How B2B social media marketing differs across the world

How B2B social media marketing differs across the world

Oliver Matejka, media account executive at B2B Marketing, packs his suitcase and boards a flight around the world to explore how social media varies across different countries and continents

With an ever-growing membership well into the billions, social media has become part of everyday life within societies across the globe. When not so long ago getting a message from one part of the world to another could take days, our ability now to connect with anyone in any part of the world within seconds has opened up huge potential for businesses and marketing in particular.

As a result of this overwhelmingly widespread adoption, it’s little surprise to find that each region has developed its own idiosyncrasies that separate it from the next. When developing an international social media strategy, understanding these quirks is paramount. 

We’ve discussed the latest social media trends in the three main global markets – Europe, Asia, and the US – with a broad church of industry experts.

Europe

Despite being the second smallest continent, Europe is a dominant economic and cultural force. With a diverse 28 nations, it would be folly to assume a pan-European strategy: social media marketers must take a targeted approach to each country. 

Interacting with brands on social media is particularly popular in Spain and Italy. Forty-three per cent of Italian internet users and 50 per cent of Spanish said they regularly checked brands’ social channels, according to a recent study conducted by Ipsos.

Maria Burpee, freelance marketing consultant, explains southern European countries are extremely relationship-based, so marketers must monitor existing conversations before interacting with an online audience. The social ethos must be friendly and unobtrusive. 

David Friedman, director of corporate communications at SendGrid agrees: “Understand what’s happening in your market, what is being talked about today, and who is genuinely influential. Tools such as BuzzSumo and Buzz Stream are particularly good for this.”

As far as platforms are concerned, unlike the UK – where the big five platforms’ popularity has tightened the social oligopoly – other European countries experience a wider range of usage across other social media platforms. 

According to Ecommerce News, there are still a selection of European regional local platforms in use: XING still trumps LinkedIn in Germany (three quarters of its page views come from the country); Viadeo is France’s XING (a thriving community of job sharing and opportunity building); and with over a million users, GoldenLine is Poland’s biggest business network.

In light of this, rather than getting hung up on the social media behemoths that dominate the UK, be sure to identify those local platforms and fine-tune your approach: the UK is a small fish in a big pond. 

Asia

Turning our attention eastwards, with a population of over 4.4 billion, a typically high rate of internet usage, and a multitude of social media platforms, Asia is a difficult landscape for social media marketers. Unlike the holistic identity of markets such as the Americas, Asia is home to a variety of unique cultures. 

China is the most dominant and fascinating of Asia’s markets. As a measure to avoid subversion of authority, the People’s Democratic Dictatorship has strict media censorship in place for both traditional and new media. While these monitoring systems restrict dissident journalists and bloggers from the mainstream, the burgeoning society still heavily relies on the internet for growth, so naturally alternative and substitute social media platforms have propagated.  

 Joel Windels, vice president of inbound marketing at Brandwatch, explains: “Authorisation rules differ and countries like China do not have the same access to sites as the rest of the world, using alternatives such as Sina, Weibo, and Renren.” 

These platforms appeal to the market’s more social-extravert nature, because, as Nick Leech, digital director of 123-reg, points out: “Social media users in Asia are more likely to share videos and music than those based in Western Europe.” 

Windels notes the ramifications of having a technologically driven economy for social media marketers: “In many ways, China is ahead of the curve when it comes to social media, so marketers must ensure their brand’s voice is authentic and original.” 

One of the main challenges for marketers adopting these new platforms is measurement and KPI application. Emma Durant, global marketing strategist at Lionbridge, sheds light: “If you are interested in reaching a Chinese audience, Echo is a great monitoring tool as it taps into a hard to reach audience, whereas other tools such as Meltwater analyse coverage and mentions of your company, while also giving insight into the level of customer engagement with your brand.”  

Other countries throughout Asia remain unburdened by authoritarian restrictions, so when operating in the likes of India and Indonesia, the big platforms – particularly Facebook – come once more into the equation. Windels warns: “Marketers [should] continue to focus their energies on creating solid social media strategies for these channels.” 

The Americas

Returning west to the world’s largest economy, the US is very much the homeland of social media marketing. And, in many ways, this is reflected by its inhabitants. A recent social media report from Forrester showed 81 per cent of Americans who have access to the internet use social media. Furthermore, technology buyers spend almost twice as much time on social media as US adults overall. 

As well as the US’ insatiable appetite for social networking, an interesting point to note is the difference in the content they are likely to consume. “For example, the UK mostly uses Pinterest as a casual network to post about their interests away from the world of work,” says  Leech. He continues: “Whereas the US use Pinterest to provide infographics and key information about their field of work.” 

PulsoSocial recently dubbed Latin America as ‘B2B marketing’s biggest opportunity’. This is partially due to the collective leap towards the world’s most dominant economies – Europe, China, and areas in the North of America – during the dotcom bubble, leaving the quieter regions to emerge organically. Now the social media marketing booming has trickled down to the likes of Brazil and Mexico in the south, these could be lucrative markets to invest in.

This snapshot of the use of social media around the world reveals that while technology may have brought us closer together on a communicative level, it is clear there is still a huge division in the way many countries use social media across the globe, with regulations and regional penchant often determining platform popularity. In order to make an impact, marketers must submerge themselves with the target country’s social media culture to fine-tune a strategy prior to launching.

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