Social media platforms have become an essential tool for businesses of all kinds to reach and engage their target audience. For B2B companies, finding the best social media platforms and developing a successful social media marketing strategy can be a challenge. However, with the right strategy and channels, B2B companies can effectively use social media to reach decision-making executives and influence their purchasing decisions. According to Forbes, 83% of executives use social media in their decision-making process and 92% have had a decision influenced by social media within the past year. While LinkedIn is a key platform for B2B companies, there are also other social media channels that can be leveraged to promote your business and connect with your target audience. In this article, we will discuss the differences in social media strategies for B2B and B2C businesses, and provide tips and tools to help you develop a successful social media marketing campaign for your B2B company.
What Is The Difference Between B2B & B2C Social Media?
Understanding the difference between B2B and B2C social media will allow you to strategically make the shift from one to another and successfully implement a campaign. Per Sprout Social, these are the main differences between the two:
Focus: B2B brands are focused on conversions, website traffic, and leads. B2C is focused on audience growth, engagement and brand health.
Invest: B2B invest their time in analytics and niche audiences. B2C invests in brand loyalty, customer service and engaging with the community.
Content: B2B content is geared towards a company’s social audience only, whereas B2C also considers the brand’s social community.
B2B vs B2C
When it comes to any solid marketing strategy, one of the key components is understanding your audience. Who are you selling to? What are their needs? How can you promote your services or your products in a way to meet those needs?
In the case of B2B and B2C, they are principally the same in this regard, except their audience and their respective needs are different.
For example, B2B focuses on businesses catering to the needs of other businesses. Products and services which fall into the B2B category include companies offering databases, management software, timekeeping programs, healthcare services for workers, indoor furnishing businesses for restaurants and entertainment venues, and so on.
When it comes to promoting one’s products and services to another company, essential leverage is a focus on cost-effectiveness and practicality. It’s also commonly noted that companies seeking a B2B company’s products or services are also seeking their expertise in a specific industry or field as well. Thus, a B2B company’s products and services are important to increase the efficacy and functionality of another company’s operations.
B2C, on the other hand, focuses on selling services and products to individual customers for their private use. The products and services offered by B2C companies are varied and focus mainly on meeting a demand in the market. B2C companies leverage pathos and solutions when it comes to marketing their products and services. In engaging with the pathos, or emotions, of the consumer, B2C companies consider more personable marketing campaigns, though this doesn’t necessarily mean that B2B companies must employ less personable marketing strategies/slogans.
While these are the core principles that divide B2B and B2C marketing, we believe that B2B and B2C aren’t necessarily exclusive. After all, some companies offer both B2B and B2C products and services. Both types of businesses might also have their own in-laid marketing strategies, but it isn’t impossible for these strategies to cross over. In fact, if you own a B2B company and you notice a B2C marketing trend that fits your company’s unique product or service, we suggest not dismissing it and to do further research.
B2B Social Media Trends vs B2C Social Media Trends
While the marketing strategies of B2B and B2C companies may contain a level of overlap, the social media trends for B2B and B2C companies differ. Here are some social media trends to consider for both B2B and B2C companies before formalizing your marketing campaign:
Top 3 B2B Social Media Trends
1. Investment Over Single-Transaction
Typically, B2B companies deal with smaller, niche markets. They’re not looking to tap into a wide market for profits. Considering how many B2B companies provide services that assist with managing workers and logging a large amount of data, a long-term relationship is more practical. Instead of having clients buy a product or service for one-time use, B2B companies should consider building relationships that lead to consideration for future products and services.
2. Continuity
The social marketing campaigns for B2B tend to be lengthier and overlapping. While short-term engagement is advantageous for certain reasons, such as promoting a specific product or sale, B2B companies want to focus more on their services and products as well as their growth and scalability for the long term.
3. Setting a KPI
When it comes to creating a goal for a business, one of the more difficult parts is measuring your goals. How do you know if your business has achieved its goal? How do you know if your social media marketing campaign is actually successful?
This is where KPI, or key performance indicator, is important. A KPI is a useful tool that measures a business’s performance. Depending on your B2B business’s goal, the KPI can by anything from the number of website visitors to your company’s website, the number of conversions, or desired actions, or even the number of clicks.
Setting a KPI not only provides a concrete way to measure how your business is doing in relation to a marketing campaign’s goal but also sets a standard for your marketing team.
