28 Awesome B2B Social Media statistics…

Below are a collection of B2B social media statistics collected from various sources covering a wide range of topics. So grab a coffee, have a read and think about that social media strategy you’ve been putting off for your business to successfully engage on a B2B basis…

Usage:

• 86% of B2B firms are using social, compared to 82% of B2C. (Source)
• B2B firms aren’t as active in their social media activity with only 32% engaging on a daily basis compared with 52% of B2C firms. (Source)
• More than half (53.5%) of marketers surveyed said they currently use social media as part of their marketing strategy. This is up from 2009, when 45.0% of marketers said they used social media for marketing. (Source)

Forecasts:

• Annual growth in US B2B online marketing spend is forecast at 8% in 2010 and is set to reach 14% by 2012. (Source)
• B2B advertising spend on social media and lead generation sites is forecast to grow at an annualized rate of 21% and 17% respectively to 2013. (Source)
• Online accounted for 7% of the B2B marketing mix in 2008. This is set to reach 12% by 2013. (Source)
• Two thirds of B2B marketers believe that online must be complemented by traditional marketing activities. (Source)
• Only 50% of B2B marketers formally analyze metrics to judge ROI – but those that do find online marketing more effective. (Source)
• B2B marketing spending on social networking sites is predicted to rise 43.3%. (Source)
• Forrester predicts B2B interactive marketing spending to reach $4.8 billion by 2014 – almost double that estimated for 2009 ($2.3 billion). (Source)
• B2B social media marketing spending will grow from just $11 million in 2009 to $54 million in 2014. (Source)
• US business-to-business (B2B) advertising and marketing spending will increase by 0.8% this year, to $129 billion. (Source)

Executive Interest:

• 36% of B2B execs surveyed said there was low executive interest in social media in their company, compared with 9% of B2C marketers who said the same. (Source)
• 46% of B2B respondents said social media was perceived as irrelevant to their company, while only 12% of consumer-oriented marketers had the same problem. (Source)

Focus:

• According to an eMarketer study, B2B online marketers focus on lead generation (38%), retention (34%) and awareness (28%).  (Source)
• The top applications for the use of social media for b2b marketers are thought leadership (59.8%), lead generation (48.9%), customer feedback (45.7%) and advertising on sites (34.7%). (Source)

Channels:

• Asked to rate the effectiveness of specific social media sites in their marketing efforts, more than one-half of respondents said that Facebook was “extremely” or “somewhat” effective. Somewhat fewer said the same of LinkedIn, and just 35% considered Twitter effective. (Source)
• In contrast, when Hubspot surveyed B2B companies in North America about lead generation through social channels, 45% rated LinkedIn effective, compared with just 33% who said the same of Facebook. (Source)
• Methods generating the highest B2B ROI are topped by advertisers’ own websites, followed by conferences, exhibitions and trade shows; direct mail; search engine keywords; and e-marketing/e-newsletters. (Source)
• B2B advertisers see cross-media marketing as most effective; 78% combine three or more major marketing methods. (Source)

Measurement:

• 34% of B2B marketers said they were not measuring social success at all versus just 10% of B2C respondents. (Source)
• Website traffic, brand awareness, engagement with prospects and engagement with customers are the leading metrics used to measure the success of social media for B2B companies. (Source)

Resource Allocation:

• 60% of B2B firms have no staff dedicated to social media compared with 54% of B2C players. (Source)
• Just 10% of B2B firms use outside agencies or consultants compared with 28% of B2C firms. (Source)

Budgets:

• B2B product marketers were spending an average of 3.4% of their marketing budgets on social media in February 2010, and B2B services marketers were spending 6.5%. Respondents expected those proportions to reach 7.4% and 11%, respectively, over the next year. (Source)
• B2B marketing spending on social networking sites is predicted to rise 43.3% in 2010. (Source)
• 39.2% of B2B marketers say they plan to boost their marketing budgets in 2010, 47.5% plan to keep them flat; and 13.3% plan to decrease them.  Among those that plan to increase budgets, 11.1% plan to raise them by more than 30%; 18.8% plan to increase them between 20% and 29%; 31.1% plan increases between 10% and 19%; and 39.0% plan to increase budgets less than 10%. (Source)
• Within online marketing, the top areas that will see spending increases include Web site development (70.7% plan increases), email marketing (68.6%), search marketing (62.3%), social media (60.3%), video (50.7%) and webcasts (46.0%) (Source)

Social Media: 8 New Ways to Make Waves

* Message shorter. There is one big “missing” in the use of social media, says Twitter co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey. Too many groups get their messaging wrong, he says. “You’re more successful if you focus on simplifying your message,” he told NCVS conferees. “Make sure the message is in as few words as possible.”

