

Want to know the best part? Social media can help you promote your business if you’re looking for actionable ways on how to upgrade your SaaS marketing after COVID-19.

Now that you want to give social media marketing a try, it’s time to choose the right channel: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, Quora… It’s nearly impossible to use all social media platforms for business promotion, so you need to know which channels are the best for your SaaS business.

Best Social Platforms for SaaS Marketing

Having social media presence isn’t enough to promote your SaaS product. It’s important to choose the right social media platforms that are popular among your target audience, give you an opportunity to achieve business goals, and offer various ways to interact with potential customers. SMM panel offer everything to do with social media

Here’s what marketers think about the most popular social media platforms:

As you can see, you earn money from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, that are the most popular social media platforms. Thus, we’re going to show you how to use these channels when promoting your SaaS business. To inspire your social media marketing campaign, keep on reading this article to find out 8 effective strategies as well as examples from the best SaaS companies.

Yet, there are no limitations on how you can leverage social media for your SaaS. An interesting case is to create new, phygital experience for your leads or potential customers. While roadshows is a good practice after all (even due to the pandemic – there won’t be a replacement for a live communication) this isn’t enough.

It’d combine different types of marketing and create a new brand experience for sure.

8 Effective Social Media Strategies for SaaS

No matter what social media platforms you choose for your SaaS business, here comes the list of 8 social media strategies that can be used on all channels and bring wonderful results.

1. Introduce Your SaaS Business

Social media platforms are extremely popular among modern people. The average internet user spends 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media. From communicating with friends and family to reading news and discovering new products, people use social media for everything.

If you use social media for SaaS, you need to reach your target audience and encourage them to follow your business and learn more about your products and services. One of the best ways to do this is to tell visitors about your business, values, and products.

Whether you use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you have a bio section that helps to tell about your business in a few words. What is more, you can use imagery on Facebook or Twitter to include additional information about your SaaS business.

Let’s take PostPlanner, for example. The company is active on all major social media platforms and it uses them the right way. PostPlanner has a Facebook video header that lists benefits of this SaaS business:

Here’s how its Twitter bio section looks like:

And Instagram:

Modern people are pressed for time, so they scan your social media profiles quickly to decide whether they’re interested in following your business or not. Here are several tips on how to tell about your SaaS business:

• Write key benefits of your business
• Use relevant hashtags
• Include a clickable website link

2. Demonstrate How Your Product Works

Most customers seek out solutions when they have faced a problem. However, many people are open to discovering new products or services when they don’t need to find a particular solution.

When you use social media management tools to explain how your SaaS business works, not only can you get an opportunity to build brand awareness and attract new potential customers, but you also ease the worried minds of clients who are seeking for solutions.

Moreover, there are many ways to explain how your SaaS works:

• Publish educational posts
• Go live
• Organize Q&A sessions
• Create explainer videos

Although all of the above-mentioned tips work well, publishing an explainer video is one of the most effective ones. Why? Videos help to include more information and keep your audience engaged, video ads improve conversions. Moreover, 85% of all internet users in the United States watch online video content each month.

Popular SaaS companies like Grammarly have started creating educational social media video content:

When you explain how to use your business and why it is important for your customers, you get an opportunity to attain more customers which means your business growth.

3. Offer a Referral Program

Living in the digital era, it’s easy for potential customers to do research and find reliable products. Most people ask their friends and family for suggestions. Believe it or not, 92% of customers trust peer recommendations more than paid ads. SaaS companies need to encourage their loyal customers to spread the word about their products and creating a referral program is one of the most effective ways to do it.

Referral programs offer bonuses for customers and new clients so everyone gets benefits, so social media followers are happy to tell their friends, family, or colleagues about your business if they are motivated.

Here’s how Simple Funnel uses its Twitter profile to tell loyal followers about its referral program, and you can also set up scheduled tweets.

For a variety of reasons, promoting your referral program on social media is great. What is more important, your referral program can grab the attention of loyal customers and turn them into brand ambassadors who are happy to promote your business in exchange for perks.

4. Recruit Brand Advocates

When starting your SaaS business, it can be daunting to acquire customers and encourage them to sign up for your referral program. But if you want to speed up the process and deliver positive word-of-mouth messages to your target audience, consider hiring brand advocates.

Brand advocates are customers, opinion leaders, or employees who have niche expertise and therefore they influence the opinions and purchase decisions of potential customers. The idea of working with brand advocates is widespread among ecommerce companies, but SaaS businesses can also make the most out of it.

Check out how Salesforce teamed up with a brand advocate to create a social media video on current niche trends:

Obviously, not all SaaS businesses can afford to collaborate with the world-known NBA players like Bardon Davis. But there are still some cost-effective ways to hire brand ambassadors without spending much money.

For example, you can reach out to niche influencers with small but loyal following or motivate your employees to become brand advocates. Anyway, it’s important to ask influencers for prices and get math assistance to understand which model suits your budget and needs best.

