Social media opens up a wide array of possibilities for marketers as well as cost savings. However, how or if it is used for marketing will look entirely different depending on the company, industry, and products and solutions sold. Social media marketing is not “one-size-fits-all”.

The hype of late has really told the story of social media marketing within the consumer arena. The picture is quite different in business-to-business. When Forrester talks about 50% of marketers increasing their spend in social media, take out business-to-consumer and you get a very different perspective. Supporting this, agencies see the big push in social media spending is really still from consumer focused companies.

In a recent Q&A session on LinkedIn, I asked marketers what percentage of marketing spend was for social media marketing and what that number was last year. So, even if everyone said they were increasing spend, this could provide a perspective on how committed they were. One reply provided an article from from eMarketer and included a graphic on social network advertising spend. To my surprise, the biggest increase of spend was not this year (2009) 17% but last year (2008) 46%. No wonder all the hype over the past year.

But, this still doesn’t show what is happening in B2B. That came from responses from marketing and business development. The B2B social media marketing spend answer: no marketing spend. None. Zero. However, that doesn’t mean that no effort is spent on social media marketing. Dani Lee, Director of Marketing at Copanion says, “(This) is partly due to the fact that our B2B SMB target audience has low adoption of social networking. However, from a time perspective, we definitely spend more time on social networking this year compared to almost no time last year. We drive content to our social networking sites with the goal of creating more engagement with our audience over various channels.” Another contributor doesn’t see that social media makes sense in highly complex solution sales.

The big question is, what does social media marketing do for B2B? Or, is there also a factor that social media marketing as it is defined today does not represent B2B marketing perspectives for marketing overall.

Where social media marketing and advertising is focused on the consumer, the engagement is much more relaxed and, well, social. In B2B, there is a lot of vested interest on both sides of the deal. Sending tweets to customers may not be the answer to relationship building. There also may not be an audience to connect to through social networks and communities. B2B is going to have to figure out what the conversation looks like from their perspective and map to social media outlets. It all boils down to conversational preference.

You can watch the Q&A session on LinkedIn by going to http://www.linkedin.com/answers/marketing-sales/advertising-promotion/in...

Also, if you would like to participate in a survey on budget and resource allocation, you can go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=9ccwmeJJoa_2f_2fcSl_2bwgr_2fDA_3d_3d

Related Articles:

You Don’t Have to Get Social Media, You’re Doing It

Conversational Preference in B2B Social Media

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