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 about 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.
Here's a similar graph to the “overall” one that we looked at initially. The only slight differences were that B2B SaaS companies were 6% more likely to focus on LinkedIn, and 3% less likely to use Twitter.
I'm still working on a better B2B/B2C classification algorithm, so don't put too much stock into this either.
Do Fast Growing SaaS Companies Focus on Different Platforms Than Less Successful Ones?
Finally, I wanted to compare platform usage of fast and “slow” growing SaaS companies, and the results were basically identical.
In other words, slower growing SaaS companies are still focusing on the right social media platforms, but perhaps have inferior marketing strategies and tactics.
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.