* Get analytical. Many nonprofits, social enterprises and social service organizations don’t have a good sense of analytics, Twitter’s Dorsey adds. “Ask yourself: Where are we today? Where do we mark today and where do we plan to go? If you don’t know where you’re coming from or going to, it’s hard to figure out if anything is actually moving or not inside your organization. On the outside, your members and supporters want status updates. They want to know — before they throw money over the wall — that you’re making progress. It’s very, very important to constantly show a sense of momentum and a sense of movement. It can be as simple as updating people in a simple message.”

* Compete harder. Sure, collaboration is all the buzz and today’s holy grail. But Joe Rospars, a founder of Blue State Digital and on the social media team that put President Obama in the White House, says that for him, two questions come into play for organizations having trouble mobilizing people — especially “during these in-between times between crises and big moments.” His advice? Make sure you’re adequately communicating “not only the reasons people should be involved in your cause — but also why people should choose your organization over another fighting for the same cause.” Rospars says most groups get the first part right but miss the second.

* Work harder. Your supporters want to help but they don’t want to phone it in — nor want you to do that, either. “Oftentimes, signing a petition isn’t enough to ask,” says Rospars. For some people, it’s too insignificant. People know when their time is being wasted, Rospars says — “when things are being phoned in by the staff who aren’t thinking about things very deeply.” Rospars says if you lose your enthusiasm, so will the people you’re trying to engage. “Even on the worst, most busy days, it pays to remember that your responsibility is to the people out there who only have an hour to give,” Rospars adds. “Don’t waste their time. Make it worthwhile. People will know the difference if you’re passionate and urgent and authentic about engaging them.”

* Get clear on ROI. “The term, ROI, is widely misused,” says social media marketing strategist Paul Gillen. “It’s a financial metric. It’s not a number of followers, or number of page views, or number of unique visitors. Those things are results, not returns. A return is a financial metric.” But don’t despair. According to Gillen, anything that can be expressed as a result can be expressed as a financial metric. Next time you’re asked what the value is of raising your organization’s visibility, do a standard marketing study called a “lift study,” Gillen says. “If you have historical data that says that the last time your organization’s visibility increased by 5 percentage points, the amount of giving increased 20 percentage points, then that is an ROI,” Gillen says. “You can say that if this social media campaign to boost visibility succeeds in raising your visibility by 5 percentage points as determined by a lift study, then you can expect X amount of return for each speaking engagement. It’s all in the math.”

* Measure the dollar value of your donors. To see how much money a member or a donor is worth over the course of their lifetimes, says Gillen, take the total value of giving to your organization in a year and divide it by the total number of members/donors during that same time period. “If you can draw X number of new members as a result of a social media campaign, you can say that the campaign will yield a specific lifetime value,” Gillen says. “When you start to think in those terms, ROI becomes much easier to forecast.”

* Measure the dollar value of your followers. Look at the total number of visits to your Web site per tweet stream over a given period, then look at the percentage of those visitors that converted into donors and the value of their donations over any given amount of time. Says Gillen: “Move all of that back up the spreadsheet and see that the value of a follower is, let’s say, 2.5 cents. It’s a matter of mapping the numbers that you use to see the impact they have on your bottom line.”

* Push or pull leaders into the pool. Don’t keep social media in a corner. Make it everybody’s business, starting at the top. According to Twitter’s Dorsey, organizational leaders need to be participating in social media use every day, to make it a part of the culture. “Your leader will make mistakes and will learn from them but what’s most significant is that he or she is sharing the learning curve and the lessons throughout the organization,” Dorsey says. “Assigning someone else to look at social media can only go so far; it won’t speak to the spirit of what your organization is trying to bring to the world.” Dorsey also said that leaders must be willing to try new things themselves, both in their personal lives and in their organizational leadership. “It’s an attitude and a willingness to jump in that makes all the difference,” says Dorsey. “A leader’s passion is clear and contagious. Don’t shut out the leader or underestimate his or her power, both outside and inside the organization.”