5. Share Discounts and Deals

When done right, social media can help to increase SaaS sales. Moreover, they are all about rapid sales which means customers make the purchase decision fast and offering a time-limited discount is a great way to encourage them to buy from you. In fact, 40% of people follow businesses on social media to get exclusive discounts and offers.

Any example needed? With the outbreak of COVID-19, SaaS companies have gained in popularity and Zoom has become one of the most popular apps. Back in March 2020, Zoom partnered with Boma to organize the web summit and offer it for free:

For Zoom, it didn’t cost much time or effort to sponsor an online summit, but that event helped to build brand awareness and increase app downloads. The bottom line? SaaS buyers are common people who also seek out offers and deals before buying from companies, so sharing discounts or offers on social media is a great way to grow your business.

6. Convert Followers into Leads

It’s no secret that most companies use social media to increase brand awareness. The more people know about your SaaS business, the more potential customers you can acquire. However, having a social media presence isn’t enough to grow your business.

To effectively engage with potential customers and convert them into leads, it is crucial to use a content planner for strategizing and executing the campaigns.

If your followers show interest in your product, you can collect their contact information to tell them more about your business and therefore turn your followers into loyal customers. For example, TailwindApp has a smart bio feature that allows you to create a list of clickable links. The company uses it to provide interested social media followers with information about its products and services. What is more, one of these links help TailwindApp promote a lead magnet and therefore generate leads:

And here’s how a landing pages for startups look like:

Lead magnets work. When you offer your potential customers something valuable, they are happy to share their contact information in exchange for it. However, many people are afraid of spam messages, so they often submit other emails to get access to your lead magnets.

When doing your email marketing campaign, using the wrong address can bring negative results. Thus, it’s important to use a valid email checker to make sure you’ve collected the right contact information.

Learn how to craft effective email marketing strategies for startups to boost engagement.

7. Run Social Media Ads

Do you know that 97% of marketers use social media for business promotion? With great marketing potential, it’s no wonder that more and more companies want to get social media presence and reach their target audience in-app. Thus, it takes time and effort to cut through the noise and promote your SaaS company unless you run social media ad campaigns.

If you have an idea on how apps make money, you know that ads help to increase revenue. When it comes to social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram also want to make money when helping your business grow. Moreover, 67% of users purchased after seeing an ad on social media. The all-in-one ad trackers like Voluum make sense to optimize the processes.

To promote your SaaS business fast, it’s important to plan and execute a social media ad campaign that helps to achieve your business goals. A social media posting schedule calendar can help you run such campaigns. For example, AppSee decided to reach its target audience on Instagram via Instagram Stories ads.

The company created an explainer Instagram Stories video, included a call to action, and added a swipe-up link that allowed them to tell more about the company. This campaign resulted in a 3.4X higher click-through rate and a 25% lower cost per qualified lead.

8. Gather Customer Feedback

If you want to grow your business and increase revenue, listen to your customers. Your consumers know best what they want to get from your business, so collecting customer feedback is a great way to understand them better and therefore improve your product to suit their needs.

Want to know the best part? Social media users are not shy to express their thoughts about your product or service. What is more, they want to help other potential customers who may be seeking recommendations from other consumers.

Here’s an example of customer review Wix got on Facebook:

Not all customers visit companies’ social media profiles to share their thoughts on your product. In fact, 96% of those who discuss businesses online don’t follow them. This means you need to use social media listening tools to see all brand mentions.

Now that you know many ways on how to promote your SaaS business on social media, it’s important to learn more about social media marketing tools that can help you make the process easier and more effective.

Top 9 Tools for SaaS Social Media Marketing

1. Crello

No matter what social media platform you choose for growing your SaaS business, you need to create social media visuals to grab the attention of your audience. Since 65% of people are visual learners, they pay close attention to beautiful social media feeds.

Crello is a free graphic design tool that helps non-designers create visuals with ease. The company offers over 20,000 ready-to-use templates and access to a photo stock gallery, so you can make visuals that suit your brand identity and style. Moreover, there’s a drag-and-drop feature that allows you to upload your visuals, brand logos and fonts, so you can customize your images. Whether you want to make social media visuals, ads, or ephemeral content posts, Crello is here to make this process easier for you.

2. Social Status

Creating social media reports for stakeholders is one of the most time-consuming and manual processes facing social media managers. But with Social Status, you can automate these reports with the click of a button for all the major social media channels.

Social Status is a social media analytics tool that includes a live dashboard as well as the functionality to customize and export reports to PDF, PowerPoint, and Google Slides. For users who prefer working on Mac, these PDF reports are fully compatible with the best PDF editor for Mac, ensuring seamless editing and customization. Social Status also includes Ads Analytics for your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, competitor benchmarking, and influencer campaign reporting too.

3. Sotrender

3. NapoleonCat

Social media marketing campaigns are not limited to posting beautiful posts from time to time. To make the most of your social media presence, you need to keep track of your social media marketing performance, analyze your audience, and manage campaigns.

If you want to find an all-in-one tool for social media management, pay attention to NapoleonCat. Whether you need a tool to plan and execute your social media marketing campaign, manage your social inbox, schedule social media posts, or get in-depth data, NapoleonCat is here to help you.

