B2B marketers to increase social media spend 43 percent in 2010
B2B marketers intend to increase spend on social media by 43% in 2010, while overall marketing budgets remain static, a survey by US research firm Outsell has reported.
However, when asked which social media sites carried the most influence for B2B marketers, surprisingly, Facebook was considered effective by the most respondents – 51%, followed by LinkedIn – 45% and Twitter – 35%.
As eMarketer points out, this is at odds with Hubspot’s survey of lead generation amongst North American B2B marketers where 45% considered LinkedIn most effective with Facebook at 33%.
The contradiction perhaps reveals a gap between understanding that social networking is important and knowing how to implement a social media strategy in the B2B market. I’m with Hubspot, LinkedIn is definitely the better route for B2B marketers at this point, combined with Twitter.
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Good news on the social media investment front. Re: the seeming contradiction between Outsell and Hubspot, I haven’t seen the demographics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the survey participants were quite different, which could easily account for the different responses. “B2B” is so big and broad, and many social media surveys these days are filled with small consulting firms that the variances are often large. Personally, I pay little attention to the details of these studies, which I think are extremely subject to the questions and the particular respondents, and just focus more on the broad directions.
I agree with this, but do you think the older generation of business people, like those in insurance, banking, accounting would look into these webite’s and find services for thier companies. I feel they may reply on traditional methods like DM and press ads. Would love to know how to target a B2B audience through social media though…