Business to Business Key Findings: January 2013
| B2B Content Marketers Mixing It Up with Social Media Sites |
B2B Content Marketers Mixing It Up with Social Media Sites
B2B marketers appear to be warming up to the use of social media. In its annual B2B marketing survey, the Content Management Institute and MarketingProfs found that B2B marketers increased their use of social media to distribute content in 2012 to 87%, up from 74% in 2011. In addition,B2B marketers also began venturing into using a more diverse mix of social media channels. The usual social-media suspects made the top four: Linkedin was the favorite social media site of choice among 83% of B2B marketers distributing content; last year’s favorite, Twitter, was second, at 80%; and Facebook, third, at 80%. Google+ made a big jump to 39% last year from 13% in 2011. But the big news was social image sharing site Pinterest, which debuted in this year’s survey with a surprisingly 26%. Slideshare came in a 23%, Vimeo, 12%, Flickr and StumbleUpon at 10%. Four Square, Instagram, Tumblr and Quora all came in under 8% each. Now, the biggest challenge facing B2B marketers (64%) in the area of content marketing appears to be producing enough content to spread across all those social media channels. ContentMarketingInsitute.com
Bullets
- 75 percent of business to business companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement. 56 percent of companies that quantify social media engagement only count comments and followers. (http://goo.gl/JTpdC)
- According to Themailhaus.wordpress.com, 47% of U.S. households read catalogs, and only 19% discard them without reading. The amount of customers who trust direct mail over email has actually grown from 29% in 2008 to 36% in 2012. (http://goo.gl/Iv5Xz)
- The digital video audience is growing in both number and time spent viewing content. The latest eMarketer projection shows that by 2014, nearly three-quarters of all US internet users will watch video online at least once per month. Much of the content being viewed is increasingly ad-supported, which puts an ever-greater focus on the metrics used to measure results. (http://goo.gl/IwhBH)
- Shoppers who interact with sales associates are 13% more likely than those who don’t interact to make purchases in-store. (GroupM Next: 314-682-2055)