The percentage of business-to-business (B2B) marketing specialists relying on social media for the promotion of their services continues to rise, however companies are still not seeing a high enough return on investment (ROI).

Social media is now the second most popular tactic for new customer acquisition, with only email marketing proving more popular. Despite this, many of the B2B marketing executives utilising social media for marketing purposes are finding it isn’t quite living up to their needs or expectations. In particular, the ROI for social media marketing isn’t nearly as high as one would expect for a marketing tactic that requires such a heavy financial investment, and such a lot of time.
For years now social media has been steadily on the rise, with market research consistently indicating that it is becoming an increasingly popular – and powerful – marketing tool. A growing number of B2B organisations are relying on social media for the core of their marketing efforts, with over fifty percent having at least a ‘medium’ level of involvement in social media, and many being very heavily invested.

Despite this, many of those same organisations are now indicating their disappointment with the ROI they have experienced for their social media efforts, especially where certain areas are concerned.

Goals such as increasing brand awareness, driving email newsletter signups and generating new leads are not being supported as generously as businesses would like, given the heavy investments they have made in their social media accounts.

Only around 30 percent of respondents to a recent survey by Demand Metric indicated that social media had either met or exceeded the expectations they had concerning ROI where driving brand awareness was concerned, and a mere 24 percent stated the same was true for the ability of social media to consistently contribute to new lead generation.

Senior B2B marketers are continually experimenting with numerous tactics and different tools where social media is concerned, and many keep finding that some platforms, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, are vastly superior to others. Even Facebook lags considerably far behind both of these platforms in terms of B2B marketing.

It seems unlikely social media’s popularity will wane any time soon, yet it is also clear that for B2B organisations serious about using it as a marketing tool, LinkedIn and Twitter are the place to be.