eMarketer reports that business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketers actively adopted social media in 2009. According to research from Business.com, however, the two types of marketers have very different social site usage patterns.
The market study found that those B2B companies already using social media were much more active in the space than their B2C counterparts -- especially microblogging, discussions on third-party sites, blogging and monitoring company mentions.
B2Cs were ahead in a few areas -- such as social media advertising, user ratings and reviews, and online communities for target customers.
B2B firms were more likely overall to maintain a social network profile. They were also managing profiles across more social sites and were significantly more likely to be present on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
In contrast, B2C companies were more likely to use Facebook and MySpace.
B2B was more active in measuring most social success metrics as well. B2C firms we more likely to use revenues to gauge their efforts. More B2Bs were looking at Web traffic, brand awareness, and prospect lead quality and volume.
Web traffic was the top metric for both types of company, however.
B2B firms used Twitter search more (60 percent) to monitor mentions of their company or brand, compared with 35 percent of B2C firms. Google Alerts was slightly smaller -- 59 percent of B2Bs versus 40 percent of B2Cs. B2C firms were slightly more likely (61 percent) to monitor mentions via Google search, compared to 60 percent of B2B firms.