Top 3 B2C Social Media Trends
1. Immediacy
In lieu of B2C’s focus on promoting a specific product or service, what matters most in consumer engagement is speed and quality content. You want your product and service to be known to a wide market but also in a short amount of time. This way you can also make more room time and energy-wise for other products. Many B2C social media campaigns also focus on giveaways, sales, and deals, which are all more short-term projects.
2. Visuals
Though both B2B and B2C companies employ visuals for their marketing campaigns, research done by marketing firm Grazitti Interactive shows that B2C social media marketing strategies employ visuals more, especially videos. Given how almost 60% of the digital content posted on the Internet is oriented towards visual stimulation, this is no surprise.
3. Brand Building
Sometimes consumers buy for reasons outside of practical needs and entertainment purposes—status and desire often play a hand when it purchase-making. Especially for fashion and tech brands, maintaining a specific image and projecting the value of your merchandise is essential. Social media is not only an extension of your business’s online presence but also is a tool that supports the image and value you want to set for your brand.
Social Media Marketing Platforms For B2B Social Media Marketing Success
If you’ve been ignoring Twitter, Facebook and Instagram because you think only LinkedIn matters for B2B – you’re doing it all wrong!
LinkedIn may be appealing for B2B because it generates leads, but a goal of B2B social media marketing also should be branding. Most people on social media are there to kill time, and your content needs to appeal to that. Do not simply post videos about why your products are so great, but create content that tells stories to spark conversation. After considering this, the other platforms will sound much more appealing!
Social Media Examiner found that more B2B companies are picking up on this and are expanding to other channels:
- 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn
- 88% use Facebook
- 83% use Twitter
- 61% use Google+
- 55% use YouTube
- 39% use Pinterest
- 26% use Instagram
A great way to find what other social media channels are right for your B2B business besides LinkedIn is to research what your competitors are using. If they are successfully building a social media presence on Twitter, chances are you can too. Look at the top companies in your industry and check out what platforms they’re throwing resources into.
It’s also recommended to look at social media demographics to find where your target audience hangs out – you may be surprised! Sprout Social has conducted excellent research on social media demographics. Check out the graphics below and learn about each platform’s dominant audience:
Which social media channel is the most effective for b2b lead generation and why?
Now that you are more intimate with some of the top trends when it comes to social media marketing for B2B and B2C businesses, we will now go into the specific social media channels that are profitable for B2B businesses and how you can use them to their full potential. We will also the “Why” and provide data and demographic information from Social Media Examiner for all platforms below to support our findings.
1) LinkedIn
What’s often considered the “Facebook” of the professional world, LinkedIn is the most popular social media channel with over 60% of B2B companies using this platform. Whether it’s because of the suave and professional interface or the handy features catering to B2B marketing, LinkedIn is a solid choice if your resources are limited and you need to push a B2B marketing campaign in only a few social media channels. Here are a few ways you can utilize LinkedIn for your B2B social media marketing needs:
Maximize the Possibilities for Leads
Does your company description only give basic details about your company’s mission and its products? Scrap it! Every part of your company’s profile should be geared towards generating leads and conversions. Whether it’s creating a header that will grab attention or providing links to content published on your company’s website, the company profile on LinkedIn is powerful too.
One last thing to consider when drafting the copy for your company profile is to make sure you’re hitting these three important following components:
- Target your audience
- Provide value
- Showcase your product/service
Take Advantage of Showcases
Showcases are primarily used to show a company’s extensions or individual brands. Not only is it useful in funneling website traffic to the appropriate areas, but it provides a chance to create long-standing relationships with potential partner companies.
Generate Meaningful Content
While this goes for any other social media channel, what makes LinkedIn particularly powerful is its article publication feature. Your company can directly put out relevant digital content related to its industry or associated industries. Compared to other digital content on other social media channels, LinkedIn articles are compelling at selling your company’s mission, values, and credibility. After all, good content equals good service!
2) Twitter
Second to LinkedIn is Twitter when it comes to B2B marketing campaigns. While LinkedIn is useful in searching up partner companies or competitors, Twitter allows you to scope the social media presence and influence of a specific company as well. Given Twitter’s character limit and the relatively short life span of Twitter posts, another way to effectively promote your company’s product multiple times within a day is through Tweets. Data analyzed by Twitter has shown that individuals are 300% more likely to click on a link they’ve seen four times rather than once.
