LinkedIn Tops ‘Social Media Marketing Tool’ chart | SocialExcerpts

LinkedIn Tops ‘Social Media Marketing Tool’ chart Dec 10

What are the top three social networking sites that business houses prefer for their online marketing?

Three sites win hands down, which are working way better than the rest: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, even though comparatively less popular than the other two, LinkedIn tops the chart with 72% vote by the B2B marketers only, followed by Facebook (71%) and Twitter (67%). These three social media channels form the strongest network for online marketing for most of the B2B companies.

Emerging Trends in B-to-B Social Media Marketing: Insights From the Field –

The study, based on B2B marketers on how they use social media as a part of their marketing strategy, included 577 businesses. Conducted earlier this year in March, the study also focused on the challenges businesses face during the process.

When asked to pick their most favored single social media marketing tool, most of the respondents answered in favor of LinkedIn (26%). Among this 26%, most of the B2B enterprises admitted that lead generation and increased web traffic were the most effective rewards that one can get from LinkedIn. When they were asked to choose one single channel for social marketing, the first choice of 20% B2B marketers was Facebook. They used Facebook mainly to attract their consumers’ attention, event promotion, and branding.

However, surprisingly, Twitter was far behind in this category. According to only 13% marketers, Twitter worked well for their marketing plan, while for the rest, it was not a versatile marketing tool that could work for both B2B and B2C. They reasoned that Twitter employed same marketing strategy for all businesses, irrespective of small, mid-size, or big and service-based or product-based companies. There was no specialized approach to address different enterprises in Twitter. However, some of the marketers also mentioned that Twitter was their favorite for creating virals.

Apart from these three master social media platforms, marketers used Blogging (44%), YouTube (48%), and Communities (22%). When it came to choose only one channel to promote their business online, 19% vouched for blogging and 14% voted for online communities. According to them, these two channels were perfect to engage social consumers and get feedback from them quickly.

In accordance with the study results, 70% of these companies agreed that they found lack of resources as the biggest challenge in social media marketing. One reason for this, according to some of them could be the fact that they did not employ social media analytics while implementing social media strategies. Among the rest, lack of definite ROI measurement tool, social media knowledge, and proper social media management created major concern.

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