B2B Sales Leads Driven by Social Media
By Jeffrey L. Cohen
Thu, Jul 9, 2009
In a new survey entitled The Social Strategy for Driving Demand The DemandGen Report reveals that social media is driving B2B sales leads, according to the 218 sales and marketing business-to-business professionals questioned. The results indicate that early adopters of social media are generating 10-15% of all leads through online interaction on LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter and Facebook.
It is clear from the activities reported as most effective, that LinkedIn is the dominant player in B2B social media. They were joining/participating in industry groups (25%), starting conversations on industry topics (25%), answering questions on industry topics (23%), which are primarily functions of LinkedIn Groups. These activities are also happening on Twitter, but they are not threaded, or captured by default, so the nature of the groups are more tenuous. And it is harder for someone to join the discussion at a later date and review all that has been said. Facebook fan pages are still in the early stages of development for business growth, but they are more focused on brand building, since they are based around companies or organizations, rather than industries or ideas.
And even though some of these companies are beginning to see measurable results from social media, more than two-thirds of them have no set budget in place for social media, and almost half of them described their social media spending as experimental.
This inspires me to begin our own survey of SocialMediaB2B.com readers. I expect that we will be doing a more formal survey in the next few months.
Please answer the questions in the comments below, and use the corresponding number for each answer. Put any additional comments or explanation after your answers.
1. Is your company currently engaged in social media?
2. If yes, for how long?
3. If no, when do you expect to begin social media?
4. Do you have measurable results and what are they?
5. What are your 3 most effective tools?
Thanks for your participation.
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Tags: sales pipeline, survey
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Thanks for your blog post. I enjoyed reading it. Social media is big. But in business terms… we are only just starting. “2/3rds have not set budgets and 50% describe social media as experimental” is something I recognize from personal experience with clients and potential clients.
My blog is dedicated to educate businesses. Show where the wheels touch the road, examples, implementation, etc.
Just did a post on B2B Marketing fundamentals.
http://tinyurl.com/lpbxzm
As for your questions:
1. Yes
2. Since the beginning, only founded a few months ago
4. Yes – building lots of valuable relationships, seeing number of document downloads rise, readership numbers of our blogs, enquiries via Linkedin, et at
5. Blog, Linkedin, Twitter
All the best,
Michiel
Thanks for covering this topic. As more B2B companies get into the social media game and execute managed campaigns (both internally & with external partners), they should gain benefit in lead gen (as the study found). This should also boost brand credibility and by default a lift in search engine rankings through natural and optimized back link development and long-tail rankings by appropriately titled content that can rank on its own.
Answers:
1) Yes
2) 12+ months
3) N/A
4) Traffic sources from web analytics and increased organic rankings for controlled keywords & pages we’ll link to via created social media content
5) Corporate blog, Industry blog participation, LinkedIn groups/Q&A
Thanks for sharing this information. The agency I work for has been talking about how B2B companies can benefit from social media for a while now, but our clients just haven’t been convinced. I also read an interesting survey issued by Forbes and Google about social media habits of C-level execs. Turns out a large percentage of those under age 50 use social media several times a week. Since they are the ones making purchasing decisions, it makes sense for B2B businesses to go where their customers are.
There’s a link to the full survey on our blog. The post URL is http://wunderkindpr.com/blog/?p=1072
To answer your questions, I will use our biggest B2B client, because I’m sure you could care less what a PR agency is doing
1. Yes
2. They are only now beginning to formalize their approach to social media, but have had a presence for some time now.
3. We’re hoping to engage in a comprehensive digital marketing program for them within the next 18 months.
4. Nothing yet, as we are only beginning to gain traction with the idea of using social media for B2B clients.
5. Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn
This is a good post and relevant as the B2B industry continues to jump into social media.
1. Yes, very much so (http://bit.ly/191QZe)
2. Since September 2007 (http://bit.ly/lQnC2)
3. Our next phase will likely be video
4. We’re looking at a number of metrics and tools, including bit.ly, some free Twitter applications and Vocus
5. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
Allan Schoenberg
CME Group – A CME, CBOT, NYMEX company
@allanschoenberg
@CMEGroup