How B2B Companies Communicate on Social Media
How do B2B companies communicate on social media? This question was posed by the PR agency ALTHALLER communication to nearly 800 companies across the DACH region. The study, now in its 12th year, provides impressive data and highlights interesting trends over time.
This year's study again yields fascinating results that we don't want to keep from you. Here, we've summarized some of the key insights:
The share of B2B companies using social media has stagnated for 3 years.
Before 2020, the number of B2B companies using social media for communication steadily increased, with only minor setbacks. This trend was likely noticeable to any social media user on various platforms. However, since 2020, this percentage has remained constant at just over 95%.
The percentages in Germany (95.8%) and Austria (95.6%) are nearly identical, with only a slight deviation in Switzerland at 94.4%. It's always surprising to me that many companies are still not present on social media, despite the clear benefits.
What are the reasons for the lack of social media use in the B2B sector?
The top reason by far is the lack of proof that social media activities contribute to business success. Half of the non-users cited this as their reason. The third most common reason is the belief that social media performance cannot be measured. Clearly, measurability plays a significant role in the decision to maintain a social media presence.
Indeed, depending on the goal, it can be challenging to measure success, especially if it cannot be quantified with hard numbers. However, it is always possible to measure performance. First, consider the goals you need to set in social media to support achieving business objectives. From there, you can derive actions and set up an effective analytics framework. This often turns out to be simpler than initially expected.How exactly, we've described here.
The second most common reason is the high time investment required. This is seen as a barrier by about a third of B2B companies. The time factor is also linked to measurability. If it's seemingly impossible to measure how successful social media efforts are, it's also hard to justify investing time in this area. However, if you find the right strategy and build a successful account, the time spent is certainly worthwhile.
There are numerous strategies to significantly reduce the necessary time investment. For example, you can schedule content creation days where you produce and create content for the coming weeks. This way, a larger time investment only occurs at intervals of several weeks. Additionally, created content can be reused multiple times. A podcast interview, for example, can be used for the podcast platform, for one or more posts, and for numerous short videos. The same goes for interviews or webinars. This creates a lot of content without needing extra production.
Which platforms are B2B communicators active on?
It's hardly surprising that LinkedIn leads this ranking by a wide margin. It is THE platform for B2B communication and offers the right target audience. Facebook and Instagram follow in second and third place. In the B2B sector, Facebook still seems to play a significant role. This is likely because the generation of decision-makers in companies also constitutes a large part of META's Facebook active users. The number one target group in B2B social media presence is new customers, followed closely by existing customers.
This is also one of the reasons why very young platforms like TikTok or Snapchat have so far received little attention in the B2B world.
Companies primarily rely on paid content
More than half of the respondents do not rely solely on their organic reach but also use ads and sponsored posts. This way, companies can reach significantly more users and tap into new target groups. Corporate accounts are often algorithmically disadvantaged compared to private profiles, so reach can often only be increased with a budget.
B2B players typically allocate up to 40% of their total social media budget to paid media. For a quarter of the companies, up to 65% of the budget goes into this area.
These are just small excerpts from the insights the paper provides. You can find the entire paper available for download online. I have linked it below the blog post. It's definitely worth a look! I'm curious to see what learnings you can draw from it 😊
Sarah Amler
Digital Process & Marketing Manager
Sarah was responsible for performance marketing, social media activities and digital onboarding in our software at aclipp.