Another thing to consider for Twitter is that it’s a social media channel that allows for direct interaction between companies, sometimes even developing cult personalities. (Good examples of this are Wendy’s and Moon Pie.) Promoting your own products and services as well as engaging with fellow companies and widening your company’s social media presence are all parts of a healthy B2B social media marketing campaign.
3) YouTube
Though using video marketing and video ads might feel like a B2C tactic, as these types of strategies employ appeals to pathos, YouTube also serves as a powerful tool with 48% of B2B companies using YouTube for social media marketing. Though YouTube has an extremely broad reach, what video marketing essentially allows you to do is employ the art of visual storytelling.
While the relationship B2C companies seek to set between them and their audience is different, the relationship between B2B companies and other businesses can also benefit the brand. With video marketing, you can still establish a relationship and go more in detail about the solutions your company offers. Furthermore, YouTube has an array of useful tools to assist your company’s marketing team—it allows for analytics, which are essential when evaluating performance and establishing KPIs.
Consistently posting top-quality content is essential to any social media marketing campaign. On the other hand, only creating posts on an irregular basis is not effective and makes it much more difficult to reach new customers. Uploading a variety of content is also a great way to expand the outreach of your company, whether you prefer to post links to blogs, informative articles, or white papers.
4) SlideShare
Considered the YouTube equivalent of presentations, SlideShare allows you to share a host of digital content in multiple forms beyond video, such as presentation and music files. While SlideShare doesn’t have the massive reach that YouTube has, it’s consistently frequented by professionals, which is the type of audience B2B marketing centers itself on.
When using SlideShare, you want to focus specifically on content marketing. Content marketing is straightforward and allows fellow professionals to quickly gauge what your company’s products and services are as well as what types of solutions you can provide for the best return-on-investment and cost-effectiveness. When creating slides, be sure to keep them concise and keep the number of slides to under 10 for thorough audience engagement.
Though using video marketing and video ads might feel like a B2C tactic, as these types of strategies employ appeals to pathos, YouTube also serves as a powerful tool with 48% of B2B companies using YouTube for social media marketing. Though YouTube has an extremely broad reach, what video marketing essentially allows you to do is employ the art of visual storytelling.
While the relationship B2C companies seek to set between them and their audience is different, the relationship between B2B companies and other businesses can also benefit the brand. With video marketing, you can still establish a relationship and go more in detail about the solutions your company offers. Furthermore, YouTube has an array of useful tools to assist your company’s marketing team—it allows for analytics, which are essential when evaluating performance and establishing KPIs.
5) Vimeo
Another video sharing and streaming social media website, Vimeo is the less popular but more suave cousin of YouTube. Though Vimeo isn’t free and has a smaller market to tap into, at least 40% of B2B businesses have it as a marketing tool and it’s in the top 5 social media channels used.
Besides its professional-looking interface and straightforward video set-up, Vimeo has no time limit on uploaded videos. Furthermore, the potential to tap into a niche market is easier with Vimeo’s smaller streaming population. The only catch is that you have to pay a yearly subscription fee to advertise or product on Vimeo. However, when it comes to storytelling and selling your brand in a humanized approach, Vimeo is the perfect video sharing platform for those who want a more professional edge and less competition.
6) Facebook
Beyond establishing a Facebook Business Page, many may wonder how Facebook can assist with B2B marketing efforts. Numbers reflect this as only 32% of B2B businesses use Facebook for social media marketing.
However, contrary to popular belief, Facebook isn’t only good for boosting brand awareness or Facebook Ads. It’s possible to establish contact and generate leads with niche markets, especially if you do your research and engage with the right communities on Facebook.
Facebook nowadays isn’t just a site to catch up with friends or renew connections—community-building has been a thing since the advent of Pages and Groups. With new communities forming and current ones growing in size, the potential to market on Facebook is just as extensive as the search results.
7) Pinterest
Combining visuals and resources, Pinterest’s main feature is the Board where users can collect links, information, and visuals. Compared to other social media channels, Pinterest is only used by 25% of B2B businesses and has a slight slant in its demographic, leaning towards women, but don’t let that stop you. Especially with visuals as the main focus, Pinterest is a useful tool in assembling and presenting digital content in one place and in a visually pleasing fashion.
Another aspect of Pinterest’s Board feature is the ability to divide the Board into different sections. Not only does this make it easy to organize your digital content, but it gives businesses more leeway to cover different industries. With these divisions, your not limited to cover what’s most relevant to your industry and can branch out into more niche markets.
For the max number of leads, be sure to use portrait photos and according to Curalate, stick to photos of things rather than people!
