The social media Goliath, which is massive compared to its next nearest competitor fails in one thing and I don’t think it is ashamed. B2B Marketing isn’t high on its priorities and is unlikely to move up the list anytime soon. Why? What can you do and what will they do?
Facebook’s relationship with businesses has been sketchy at best over the past few years. The support is lacking and things have been changing, so the platform works against businesses growing on it.
In 2014 they changed their algorithm which meant it became harder for businesses to reach their audience organically. This ended up forcing businesses to be required to pay for any decent reach, making the platform a no-go for SMEs.
Four years on and the wound is still open. Business to business Facebook pages
There are a few reasons, in my opinion, why Facebook is failing to help support business to business marketing organically. Something that I think Facebook will be unwilling to change, especially now with the Cambridge Analytica trust issues.
The first reason is there is no page-to-page interaction, I think this is the same reason LinkedIn, is struggling. The reason that Twitter is still as popular is largely due to pages as entities chatting to each other. F
Secondly, I think Facebook has firmly put itself in a niche of “I refuse to think about anything to do with work when I am on Facebook”. I don’t
The above may seem irrelevant, but Twitter works well because other people can interact with businesses as well as businesses. We run the risk of creating a silo for businesses chatting to each other if the above mindset exists.
Facebook could do a lot of changes to its platform to make it more friendly to business to business people. It would likely need to roll back its algorithm changes, to enable businesses to get more airtime on the platform. This does mean they could lose a key revenue stream which will not please investors.
Enabling more interaction between pages, my main example would be bringing back a business pages personal feeds. This would give more businesses the chance to talk to their main customers, it could also give Facebook a new revenue stream.
But the bigger question is, will Facebook make these changes to its platform? Probably not.
Facebook is an advertising platform, as much as Zuck says it isn’t. It’s geared to help advertisers reach consumers and it now has (I believe) one of the biggest audiences out there. So advertisers will likely be willing to pay a hell of a lot to get in front of their customers.
Twitter is my go-to alternative for B2B comms. It’s a good platform and you can grow an audience on it pretty rapidly. Outside of Twitter, LinkedIn would be my second go-to. Sometimes you don’t get as much engagement, but your audience and reach grow quite quickly, so a worthwhile replacement.
I wouldn’t even bother with looking at Facebook for social media, I don’t think it’s even worth advertising on there. You could probably spend your money wiser by working with industry-focused blogs, magazines or things that people will be reading in their offices.
I’ve also written posts about LinkedIn and Twitter, if this one got your interest.