Does Facebook have a place in B2B marketing?

What does Facebook bring to the table for B2B marketing?

Over the years, Facebook has evolved, and marketeers have had to evolve too in order to make full use of its tools. From Facebook Stories to Facebook Messenger, neglecting this platform would leave a big chunk of users out of your reach.

The most important thing to keep in mind if you decide to use Facebook for B2B marketing is to be selective with the tactics you use and make choices based on your niche and target audience. A few of the Facebook tools that could be useful to marketeers for B2B social media management are:

• Facebook Live: Video has proven itself to be one of the biggest trends of the past two years. Add that to the major theme of personal connection and you’ll find yourself with an incredibly powerful tool that can reach hundreds of thousands of users. The upside of Facebook Lives is that the video content can then be uploaded onto multiple platforms (LinkedIn and YouTube) as video snippets, which can generate further organic engagement.
• Raw images: Gone are the days of airbrushed, immaculate images, as more users than ever are now engaging with “real”, untouched and more authentic imagery . While there are currently few statistics available to prove this theory, it is definitely worth a try as it will give you a clear indication of what your audience likes and engages with.
• Messenger: Personalised communications have become increasingly popular, and marketers have noticed high conversion rates from “H2H” (human to human) communications. Facebook Messenger’s rules and restrictions, however, change quite frequently so it’s always best to read their Facebook’s Messenger Platform Policy Overview if you’re planning to use a bot for personalised messaging.
• Customer service: Although most businesses struggle to think of Facebook as a channel for customer support, most customers see it as an easy way to approach customer service. This gives businesses an opportunity to strengthen their customer relationships by offering quick advice or solutions to their problems, showing enhanced responsiveness that most customers will appreciate.

Drawing our conclusions

As Facebook keeps evolving, so do its users and marketers must be agile and adapt to the challenge. Since the launch of Apple’s iOS 14 for example, restrictions around user tracking have come into play and enhanced privacy controls are on offer which cut off a lot of tracking features, negatively effecting ad performance in some cases.

The perfect B2B social media strategy is tricky to find but knowing your audience and, most importantly, where to find the decision-makers in that audience, is the key to a successful plan. Facebook might not be the right choice for everyone but the tools it offers can be of great value to any B2B campaign, making it worth a try.

After all, marketing is all about testing and, should you conclude that this social network isn’t the right one for your business, you can always shift your focus to other platforms that would give you the return on investment (ROI) you’re looking for.