How important is Social Media for B2B Marketing?

With over 30billion pieces of content shared on facebook and 95 million tweets each day it is hardly surprising that we keep getting told that social media marketing is integral to any marketing campaign. The benefits of using facebook and twitter to target teenage girls about a new make-up range is pretty obvious but what about business to business marketing, can social media really help?

The big difference between B2B and B2C is that with B2B you are not trying to convert a million individual consumers to become your customer you are trying to reach a smaller number of large companies to invest their budget in your products or services. This may make you think that social media will therefore play a less important part in trying to target this audience but this is incorrect as a study has shown that over 86% of B2B companies are using social media in one way or another.

This means that if you are not participating in social media yourself you are missing out on an opportunity to reach a wide percentage of your target audience.

One main thing to consider when thinking about social media for B2B is that interaction is not going to lead to automatic sales. Social media is about moulding relationships, providing an opinion and attracting attention to be recognised. Businesses use other businesses because of their expertise and a bigger decision making process is involved than B2C; this is why using social media platforms is so beneficial to B2B companies as you are able to showcase your expertise and knowledge.

One main advantage of utilising social media platforms is that it will increase your SEO ranking, as by appearing across multiple platforms you are increasing the chances of your search terms being found. Research has also shown that people are now turning to social media platforms instead of search engines to find out the information they need.

B2B companies are more likely than B2C to maintain a company blog and participate on Twitter so make sure you don’t get bogged down with the perception that social media has no place in your marketing strategy as you just might be missing out on the quickest and cheapest way to reach your target audience.