Jun 8, 2012

New Study Analyzes B2B Social Media Tracking Efforts

At this point in the evolution of integrating technology and business, most companies know that weaving various social media outreach efforts into their plans is not exactly optional. In fact, regardless of what industry you work in, being social media friendly is an inescapable component of staying relevant and competitive. But even if they are aware of the need for effective social media strategy, the real question is this: are businesses doing enough in terms of social media? And furthermore, how diligently are they tracking the success and results of these efforts? According to a new study, in the B2B world, the answer is not diligently enough. Software company Satmetrix recently conducted a survey of 1,180 B2B professionals worldwide to gather data on this topic. The results yielded some of the following (and rather eye-opening) results:

51% of B2B companies have no social media tracking at all in place. This compared to just 22% of B2C businesses.
69% of B2B participants in the study had social media components in place, but ignored customer feedback and interaction through these channels.
Of the small percentage of B2B companies who did track social media performance, most utilized very basic, unsophisticated tactics for measuring results, such as simply counting followers and comments, rather than truly analyzing the meaning, context and impact of those figures.

So what does this study reveal overall? That, generally speaking, B2B companies still vastly drag behind their B2C counterparts in terms of adequate social media presence, and tracking the efforts they do have in place. What is clear is that there is immense, largely unexplored potential for growth for the B2B world through social media – but the key is to convince businesses of that. Perhaps studies like this will help to further stimulate this growth by illuminating companies’ present shortcomings in this area. Satmetric CEO Richard Owen had this to say: “Whilst 77 per cent of consumers post about products, 67 per cent of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity.”