Social Strategy for B2B 2013

Social Strategy for B2B in 2013

Twitter is the B2B social media platform of choice, favoured by 85% of B2B brands. Twitter ranks ahead of LinkedIn at 82%, YouTube at 77%, and Facebook at 71%. Stats brought to my attention by a recent Mediabistro article “The State of B2B Social Media 2013” by Shea Bennett. Here’s what social strategy for B2B in 2013 will look like…

These are the findings from B2B Marketing in their 2013 Social Media Benchmarking Report. The report is designed to give insight on key social media trends and activities in B2B organizations and is based on an online survey conducted in January 2013. The report noted that while driving traffic to their website was the primary goal for B2B marketers using social, 61% described their social marketing as “ad-hoc”.

In terms of being able to calculate social media ROI, 44% said they were able to calculate it “rarely or not at all”, with only 9% being able to successfully do this “most of the time.”

Twitter is still growing in popularity with marketers, continuing to be the fastest growing social platform. But time and time again we see this:  the marketing that is happening is primarily unfocused, and non-strategic. What can we expect when only 28% of marketers have a defined social strategy? So, although Twitter ranked highest in “most popular platform,” it’s clear that for many companies, social strategy is lacking. This is a pretty common trend that we’re seeing, in social media and in email campaigns – marketers are not devoting enough resources to strategy. The state of social media marketing is definitely maturing, but marketers are behind the curb in terms of adapting to these changes.

Jaclyn Bickerton, Social Media, Raven5 Ltd, Oakville & Toronto Ontario, May 2013

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