Getting B2B Marketers on Board the Social Bandwagon

Manoj Jasra - Friday, May 21, 2010 0 Comments

Guest Post: Parker Trewin, Director of Marketing Communication - Genius.com

The success of social media in the B2C space is well documented, with standouts including Ford and @comcastcares, but B2B success is less well documented.

Recent surveys by Forrester, SiriusDecisions and others indicate that up to 90 percent of buyers are using social media to help them in their purchasing decisions but a new report by Genius.com and BtoB Magazine found that B2B marketers are lagging behind their B2C counterparts and their buyers in terms of adoption. 49 percent of B2B marketers do not use Twitter, 50 percent don’t blog, 42 percent don’t use Facebook, and perhaps most surprising, 25 percent don’t use LinkedIn. Even more alarming is data reported by eMarketer that indicates that only 16 percent of companies are tracking ROI from their social media efforts.

What’s behind the numbers is probably a mix of economic, staffing and resource pressures combined with a lack of widely-used measurement tools to track and gauge ROI from these social efforts. The B2B challenge is much more complex: while it’s easy to show the immediate payback from Pizza Hut coupons offered on Twitter, it’s hard to show social media’s contribution to a multi-step sales process that can take months to complete. Yet the proof is there. Beyond sentiment and awareness measures which are directional, companies have a wide range of tools, including URL shorteners like Genius URLs, budurl or Twitter clients like CoTweet, which integrates click-through data. These tools allow companies to more effectively measure interest and track these conversations from the cloud to the top of the funnel and into a deal.

As buyers are looking to their internet and their peers for new ways to buy, B2B marketers must engage and track these conversations on social channels if they hope to prove social’s influence to B2B’s top line and marketing’s contribution to the top brass.