B2B businesses are companies that have to use social media as much as any other type of company. This is the platform where you are likely to reach the most people. Part of your social media strategy should be taking into account what others are doing and how they are performing. This could include hiring and Instagram growth service or even hiring someone to manage your Tailwind account.
For a long time, it was extremely difficult to know what platforms B2B companies were successful on and what you could do about it. But all that has changed and now you are going to learn more about the social media followers of the average B2B business.
The Results of the Study
A recent study from TrackMaven looked into B2B brands and their activity on social media. The overwhelming conclusion is that LinkedIn is the ultimate platform for social media among businesses. The average number of LinkedIn followers for B2B businesses is 109,000, which eclipses anything else that Facebook and Twitter has managed to accomplish.
Facebook came in a distant second with 34,000 followers and Twitter had just 18,000 followers. Instagram and Pinterest were even further behind.
This trend isn’t specific to any industry. LinkedIn is killing it across every industry. The only real difference was in the computer hardware industry, where Facebook appeared to do far better.
What Does this Mean?
For most people, there’s absolutely nothing surprising about these results. LinkedIn is the only social media network that has geared itself exclusively towards businesses. It’s no surprise that it’s doing well among its target audience. Naturally, B2B companies are going to go where their buyers are; 94% of B2B marketers now use LinkedIn.
What is surprising is how much of a lead the network has built up on its competitors. Facebook has also done better than expected, despite the fact that it has done everything possible to make doing business on its network difficult. But its success may be as a result of its one billion monthly active users than anything else.
How Should Small Businesses React?
It’s important to mention that this study only focused on big companies. Small businesses were excluded from the data. It used over 300 large B2B brands that were operating on social media in 2015 in order to compile these figures. 100 million different social media interactions were monitored.
Despite this, small businesses still have a lot to learn from the results of this study.
LinkedIn is Necessary – The biggest takeaway is that B2B businesses must use LinkedIn. It is absolutely essential and you can’t afford to sit back and ignore it. If you are not on this network, the chances are your competitors are and you are leaving money on the table. Make this one of the platforms you concentrate your resources on.
Benchmarking and Large Brands – Don’t just use larger brands in order to understand what’s going on with social media. Conduct your own surveys in your niche in order to get a clearer picture of everything that’s going on. List your top competitors and then take the numbers directly from their social media profiles. This is far easier than you might think.
Conversions Not Size – What the success of LinkedIn has shown is that size really doesn’t matter when it comes to how relevant a social media network is to you. LinkedIn is the smallest of the top three, and yet it’s dispatched its competitors with ease.
The owners of LinkedIn haven’t spent their time trying to build a huge platform just for the sake of it. They have attempted to improve the quality of that platform to ensure that people are getting real value from it and businesses treat people like humans not processes. And it appears to have paid off.
Take Action Now
Now you have looked at the numbers and studied the takeaways of this study you have to think about how you are going to react to this news. First of all, it shows how much you need to concentrate your resources on a select number of platforms.
A B2C business can afford not to be on LinkedIn, and that’s a good choice because they can better focus on networks more relevant to their industry. But as a B2B business LinkedIn should be one of two or three platforms that you spend a significant portion of your time on.
What makes LinkedIn so powerful is that you can build real relationships on it. This takes time, however, and it requires a lot of effort on your part. You have to join groups, adopt a transparent marketing strategy, and exchange messages without the view to making huge sales. It’s not like with Instagram where you can just buy Instagram likes and call it a day.
How are you going to maximize your gains from social media today?
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.