Survey shows B2B and B2C social media are less different than you'd expect

American agency Clutch conducted an interesting survey that shows a remarkable similarity between the social media channels used by B2B and B2C marketers. The graph below shows the number of marketers using each of the main social media channels in their campaigns:

The differences between the two disciplines are remarkably small, and even LinkedIn has less than a 10% difference in adoption between B2B and B2C campaigns. This is surprising as you’d expect LinkedIn to be much more of a B2B social media platform than for consumer. Equally Facebook shows only a 2% difference: although Facebook is clearly a channel that will perform for B2B, you’d expect that the general principle that “Facebook is where people choose to go to waste time” would mean that there was a more significant skewing of this channel to consumer marketing.

There are a number of possible reasons for this. Certainly there is some truth that all B2B customers are consumers, so there should be some similarity in the approach, but I’d suspect that some of the similarity is also accounted for by the cross-posting of content from one channel to several others.

Best Social Media Content

The survey also asked what content performs best on social media (this covers both business and consumer audiences). Not surprisingly, the most effective is video. We were, however, interested to see a real lack of enthusiasm for infographics: there are still a lot of marketers who believe inforgraphics are great content for social media. Although we don’t believe that the results of the survey mean that it’s a waste of time creating an infographic, it clearly shows that simply creating one does not guarantee social engagement, particularly if it’s not of the highest quality.

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