Background Image

4 reasons why you need to include Facebook in your B2B growth strategy

Nina Cieminska

Hotwire has over 20 years of igniting possibilities for tech businesses. Hear our expert views and insights from our team on the latest developments in the industry.

B2B businesses often neglect Facebook when developing their social media strategy. Over the past few years, I’ve observed this tendency amongst many companies: a Facebook page is set up with high hopes of driving brand awareness, only to quickly become abandoned as everyone’s attention gradually shifts to other more business-oriented platforms. Does that sound familiar?

 

Together with its daughter company – Instagram (acquired back in 2012), Facebook is widely recognised as being the main pillar for generating consumer engagement but when it comes to B2B, many people assume that the business crowd has no interest in the platform. However, we all know that the pandemic has been turning the world upside down since last Spring so if you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to reevaluate your social media approach and learn more about the changes in your customers’ digital behaviours.

 

Here are four, data-loaded insights that reveal why developing a Facebook strategy should be on the first page of your business growth agenda.

 

#1 Your clients are looking for business opportunities in new places 

 

Throughout the past year, we’ve all seen the line between our work and personal lives blur, and this has also been reflected in the way we use social media. Your customers are now looking at business-related content outside of work and during their regular working hours, their focus might shift towards opening the door to receive a parcel delivery or getting the new puppy to stop barking at the neighbour. When working from home there’s no longer such a thing as “the right time and place”. Since mid-March 2020, B2B service provider websites saw a 60% average increase in weekend traffic and the spikes in user engagement on social media platforms during the time of standard work commutes have stretched out throughout the whole day. While this might give us a hint of how the shift has started to shape up new digital behaviours, 40% of business decision-makers straightforwardly say they have used platforms like Facebook for business research – and they will do it again in the future.

 

#2 More than 1/3 of the world’s population uses Facebook every month

 

With nearly 2.8 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains the biggest social media platform, leaving the other channels far behind. This stat accounts for 1.84 billion users visiting the platform each day. For comparison, Twitter is being used by only 192 million users daily while LinkedIn, the platform of choice for the majority of businesses, is visited by roughly 400,000 unique accounts each day. The data can’t lie – more than 1/3 of the planet is on Facebook.

 

#3 Business leaders and decision-makers use Facebook more often than the average user

 

Looking at the numbers above, it shouldn’t be a surprise that amongst these billions of users you will find business decision-makers ranging from global enterprise leaders to 90 million small business owners who use the platform to run their own company profiles. In fact, the median amount of time B2B decision-makers spend on Facebook per day is 74% higher than other people on the platform and they are two times more likely to be active than other users. And what about the tech industry? IT decision-makers bring this number up to 2.2x more engaged users per day. While LinkedIn remains the most popular platform amongst professionals, the hard data proves to us that Facebook has the potential to be a key channel for business growth.

 

#4 Facebook posts perform up to 4 times better than those on Twitter

 

The best-kept secret about Facebook is that user engagement on the platform is significantly high and can become a valuable driver of ROI. Let’s compare how the performance of the content shared on Facebook compares to Twitter – a platform still favoured by many businesses. The average business profile on Facebook will generate a 0.3% engagement rate with their posts – that’s already over 4x higher than the average engagement rate seen on Twitter which places itself around 0.07%. If we consider different industries such as Software, Facebook sees an average of 0.2% engagement rate compared to 0.03% on Twitter – a similar one to the Electronics market where the engagements are 0.21% for Facebook and 0.02% for Twitter. Looking at this data again and considering the number of daily active users and we get 8.5 million users that could potentially engage with your content – a number 17x higher than the entire population of Manchester.

 

So what can you do now with all this information? As we re-emerge from the pandemic, we now know that some changes it brought are here to stay and by now we’ve all learned a few digital lessons. If you want to reach your clients where they are today you’ll now need to put these learnings into practice which might mean looking at new ways of communication you may have never considered before.

 

If you’d like to find out more on how you can leverage your social media channels, drop me an email – nina.cieminska@hotwireglobal.com