The B2B Social Media Marketing Series is supported by IDG Enterprise. Understand how IT decision-makers are accessing information and how you can engage them with successful multi-channel programs. Learn more.
Promoting a brand through social media is no longer unique or novel — it’s simply the norm. From Starbucks to taco trucks, the use of social tools like Facebook (
) and Twitter (
) to spread awareness about a business to customers is widespread because that’s where brands find prospective customers and engage with existing patrons. But what about the use of social media between businesses?
Business-to-business (B2B) social media is a different animal. B2B and enterprise companies aren’t trying to convert millions of individual consumers into customers — they’re trying to convince a smaller group of companies with bigger budgets to buy their products or services. Social media’s power to spread a message across the web isn’t as relevant.
That doesn’t mean social media doesn’t have a place in the B2B world, though. On the contrary, a lot of these companies have found social media to be extremely useful in generating leads, performing market research and establishing themselves as thought leaders.
We’ve already written about ways to use social media for the enterprise, but now we want to explore a different topic: how B2B companies will use social media in the future. To do that though, we need to explore the current state of social media in the enterprise.
