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:

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:

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:
19% of SaaS businesses feature Zero social profile links on their website (although they may still exist, just hard to find)
21% of SaaS businesses have 3 main social media profiles, and another 21% have 4 main profiles
Only 2% of fast growing SaaS companies in our database have all 6 of the social media platforms that we track linked to from their website
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.

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.

There are similar trends overall, but a few important differences worth noting:
While a majority of companies use LinkedIn either way, B2B companies had a 14% higher share of LinkedIn usage
On the other hand, Twitter (X) is the most popular social network for B2C companies; B2C companies have a 6% preference for Twitter than B2B
Tiktok is significantly more popular among B2C SaaS companies.
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 Network | Fast Growing (%) | Slow Growing (%) |
---|---|---|
70 | 67 | |
50 | 54 | |
Youtube | 38 | 37 |
59 | 58 | |
Tiktok | 4 | 4 |
34 | 34 |
There are 2 clear possibilities for what this means:
First, it’s possible that social media may not be the most important marketing channel for growth. Based on our case studies, SEO is often the primary focus.
Slower growing SaaS companies are still focusing on the right social media platforms, but perhaps have inferior marketing strategies and tactics.
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 Network | Common Use Cases |
---|---|
Build authority, connect with customers & talent, direct messaging, targeted ads | |
Customer support, sharing content | |
Advertising, community marketing (e.g., groups) | |
TikTok | Currently 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.