Is social media the key for B2B companies to educate their buyers?

Social media is not just a channel where leaders can invest to build brand awareness or attract visitors to their website, says Catherine Pardo. Managers of B2B companies must also to consider how their tweets can shape a company’s perceived position in the market

The use of social media is considered not as developed in business-to-business(B2B) contexts as it is in business-to-consumer (B2C) contexts, however, B2B companies are more and more present on different social media platforms. This is the case for large industrial companies like General Electric on Instagram, Dow Chemical Company on LinkedIn and ArcelorMittal, Technip, and Airbus on Twitter. This is also the case for small B2B companies which are starting to build a presence on social media.

B2B companies use social media to communicate about their products and services, support their sales, develop professional networking and improve customer satisfaction. B2B companies use social media to communicate about their products and services, support their sales, develop professional networking and improve customer satisfaction. These are rather tactical uses of social media. However, B2B companies can also use the media more strategically to build, strengthen or change their position in a market.

Today, some B2B companies are changing (or wish to change) the value propositions they make to their customers (for example by offering ‘as a service’ offers) or more generally their business models (for example by adopting a subscription model). Digital technologies also play a role in these changes, by causing them or accompanying them (for example, the IoT supports predictive maintenance which is central in certain B2B subscription business models).

Company interactions

The strategic moves described above lead to a change in the way a company interacts with other actors (for instance it will no longer sell products but will sell the use of the product). This will also result in the creation of new relationships and the disappearance of others, depending on whether other actors (customers for example) accept or not the new role that a company wants to play. Thus, a central dimension of such a strategic movement for a company is that it be accepted by the other players in the network (not only customers, but also partners, experts, public authorities, users, intermediaries, suppliers, KOLs, influencers, etc.)

Social media, and in particular Twitter, because they allow an easy sharing of representations between different actors are a mean to build a shared accepted meaning of the new role a company wants to play. On Twitter, official tweets (tweets tweeted by the company itself) account for the description of the role a company wants to play and this role is made of representations a company wants other actors to share. Non-official tweets (all the tweets tweeted by other Twitter users and mentioning that company) are rather an expression of how other actors see the company. In other words, non-official accounts ‘select’ from the official discourse only the elements they want to communicate about, and we argue that these elements are their representations of the company they are tweeting.

From February 2017 to June 2018, we analysed a database of over one million tweets (both official and nonofficial tweets) for 16 companies. Some companies only sell intangible goods such as consulting or training. We identify them as ‘B2B services companies’ like, for instance, Cap Gemini and Forrester. Some companies have a strong digital focus with a clear mission to implement digital technology within other companies, whether selling services (software’s or consulting) or goods (infrastructures). We identify them as ‘B2B tech companies’ (e.g., Salesforce VMware, and Cisco). Finally, some companies are selling products or product/service solutions, but are not primarily connected to digital technologies. They are identified as ‘industrial companies’ like, for instance, Air Liquide, Maersk, and Safra.

Using a machine learning method designed for natural language processing, our results show that the roles these companies want to play in their networks are structured around four main dimensions. The ‘customer experience’ dimension emphasises a company’s ability to engage with its customers. The ‘customisation of offerings’ dimension emphasises the ability to adapt products and services for customers and even to produce tailor-made offers.- we consider these first two dimensions as ‘customer-oriented’.

Digital transformation

Another dimension is that of ‘digital transformation’, when companies want to be identified as those who can help other players to digitalise, and a final dimension is that of the ‘ecosystem’.

Here, companies express their ability to establish and develop relationships with different partners in a business network. These last two dimensions are considered ‘supplier-oriented’.

