Social media drives 15% of traffic to B2B websites

Social media sites now account for nearly 15% of referral traffic to B2B websites that have a social media presence, according to the LeadForce1 analysis of 4.4 million leads analysed over a three-month period.

LinkedIn is the top referrer, accounting for 27.1% of traffic to B2B sites, followed by Wikipedia (16.8%).

Bookmarking site Reddit (18.4%) and developer site Dzone (13.0) also feature prominently, though this is probably due to the relatively high number of tech companies included in the study.

Meanwhile, Twitter accounts for just 9.5% of referred traffic to B2B sites and Facebook 6.9%.

Visitors referred to B2B websites from LinkedIn are more interested in finding out about the people within a company rather than what the company does: The most frequently visited Web pages are “management team” pages (13.76%) and “contact us” pages (13.49%).

Visitors referred to B2B websites from Wikipedia are likely to be in the research stage of their buying decision process: The pages most visited on B2B sites are features pages (16.74%) and products pages (13.22%), followed by the about us pages (10.95%).

Most visitors referred to B2B sites from Twitter are in search of content, with blogs the most-visited pages (4.76%), followed by the “about us” section (4.0%).

Similarly, visitors referred by Facebook are primarily looking for content or company information: The “about us” page (4.0%) and blog pages (3.26%) are the most-visited pages on B2B sites, followed by “management team” pages (2.55%), “contact us” pages (1.97%), careers/jobs (1.85%), and products pages (1.11%).

Most visitors (47.8%) come to B2B sites directly by typing in the website URL, whereas 16.2% arrive via search and 5.71% via paid search. Some 30.3% of visitors arrive via referral sites—consisting of news sites, job sites, and social media.

Source: MarketingProfs