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Survey Results:  B2B marketers’ engagement in social media

June 20, 2008 | Posted by: Lee

Last month we sent out a survey to B2B marketers asking them to tell us what types of social media activities they engaged in personally and for work.  We were interested in finding out two things:

1. How do B2B marketers' social media activities compare to Forrester's research on activities of online adults.

2. Do B2B marketers engage in different social media activities for business versus personal use?

We found out some interesting things.  Below are highlights, but you can download the entire survey for all the details and to find out what we think it all means.

•  While 44% of adults, according to Forrester, have no participation in social media, B2B marketers are far more likely to engage in some type of activity - only 9% of respondents were inactive.

• B2B marketers were 4.6 times more likely than the average adult to engage in “Collector” activities such as tagging content and subscribing to RSS feed and three times more likely to be a ”Joiner” (that is, belong to a social network).

• In answer to our second question, “Do B2B marketers engage in different social media activities for business versus personal use?”, we found this group to be 1.3 times more likely to engage in social media activities for business purposes than for personal.

Overall this buyer is much more likely to engage in social media activities across the board than the average adult.  This would suggest a high level of interest in these types of activities.  Because of this high level of interest and engagement, companies targeting this buyer should begin to add social media tactics to their marketing strategy.