Facebook for B2B – are there any benefits?

The benefits of Facebook for communicating messages to consumer are clear. Social Media by its very nature affords word of mouth advertising to marketers on a scale never seen before. B2B marketing, although based on similar principles to B2C marketing, in practice, is wholly different.

 Facebook is seen as a personal, friend based channel while LinkedIn, being professionally focused, tends to be where most B2B companies do their social media engagement. But are they missing a trick? How can, and why should, B2B company engage on Facebook?

Before a B2B company can reap any benefits from a Facebook presence they have to know what they want out of it, and what they are willing to put in. You can build up a big fan base by advertising and “become a fan” campaigns only – but how long this would sustain is questionable.

 It is almost expected now that companies will have a Facebook page, regardless of whether or not it has lots of fans, likes or is frequently updated. A quick glance at B2B focused magazines like HSJ, Brand Republic or Media Week show how weak their Facebook presence is.  A further examination of their pages shows the main reason why, most messages are push messages.  Push messages are effectively ignored within a social media context. This means there is very little on the pages for an organic audience to latch onto. Unless this big B2B brands were considering doing Facebook Fan campaigns or sponsored contextual advertising, little would come from these pages.  Doing Facebook because you feel you have to shows in your pages – in fact, any professional coming to a push message Facebook page such as the above may be turned off the whole brand because of it.

 People who interact on Facebook tend to do so as a private individual. They go there to virtually “meet up” with friends, old and new, catch up on the news in their circle and generally have a good old nosy. They are not, it would seem, in professional mode. Recent privacy concerns mean many Facebook users do not list their profession, employer or even add work friends.  Therefore for B2B marketers, it is difficult to find their audience, let alone engage with them. This poses a significant barrier to Facebook marketing. Again, it can be overcome by “become a fan” or contextual advertising campaigns that would root out the few who can be targeted but it may make it difficult to realise the potential of your organic audience.

 Growing an organic audience, i.e. without advertising, would be difficult to do unless you have a Facebook prone audience elsewhere that you can inform via pre-existing communication routes such as email newsletters or magazines. Even then, you have to give them a reason why they should go to your Facebook page. Your interactions through this channel need to be differentiated from everything else you do in order for it to add value to your audience. For B2B marketers, with relatively small audiences this may be difficult to do.  

 For B2B marketers, Facebook does present real opportunities but as with all marketing, it depends on what your end goals are as to whether the opportunities are worth the effort. A bad presence on Facebook may be more detrimental to your brand than none at all. With easier, lower hanging fruit available to B2B marketers perhaps Facebook should be left for the B2C marketers.