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Differences Between B2B and B2C Social Media Marketing

Most social media marketing is the online equivalent of a billboard – something that people scroll past on the way to the content that they actually came to the site to see. But then again, there are exceptions.

Remember the ALS Association’s Ice Bucket Challenge that flooded your Facebook feed a few years ago? With $115 million donated through the Challenge during an 8-week period in 2014, that social media marketing campaign can be considered one of the most successful in marketing history. The key to that campaigns’ success was engagement. The Ice Bucket Challenge prompted action and it got people talking.

Your social media #marketing strategy? Simple: engagement.

In order to catch people’s attention, your social content has to be engaging for your potential audience. And while a 2012 study conducted by Forbes showed that 78% of respondents indicated that company posts on social media impact their purchases, not all industries are equal when it comes to the results they can expect from social media marketing. Engagement ratios, audience sizes, and follower growth rates vary across the board.

Social Media Guidelines for B2B Companies

First, let’s address a few points that often come up when we’re working with B2B companies on their social marketing strategy:

B2B social media audiences, and thus the potential for engagement, will be smaller. It’s the rare B2B company that has as many customers as Coke or Apple, so you shouldn’t expect millions of likes and shares when posting content. Your goal should be to reach the right people.
B2B social media interactions are generally a long way from becoming sales leads. The size of most B2B purchases means that there will generally be many steps in your target audience’s purchase evaluation, which means that “click to buy” type offers will fall on deaf ears.
B2B audiences lean more toward instructional or problem solving content. Most of the time, B2B audiences are looking for training, education, or help with a problem that just landed on their desk. So, as much as you might want to post humorous blogs, this type of content likely won’t perform well for your business.

Let’s dig a little deeper into our last point. Social media tracking software provider TrackMaven conducted research in order to highlight differences among B2B industries. Based on their results, we can conclude some key points about various industries:

Most engaging: Biotech, financial services, and engineering. These industries have mastered engagement, likely due to a combination of healthy debates and problem-solving content that is perfect for their audiences.
Least engaging: Software. The software industry actually has a high audience growth rate, but its content strategy clearly leaves its users wanting more. Why? Most likely, software falls into the category of services like utilities that customers generally only think about when something goes wrong. The odds of them choosing to interact with, for example, a payroll services vendor for anything other than a complaint are minimal.
Lowest audience growth rates: Motor vehicles and parts. At around 35% annual follower growth, this industry has the lowest audience growth rates of all the B2B industries observed. It can be argued that, for these industries a basic listening and informational presence could be enough.

B2B Tip: Maintain a LinkedIn presence but engage on Instagram. LinkedIn is used by 94% of B2B marketers, and most B2B companies have much larger followings on LinkedIn compared to any other social media channel. But, when you look at content engagement, Instagram takes the cake. B2B brands get 20 times more engagement on Instagram than LinkedIn.

B2B with a brilliant social media strategy: Intel

Intel faces a common B2B issue in that it has no direct contact with the users who ultimately buy its products. In an effort to make a greater connection with users, Intel has mastered social media by directly engaging its followers on multiple platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. According to Simply Measured, Intel’s social audience once grew by 175,000 people in a single month.

Intel’s secret? The company created conversations around a wide variety of content ranging from jokes about technology, to introducing new products or special offers, to participating in movements like the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign.

Social Media Guidelines for B2C Industries

As we did on the B2B side, we’re going to address a few common questions that we hear from B2C companies first.

Recommendations, Likes, and Ratings Do Have an Effect on Your Business: Word of mouth has been one of the most popular marketing tools since long before the internet, and the same holds true on social media. A recent study found that positive recommendations will boost consumer’s willingness to pay by 9.5%, while negative reviews will lower that same figure by 11%.
The Higher Your Price, the Farther You Are From Sale: A study by Western Kentucky University found that consumers make snap decisions for purchases under $20 advertised on social media, but the larger the purchase price, the longer they took to consider the decision.
It’s Impossible to Manufacture Consumer Passion: As we’ll see in TrackMaven’s B2C social media data below, industries that have little natural connection with their audiences struggle with consumer engagement.

Most engaging: The automaker industry is the model industry for engagement, which likely reflects the extreme enthusiasm its audience has for its products.
Best audience growth rates: Hospitality is in the sweet spot for follower growth. Given the industry’s intense focus on customer responsiveness and regular offers of deals, consumers likely see a direct tangible benefit of following these types of companies.
Least engaging: Telco, retailers, and consumer products. Not only do these industries have low engagement ratios, but their follower growth is lacking as well. In fact, food & beverage actually has negative follower growth (-.06%).These industries generally fall into the area where it can be extremely difficult to manufacture consumer passion for something like their phone service or toothpaste. Companies in these industries may choose to engage largely through coupons and discounts, rather than attempts at more significant engagement.

