Business-to-business (B2B) marketing has gained momentum since the arrival of social media as these networks offer a great deal of opportunities to businesses for social interaction and information sharing. Unlike traditional marketing media, it offers space to share the content without many boundaries. Also, there are multiple media to offer choices for self-selection. According to a study, for B2B marketers, LinkedIn has become a preferred option for marketing communication as against Facebook and Twitter. Also, more than 85% of B2B marketers utilize social media for creating brand awareness. There is social communication happening with vendors or corporate clients through social media for more B2B companies than for B2C companies. The above findings in the report are based on the yearly ‘State of Corporate Social Media’ survey conducted by ‘Useful Social Media’ with more than 850 respondents.
How corporate world has been adopting and using social media
Since social media offers a personal way to receive better marketing gains in terms of response rate, satisfaction and loyalty, there is no surprise that around 90% of companies are using it as part of their marketing communication (marcomm) strategies. As regards B2C companies, majority of them (around 97%) have been using Facebook for their marketing communication purposes as it’s the most popular and largest social network to have provided mature capabilities to market, as well as various examples and cases to explain how companies can make use of this platform in the best possible manner.
There are around 51% of B2C companies going for a corporate blog now, while less than 50% utilize Pinterest, Google+, Instagram or Foursquare. Facebook dominates the whole scene as around 65% B2C users feel that it has the best utility. Twitter, lacking specific functionality for big brands, is somehow, not preferred by companies. Merely 20% of all corporations use Twitter for marketing communication.
Talking about B2B companies, the scene is entirely changed. There are just 17% adopting Facebook, while there is more craze about LinkedIn that is the top-ranked network utilized by 37% of B2B companies. Twitter has also overtaken Facebook with a share of 21% B2B users. Some new big networks like Instagram and Pinterest haven’t received a very good response from the corporate marketers.
Other usage purposes for social media
There is not just the marketing communication department of many companies using social media, but also some other departments that have started taking advantage of these networks. One such area in which social media has been greatly contributing is ‘customer service.’ There are about 53% of the surveyed companies using social media for brand reinforcement, showing the responsiveness of the company, and sharing positive issues related to the firm.
