Grow Your Rent Roll: B2C Outpacing B2B in Social Measurement

B2Bs focus less on hits and followers, more on sales

Social media marketing has become mainstream, but the best metrics to determine social success still appear to be up for debate, with substantial percentages of marketers measuring a variety of things including hits, repeat visits, conversions and number of followers or friends.
According to “The CMO Study” from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association, social metric usage varies depending on whether a marketer is focused on selling to businesses or consumers, as well as whether the firm markets a product or a service. Business-to-consumer (B2C) product firms had the highest usage of the top six overall metrics, including sales levels and revenues per customer.

Several studies have indicated that B2B firms do better at social measurement because they tend to focus more on the bottom line than on soft metrics like number of followers, but according to “The CMO Survey,” B2C product firms are outpacing them in monitoring sales levels and revenues and profits per customer, suggesting consumer-oriented social marketers may have learned that lesson.
There are also signs that social marketing is finding its place within organizations, and marketers are beginning to get a better idea of how much they will spend on the channel. While estimates of current and future spending changed greatly between August 2009 and February 2010, forecasts made in August 2010 were much closer to the February projections. In the next year, marketers expect to nearly double social dollars from just under 6% of total marketing budgets to just under 10%. Within five years, spending will be up to 17.7%.

Notably, service companies nudged spending down across the board—both B2B and B2C, now and for the future.
“Consumer goods companies like Unilever and Procter & Gamble have been very effective at connecting with customers through social media,” said Fuqua professor Christine Moorman, director of the survey, in a statement. “However, these results indicate that social media may be more difficult to apply in the service sector environment, where there isn't a tangible product for customers to relate to.”