Facebook as a ‘B2B’ marketing tool?

Right now, people seem to naturally separate their professional lives from their personal lives on social media, not unlike their non-cyber lives. So facebook is the destination for social interaction and Linkedin is obviously the perfect outlet for professional networking. Out of the top 200 branded fan pages on facebook, not one is marketing B2B. So is this ever likely to change?  Having said this, you wouldn’t need ‘millions’ of fans to have an effective niche market facebook fan page, so maybe there are quite a few B2B successes on Facebook that I’m not aware of. So I’m very keen to hear from our readers on this.

• As a ‘B2B’ marketer, have you or anyone you know of had success on Facebook? • Would you want to, or do you currently stay up to date with business related information on Facebook?

My personal feeling is that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. But it is so tempting to seriously consider facebook as a medium for B2B marketing, as the stats for usage in Australia are off the charts and far outweigh Linkedin. I’m not just talking about the take-up of Facebook (9 716 340 users in Australia; 57.04% of the on-line population and 45.70% of the general population), but how much time the average user spends on it and how they use it. I mean, look at the stats:

• The average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on Facebook (the only people spending that much time on Linkedin are recruiters I would have thought, and perhaps B2B sales and marketing professionals). • The average user becomes a fan of 2 Facebook Pages each month. • The average user clicks the ‘Like’ button on 9 pieces of content each month.

So with the later two stats, if you know facebook, you will know that each time someone clicks the ‘Like’ button or becomes a fan of a page, the content or the page is then broadcasted to all of their friends on facebook (the average user has 130 friends on the site).

So it’s clear that facebook is a very powerful marketing tool, but I stand by what I mentioned earlier: I feel that facebook is likely to always remain a ‘B2C’ marketing tool for businesses and Linkedin will remain by far the most effective place in the social media world to engage your audience in the B2B market. I’m no expert on facebook of course, so I would love to hear your thoughts, especially if you have some conflicting views and / or success with marketing your business to other businesses on facebook.

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