B2C Tip: Focus on creating casual, yet compelling content that speaks to your brand values. The goal of B2C social media marketing is typically to create brand awareness, not lead generation or direct transactions. Humorous, exciting graphics and visuals can help your campaigns go viral.

B2C with a brilliant social media strategy: GoPro

GoPro’s social media marketing and advertisements nearly all feature user-generated content. This strategy is not only affordable, but effective. GoPro’s YouTube channel alone has over 4 million subscribers driven by its passionate community.

Looking for more tips and trips on social media? Why not contact Young Marketing Consulting to discuss your needs?

August 10, 2016/by Tim Young

How to Monitor Social Media Analytics

Social Media

Social media was made to be monitored.

Social media is, at its heart, an ongoing conversation with your customers. And to help them better understand their audience’s behavior, savvy marketers have turned to social media analytics. Ultimately, social media analytics are your guide to creating a successful social media strategy. Without monitoring analytics, you’re essentially playing a guessing game when it comes to what content is working and what is not. But before discussing what tools you should be using for social data, let’s discuss the most important social metrics you should be monitoring on a weekly basis.

Three social media metrics that matter:

Impressions: Impressions represent a social media platform’s best guess at the number of unique individuals who saw your content. Impressions are easy to calculate and monitor, but come with varying degrees of accuracy. For example, impressions on YouTube represent the number of times someone has clicked play on that video in YouTube, and are relatively accurate. Twitter will show the number of impressions one of your tweets received simply by clicking “View tweet activity” on the tweet, while Facebook and LinkedIn provide impression statistics in similar fashion next to each post. However, if you think of how quickly you scroll through your own feed, you’ll understand that these impressions do not necessarily indicate that someone has actually seen your content. Which brings us to….
Engagement: Engagement measures how your audience interacts with your content, and tracks interactions like shares, comments, likes, and retweets. Different interactions may have varying degrees of importance to your business. For example, a share on Facebook may be more important than a like on LinkedIn, depending on your marketing goals. And thousands of retweets by people outside of your target audience won’t necessarily help you sell anything. Which brings us to the most important metric of all.
Conversions: Social media conversions occur when someone takes action to qualify themselves, either through a sale or by indicating interest in a potential purchase. The action that specifically constitutes a conversion will differ across social media marketing campaigns, but a few examples are sharing content, filling out a form, clicking through to your website, signing up for a coupon, or making a purchase. Ultimately, conversions are your most important metric, but many marketers are surprised to learn that social conversions can be difficult to come by. This is one of the reasons why social media analytics have become so important.

Conversions are the only social media metric that matters. Everything else is window-dressing.

Now that you know what social media metrics matter, let’s talk about what tools you should be using to monitor these metrics. Below, we’ve narrowed down what we believe to be the top social media measurement tools of 2016.

2016’s Top Social Media Analytics Tools:

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to measure the effectiveness of your social activity. And even better, it’s free! The acquisition overview report on Google Analytics shows how many people clicking through to your website have come from social traffic. Digging more deeply into the Behavior tab lets you see what content on your site is most popular, while looking at referral traffic will show you where your content is being shared. To help keep your social momentum up, it’s a good idea to have social plugin buttons on your pages (such as the Facebook “Share” button) to help your visitors share your content.

how-to-monitor-social-media-analytics-google-analytics

Google Analytic’s overview report provides conversion value based on social traffic

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another widely successful social media management platform, and for good reason. Hootsuite tracks engagement and conversions from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, but takes things a step further by adding demographic detail and “sentiment” to the conversation. If you need to know who’s talking about your company on social media in the moment and whether or not their satisfied or upset, Hootsuite is a great tool

How to Monitor Social Media Analytics - Hootsuite

A quick look at what your Hootsuite dashboard may look like

3. Klout

Klout approaches social media from a slightly different perspective, having developed its own social media metric (Klout, of course) that attempts to quantify your brand’s influence on the social media platforms you use. This influence score is graded out of 100 based on other users’ engagement with your content, and serves as a good proxy to measure how effective of a thought leader your business is becoming.