4. Linktree

Most social media platforms allow businesses to add one clickable link. If you want to tell about your business, promote your email newsletter, drive website traffic to your blog, and share product pages, having one link isn’t enough.

Find out which email marketing software platforms are worth your time and investment.

Luckily, you can use the Linktree tool that helps to redirect your followers to all of your target URLs with just one link. Not only can you customize your Linktree link, but you can also get access to analytics and insights that help to understand your social media followers better.

Planning a crowdfunding platform? Learn what goes into crowdfunding website development.

5. HypeAuditor

With the popularity of influencer marketing, SaaS businesses also turn to niche social media opinion leaders to offer collaboration opportunities. Whether you want to hire a brand advocate or team up with an influencer, it’s important to make sure that this person is the right opinion leader for your audience.

Since many opinion leaders buy fake followers, it’s important to use a tool like HypeAuditor to spot fake influencers, discover and analyze opinion leaders, and track influencer marketing campaigns.

6. Offeo

With the proliferation of social media, the attention span of users have certainly gone down. People using social media today are scrolling much more as compared to the past. As such, it becomes important to optimize your social media assets for attention. For video assets, this becomes the most apparent whereby you have to capture your prospective customer’s attention within the 1st 3s.

Here’s where a user friendly, drag and drop video editor such as OFFEO or PlayPlay will come in handy. Explore their list of professional video templates, ready to be deployed in just a few clicks. You can also customize your videos to optimize for the different social media formats (square, landscape, and vertical videos).

7. url.bio

Another link customizer in the list. url.bio tool allows you to drive traffic from your Instagram account to pages that you want to promote. It helps to turn your social media followers into customers and earn more sales.

8. SocialPilot

When it comes to social media marketing, not only do customers use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter actively, but they also discover brand content and follow influencers which gives an opportunity for SaaS companies to promote their products without spending much money.

You can also use tools like Instagram tools, Facebook tools for best results on social media. Many people buy Instagram followers and Facebook likes to boost their social proof.

9. Colorcinch

Colorcinch allows you to create social media assets that can help you connect better with the audience. It’s an online design tool that comes with an intuitive and clean (no ads) interface so you can craft banners, graphics, and cover arts on the fly. You can play around with its collection of graphics & icons, stock photos, and overlays. Transform your photos with hundreds of special effects, add multiple elements, and utilize the text editor to personalize your designs.

Colorcinch lets you enjoy the beauty of AI-powered photo effects and editing tools whether you’re a designer, non-designer, or hobbyist.

10. BeFunky

One of the most popular content marketing trends today is the creation of photo collages. Using collages, SaaS businesses can create photos and other visuals that demonstrate what their solutions provide and make it easy for customers to understand the solutions.

If you were to sign into one of the most popular social media platforms, you will realize that photo collages have taken over users’ stories and feeds. This is where BeFunky’s photo collage comes in.

You do not have to design these collages manually. Using this tool, all you need to do is upload the photos that you need to use and then select a layout for your collage.

You can also add other effects to make sure that your collage meets your expectations. This way, you will not only attract social media following but also convert visitors into customers.

11. Picsart

Picsart is a design and editing tool that empowers creators that may or may not have graphic arts degrees.

Its numerous features, including a batch editor, access to hundreds of assets, and reusable templates, makes Picsart a one-stop shop for all your content creation needs.

Its free version includes a powerful image and video editor, which allows you to turn a photo into a cartoon, remove backgrounds, and more.

What separates Picsart from other editors is its AI image generator. Simply type a few keywords, and you’ll get a completely original piece in seconds.

12. SocialBee

SocialBee is an all-in-one social media management platform that streamlines the management of your various social media accounts, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google Business Profile, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.

The platform empowers you to create, schedule, publish, and track your social media content, while also providing advanced features such as the AI assistant, Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy integrations, which enable you to generate captions, ideas, and add visual appeal to your posts.

In addition, SocialBee offers customization and recycling options to help you make the most of your content, while its performance tracking and data reporting capabilities allow you to analyze your social media metrics and share insights with your team.

13. Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a collaborative social media management tool that caters to all your social needs, from Publishing to Reporting. It allows you to manage multiple social accounts from a single platform and offers a flexible notification system with Slack and Microsoft Teams alerts. The platform’s automation features, such as spam filtering, saved replies, approval workflows and conversation assignment options help save time and streamline team workflows. 

Statusbrew also simplifies social media advertising for SaaS by providing tools to create, manage, and optimize ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Brands can set targeting options, specify ad placements, and track ad performance, all within the Statusbrew platform.

Summary

The popularity of social media platforms is on its rise and the number of social media users is predicted to grow. For businesses of all sizes and niches, social media platforms have become a powerful marketing tool

To get your business off the ground, it’s important to use social media for SaaS as there are many ways to promote your business, reach your target audience, ease the worried minds of potential customers, and understand your consumers better.

So, have you started using social media for SaaS? What works best for your company?

As a bonus, discover some of the best SaaS startup ideas that are driving innovation in the tech industry.