This infographic from B2B Marketing shows that social media is obviously important within the B2B market but there’s not much strategic planning about how businesses use it.
The figures are taken from the Social Media Benchmarking Report produced by B2B Marketing from an online survey with 234 participants. They show that there is little in the way of strategy in the use of their social media, which in turn leads to little or no measurement of what may constitute successful use of social media.
It’s often seen as a daunting step to create a social media strategy, but it doesn’t have to be a lengthy document detailing your every move. It can be a simple as jotting down some ideas about why you want to use social media, what channels you are going to use, how you are going to use it and how you are going to measure whether it is working.
For example:
Why: To raise the profile of the company, drive more traffic to the website and connect with our customers.
What: We will use Facebook and Twitter, as these both have large user groups and we believe many of our customers use these channels.
How: We will post regular updates about what we are doing as a company, new developments, who we are working with and respond to comments made on our social media channels.
Measurements: Increased use of the website, increase in the number of fans and followers in a given period, amount of engagement on Facebook and Twitter. We will review which posts received the most engagements each month to help us see what is of interest to out fans and followers and how we can develop our use of social media in respond to that.
You can go into much more detail on all these points of course, and you may well do as your use of social media develops, but even this is better than many business appear to have. Scary!
From B2B Marketing’s 2013 Social Media Benchmarking Report