July 13, 2016/by Tim Young

Six Social Media Best Practices for 2016 – Part 1

Social Media

If you want to market to an audience in 2016, you’ll find them on social media. Facebook’s user base is now larger than the population of China, Instagram grew 50% in 9 months, LinkedIn has nearly 400 million members, and it seems that a new site or app pops up every day that demands our audience’s attention. With so many options and networks to choose from, the sheer scale of social media marketing can overwhelm marketers. But a coherent social media marketing strategy is essential to an effective digital marketing campaign, and social networks are growing ever more savvy about helping marketers reach their audiences. So, with hope on the horizon, let’s start by looking at what some of the most popular social media sites are, and what they aren’t.

The first thing to keep in mind when marketing on social media is that each social medial platform began with unique functionality that evolved to drive different forms of discussion. Twitter, for example, is a way for customers to have direct, public conversations with a brand (or anyone). But if you want more involved professional discussions, you may need to head to Google+ or LinkedIn. According to the Pew Research Center, LinkedIn’s users are more likely to be aged 30-64 than 18-29. On the other hand, Facebook and Instagram are more popular among younger generations and are much more visual modes of communicating.

So, as we review the best practices for social media marketing below, keep in mind that the best social strategies adapt to their channel. If you have any questions or would like to a review of your social media strategy, please don’t hesitate to contact Young Marketing Consulting.

Facebook Best Practices

Facebook is taking more and more steps to keep users on the Facebook platform by autoplaying videos and housing news articles within its site, rather than having visitors click away to other sites. These efforts make things tricky for marketers looking to drive traffic from Facebook, but you do have some good options:

Ramp up your organic Facebook activity: there’s still no substitute for a post that goes viral, so make sure that you’re regularly posting engaging content and responding to users who interact with your posts to build your community. Be friendly and personable, and remember that Facebook is primarily a visual medium. The platform currently has more video views than YouTube, so the more images and videos you’re posting the better. If you’re struggling for topics, try how-tos, “listicles,” comparisons/quizzes, or just plain humor. Many Facebook users also wear their hearts on their sleeves, so cause advocacy can work well in this space also.
Use Facebook’s advertising and post-boosting tools: Facebook is doing more than ever to integrate advertising within its platform, and if you haven’t yet experimented with its targeting capabilities now would be a good time. Facebook allows strong targeting based on user interests, and its advertising cost-per-click rates are some of the more affordable of the various PPC advertising channels. While conversion rates from social media ads tend to be lower, you’ll at the very least know that you’re getting your advertising in front of the right audience.

Twitter Best Practices

Twitter is still an evolving social media platform. At its best, Twitter allows for lively conversations among diverse groups, while giving a unique form of direct access to brands and individuals that would not otherwise be possible. Here are two best practice tips for Twitter from the team:

Engage with influencers on an individual level: One thing that’s easy to forget in the Twitterverse is that there’s a human being behind the computer screen who’s reading and reacting to what you’re saying. The best analogy for Twitter is that it’s like a cocktail party – you don’t want to stand in the corner shouting to yourself, you want to reach out to people, ask them questions, help them out when you can. And by doing so, you’ll begin to build your own influence. Directly tag people and respond to them in a timely manner – etiquette matters in the online world.
Keep up with hashtags: Hashtags let everyone chime in to a single conversation, and are great tools to use when you don’t have large numbers of followers. They’ll also show you trending topics that you’d like to be involved in that you can take advantage of in the real world as well. Hashtags.org is a good resource to identify popular and trending hashtags. A few other words of wisdom on Twitter – try posting in afternoons and later in the week, and include pictures when you can. Keep your conversations natural, and don’t force a sales message into a discussion. It’s the quickest way to see yourself blocked.

LinkedIn Best Practices

LinkedIn is the most popular “professional” social network in the U.S., and the conversations you’ll find here are very much geared toward testing ideas and asking for advice on business topics. For this reason, it’s a much better B2B marketing tool than any other social network. Here are a few tips for maximizing your reach on LinkedIn:

Engage in discussion groups: Discussion groups are some of the lesser-known features of LinkedIn but are a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Adding quality responses to industry-specific discussion groups will add to your credibility and build your audience among those who don’t know you. The topics will also show up in searches as well, which never hurts. One thing you don’t want to do is hit LinkedIn with heavy sales messages. LinkedIn users are savvy business people; the hard social media sell will turn them off. By the same token, company posts are not the best places to engage in discussions.
Remember that your company is a collection of individuals: People follow other people, not companies. Your company officers should be posting on LinkedIn and tagging your company or promoting those posts. In addition, your CEO or spokesperson should be regularly commenting on news, engaging in discussions, etc. The more conversations you can get your teams involved in, the greater your reach will extend throughout the platform.

We hope that these social media best practices help set you up for success in 2016 and beyond. Next week, we’ll cover some of the “newer” social media platforms out there: YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and more!

January 12, 2016/by Tim Young

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