B2B Uses for Facebook

I've been giving some talks recently about how to leverage social networks to market your business, and the question came up regarding whether or not you could use Facebook for Business-to-Business marketing.  This is an interesting question with no clear answer at this point.  There are those who feel that B2B companies can skip social marketing, but I personally feel that there is merit in leveraging social networks, including Facebook, for B2B marketing.

The question, in my mind, comes down to whether or not B2B decision makers are using Facebook.  If they are, then exposing them to your message via shared links, fan pages, etc., will have just as much impact in terms of building brand awareness and driving website traffic as if you were marketing for a B2C company.

First, some interesting direct results from research done by Forrester:

• 91% of .. technology decision-makers ... are reading blogs, watching user generated video, and participating in other social media...69% of them said they were using this technology for business purposes.
• Only 5% are non-participants.
• 55% of these decision-makers were in social networks.
• 43% are creating media (blogs, uploading videos or articles, etc.) and 58% are Critics, reacting to content they see in social formats.

Second, even if you don't find these results compelling there are some interesting statistics from Facebook directly:

• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college.
• The fastest growing demographic is 35 years old and older.
• More than 120 million users login at least once a day.
• The average user has 120 friends.

From this we can infer that there are more than 80 million users logging in each day that are outside of college, and that a good percentage of them are 35 or older.  These numbers are too large to ignore the probability that a sizeable percentage of these users have to be B2B decision-makers, if not influencers.  And with an average of 120 friends, if even a small percentage of those users become your fan or promote your message, you are definitely reaching a decent-sized targeted audience.  As a result, I feel that it would not be prudent to disregard leveraging social networks (at least Facebook) for B2B marketing.