Right now, people seem to naturally separate their professional lives from their personal lives on social media, not unlike their non-cyber lives. So facebook is the destination for social interaction and Linkedin is obviously the perfect outlet for professional networking. Out of the top 200 branded fan pages on facebook, not one is marketing B2B. So is this ever likely to change? Having said this, you wouldn’t need ‘millions’ of fans to have an effective niche market facebook fan page, so maybe there are quite a few B2B successes on Facebook that I’m not aware of. So I’m very keen to hear from our readers on this.
• As a ‘B2B’ marketer, have you or anyone you know of had success on Facebook?
• Would you want to, or do you currently stay up to date with business related information on Facebook?
My personal feeling is that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. But it is so tempting to seriously consider facebook as a medium for B2B marketing, as the stats for usage in Australia are off the charts and far outweigh Linkedin. I’m not just talking about the take-up of Facebook (9 716 340 users in Australia; 57.04% of the on-line population and 45.70% of the general population), but how much time the average user spends on it and how they use it. I mean, look at the stats:
• The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook (the only people spending that much time on Linkedin are recruiters I would have thought, and perhaps B2B sales and marketing professionals).
• The average user becomes a fan of 2 Facebook Pages each month.
• The average user clicks the ‘Like’ button on 9 pieces of content each month.
So with the later two stats, if you know facebook, you will know that each time someone clicks the ‘Like’ button or becomes a fan of a page, the content or the page is then broadcasted to all of their friends on facebook (the average user has 130 friends on the site).
So it’s clear that facebook is a very powerful marketing tool, but I stand by what I mentioned earlier: I feel that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. I’m no expert on facebook of course, so I would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have some conflicting views and / or success with marketing your business to other businesses on facebook.
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Facebook as a ‘B2B’ marketing tool?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Karalyn Brown. Karalyn Brown said: RT @harlow_group Facebook as a ‘B2B’ marketing tool? – Out of the top 200 branded fan pages on facebook, not one is … http://ow.ly/1aiW6B [...]
Steve
Good article.
It is hard for B2B to know the what, when where and how of social networking. Being a small business and trying measure the return on investment from social networking is even harder.
Understanding who your customer is and how they interact with social networking is crucial to gaining value for the time investment required for social media. Articles like this help, many thanks.
Hi Steve,
Thais for posting this, I can see where you are coming from but am afraid I very much have an opposing view. There are several very good examples for B2B on Facebook, it’s just not easy to find them as they will never be popular, after all how many B2B advertising campaigns feature in the top 200 brand ad campaigns? If we are not in their market they won’t reach us with the message as this is the beat of digital marketing done well. Have a look at what Allianz do they have a great Facebook group that is aimed at the B2B side of their business.
I get asked a lot by clients about Facebook and always say the same thing (I blogged on this recently here (http://bit.ly/InitioFbB2B). This is the most popular comma nication channel at the moment, your potential clients and current clients are there already and if you don’t join them then you will miss out a good proportion of your total reach.
Its not whether we agree with it or not, it’s like the old days when clients would ask if they should have a website or not. Also if as a company you have chosen to use any other social channel then you have already realised the need to be seen on these channels so you should be on all of them.
Maybe I will be proved wrong, I just think it’s there and our clients are, so we should be.
Thanks for the blog, nice to have a good opinion to discuss.
H
I don’t think there is any one right answer. I think for some B2B companies – if they are in the low cost tech space or commoditised business products/services then I’d argue they should have a foot in both the LinkedIn and Facebook camps.
Further, I also see a lot of value in B2C companies having a solid footprint on LinkedIn. Unfortunately many who talk about social media forget that social isn’t just forward facing. You’ve got to consider the demands of engaging effectively with suppliers, partners, Government, and industry – and in many cases you won’t be able to do this via Facebook.
You’ve got to stop treating this as black and white and start looking at this from an enterprise perspective – where do we need to be so as to connect to the various communities that collide with our brand/company