• Our findings also show that companies are not using these dimensions the same way. ‘B2B service companies’ build a discourse strongly articulated around the ‘customer experience’, In this strategy, we identify the company’s intention to communicate their core service promise: attention to customer needs through a personalised experience.
• ‘B2B Tech companies’ strongly use the ‘customisation of offerings’ dimension. Those companies know that their scope of action is to drive the technology challenge that may be difficult to understand and adopt. Thus, they do not particularly emphasise their role in the digital transformation process but highlight the specific needs that their customised solutions address.  By insisting on their capacity to ‘customise’ their offerings, they enable technology to be perceived as ‘serving the customer’ and they focus on how technology allows them to meet customer needs.
• ‘Industrial companies’ put forward both the ‘customisation of offerings’ dimension and the ‘customer experience’ in a rather balanced way. They appear as companies defining their role based on customer-oriented dimensions.

Finally, our findings show that the other actors of the network do not automatically share the representations built by a company. This is because they have had experience with the company and its offerings, and because they have been influenced by information provided by other communication channels (for instance, websites, hotlines, sales support, etc.), other actors of the network can amplify or mitigate certain dimensions of the role a company wants to share.  

• For ‘B2B service’ companies’, other actors of the network only partially relay the ‘customer experience’ dimension and strongly amplify that of the ‘customisation of offerings’. This could mean that these actors accept the idea that the role of the ‘service companies’ is to make customers live an experience. However, they do not consider this dimension as the most important. One knows how difficult it is to conceptualise customer experiences in business-to-business contexts, and this may explain why actors have difficulties picturing a company that could offer B2B customer experience. For other actors of the network, ‘B2B service companies’ are identified as actors that are addressing customers’ behaviours with offerings that are adapted.
• Concerning ‘B2B Tech companies’ other actors of the network mitigate the ‘customisation of offerings’ dimension. They rather build a balanced representation of tech companies around the triptych of ‘digital transformation’, ‘customisation of offerings’ and ‘ecosystem’ dimensions. The ‘digital transformation’ dimension, far from being a threat or a foil, has the power to organise the representations other actors of the network have of ‘B2B tech companies’. 
• As far as ‘industrial companies’ are concerned other actors of the network amplify the ‘ecosystem’ dimension. B2B companies selling products and solutions (not specifically technology oriented) are identified as actors potentially able to orchestrate a wide array of resources (including the technological ones) through the multiple links they may have with actors of different sorts.

Based on these findings, we invite managers not to consider social media just as a channel where they can invest to build brand awareness or attract visitors to their website thereby increasing reach and creating short-term conversion. Managers of B2B companies must also to consider their tweets to shape a company’s perceived position in the market.

Second, managers of B2B companies are also encouraged to develop a balanced approach in their communication strategy (social media and other media) with two objectives in mind.

The first is to reach new actors using customer-oriented dimensions like ‘customer experience’ and ‘customisation of offerings’ so that these actors engage in a relationship with the company. The second is to continually feed actors with information that matches the perceived position (using ‘supplier-centred’ traits relating to what the company is or what it does). If companies completely reorient their communication according to what other actors of the network perceive, they risk not engaging new actors because of a ‘less’ customer-oriented communication. On the other hand, if companies neglect what other players perceive, they can also lose interest.

Third, following this idea of ​​a balanced approach in their communication strategy, we suggest that B2B companies rethink the content of their communication across different communication channels using stories inspired by both a ‘customer experience’ focus and an ‘offer’ focus. If the customer experience has been present for a long time in the marketing literature and is often at the centre of marketing efforts, we must not forget that a company never really offers an experience, because the experience is a subjective episode lived by the customer interacting with the company. However, communicating about the experience can shape customer expectations and drive them to seek out more information about a company’s products, services, and solutions. Thanks to this vision of the customer experience, B2B companies could for example create an expectation by relying on social media while reinforcing communication on personalised offers via other communication channels (websites, salespeople, etc.).

Finally, always keeping in mind the perspective of a balanced approach in their communication strategy, we invite B2B managers to draw inspiration from the meanings conveyed about their position (for example, through tweets or other messages of different actors of the network), to continually nurture their ability to explain their position.