What's the Best Social Network for SaaS Businesses? (Research)

When we add a new company to our SaaS database, we crawl a portion of their website to collect information on it.

One of the first things we collect are links to social media profiles.

In theory, if all successful SaaS businesses are using one social media network, then it's probably pretty important.

I've gone through our database of over 30,000 SaaS companies so that we can visualize which networks are most important. Note that there are some limitations (e.g. The presence of a profile doesn't mean a company focuses their branding and marketing on all of them equally).

Which Social Networks Do SaaS Businesses Use Most Overall?

The graph below shows what percent of SaaS companies overall (regardless of growth rate) use each social network:

SaaS Social Media Usage Overall

LinkedIn is firmly in the number 1 spot - about 68% of SaaS businesses have a clear link to LinkedIn on their website.

Twitter was surprisingly high at 58% with a lot of the controversy on the platform recently. I'll be interested to check on this in a year or so and see if it changes.

A decent chunk of companies also include Facebook (52%), YouTube (38%), and Instagram (34%).

The final surprise was that barely any SaaS companies use TikTok (4%). I'm pretty engaged with the SaaS marketing community, and you wouldn't guess this based on how much attention is given to TikTok.

So either companies are missing out, or they've tried TikTok and found that it isn't a particularly effective platform for SaaS.

How Many Social Media Profiles do Fast Growing SaaS Companies Focus On?

The second main question I wanted to know was how many profiles do companies highlight on their website, which is answered in the graph below:

SaaS Social Media Network Count

Note that I only considered companies with a positive growth rate (in terms of brand searches), so these are the most “successful” companies at the time of writing.

Of note:

Do B2B SaaS Companies Target Different Social Platforms?

The short answer is basically no.

We’ve also built a classifier for the companies that we inject into the SaaSyTrends database that assigns a B2B or B2C label to each company.

Let’s look at the B2B side first...

Here’s a similar graph to the “overall” one that we looked at initially.

SaaS Social Media Usage B2B

Not surprisingly, LinkedIn is even more important for B2B SaaS, and I wouldn’t expect that to change any time soon.

A Direct B2B vs B2C Social Media Comparison

In order to get the full picture, here’s one additional chart showing social media usage by both B2B and B2C SaaS companies side by side.

SaaS Social Media Usage B2B vs B2C

There are similar trends overall, but a few important differences worth noting:

Do Fast Growing SaaS Companies Focus on Different Platforms Than Less Successful Ones?

Finally, I had one last question that I was really curious to answer from the outset of this analysis.

I expected that the most successful companies might focus on different social media platforms than the less successful ones.

But their social media platforms of choice are almost identical.

Social NetworkFast Growing (%)Slow Growing (%)
LinkedIn7067
Facebook5054
Youtube3837
Twitter5958
Tiktok44
Instagram3434

There are 2 clear possibilities for what this means:

Unfortunately, which (or both) of those are true is beyond the scope of this analysis, so it will have to wait for a future time.

Takeaways for Your SaaS Marketing

Focusing on the right social networks can help maximize your SaaS marketing impact.

Below is a summary of the most important platforms and their common use cases:

Social NetworkCommon Use Cases
LinkedInBuild authority, connect with customers & talent, direct messaging, targeted ads
TwitterCustomer support, sharing content
FacebookAdvertising, community marketing (e.g., groups)
TikTokCurrently limited use for SaaS; more relevant for B2C

Unless you have a strong reason to explore other channels, prioritizing LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook will cover most SaaS marketing needs effectively.

With that being said, running experiments on TikTok, especially for B2C companies, is likely worth trying.

Limitations

As mentioned initially, there are some significant limitations in this quick analysis.

The biggest one is that we looked at the presence of a social media profile, but not follower or engagement amounts.

I'd like to dig into this more into the future to see if the follower counts correlated with platform usage.

And finally, we’ll come back and update this post in the future with fresh data so that we can also look at if certain social network usage is growing or shrinking for SaaS companies.