The social media heavyweights are prepped and ready to fight it out to see who will be named as the social champion. Will Green referees the match
As our Social Media Benchmarking Report shows, there are only two contenders for the B2B social media crown. In the blue corner, weighing in at 76 per cent, Twitter is the most used platform, up three per cent from last year. And in the red corner, the challenger LinkedIn is used by 71 per cent of marketers, down three per cent on last year, but still very much in the running for the grand prize.
Both fighters have their strengths and weaknesses: Twitter is quick, playful, agile, and can produce wins from unexpected places – but its punches don’t always connect or land with the necessary force. LinkedIn, meanwhile, is a serious competitor who strikes weighty blows that can make a big impact, but its reactions are slower, its feet less nimble and it can miss opportunities to hit the target.
In the ‘Rumble in the Social Media Jungle’, there can only be one winner. We put the platforms through their paces in five rounds to see which will emerge victorious as the undisputed heavyweight social champion of the B2B world.
ROUND ONE: Getting started
Gloves are touched, the bell is rung and the bout is underway. First: which platform is easiest to get started on? According to Bryan Adams, CEO and founder of Ph. Creative, it’s Twitter that takes the honours in the opening exchanges: “Twitter is probably the easier of the two to get started. It’s very quick to sign up and you can get going with very little input at all. LinkedIn requires much more effort to fill out your profile effectively before people would consider connecting to you or taking you seriously at all.”
Jenna Vernon, head of social at Eight&four, agrees with this, also praising the platform’s intuitive nature: “Setting up a Twitter account couldn’t be easier. Upon completion it encourages the user to follow people straight away so they immediately see the dashboard in action and get to grips with how it works. The step-by-step set up illustrates how to search for people, topics and brands showing users how they can easily and quickly search for content and people of interest.”
LinkedIn relies on its depth, authenticity and detail which means it’s time intensive to get right. There are lots of different elements, first in terms of filling in personal details and optimising your profile, and then in terms of building the connections that make the platform tick. As James Moffat, MD at The Organic Agency puts it: “Without any connections [on LinkedIn], you will struggle to reach a sizeable audience. With Twitter, on the other hand, even if you create an account and have no immediate followers, you still have the potential to get your message out there via the use of hashtags and tweeting more well-known users.”
JUDGES’ VERDICT: Twitter
ROUND TWO: Managing the platform
For its agility, speed and opportunity for getting quick hits, Twitter takes round one. But as the title fight gets into the nitty gritty and both combatants have found their feet, we ask which platform is the easiest to manage. Can LinkedIn hit back?
Not according to Alyssa Drysdale, head of social media at Fieldworks Marketing: “When it comes to platform management, LinkedIn has many drawbacks. For one, the analytics aren’t great for Company Pages – and they are non-existent for personal profiles – which means gaining the right level of insight against activity can be more time consuming.”
Moffat agrees, but it’s a closer-run thing: “Twitter wins in the ease of management category because it is quite simple and straightforward. The only caveat being that it does require consistent activity. LinkedIn is a much more advanced and professional suite, with lots of CRM functionality, allowing for stronger B2B relationships and interactions. But the majority of LinkedIn users don’t take advantage of all its capabilities, either because they don’t understand it or simply don’t know it exists.”
Like the previous category, Twitter takes the point because it does the simple things well. For someone managing a B2B Twitter account, there aren’t many moving parts to think about. Plus, there are a variety of other tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to help even more. LinkedIn has a wide range of business tools and applications, but to get the best out of them requires investment, both in terms of time and money: with a premium account, for instance, you can contact anyone on the platform, use search filters and advanced analytics.
JUDGES’ VERDICT: Twitter
ROUND THREE: Quality of engagement on the platform
After taking rounds one and two, Twitter is floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee while LinkedIn is on the ropes. Can it come out firing in round three to stay in the contest?
Sophie Morris, director at Millharbour Marketing says it’s a resounding ‘yes’: “LinkedIn wins hands down thanks to Groups and the ease of starting discussions. People are more likely to see your posts than the fleeting Twitter feeds. Real discussions take place and real relationships are made.”
Luke Budka, director at TopLine Comms, agrees: “LinkedIn is a better forum for business engagement. For a start, it’s not a place people go to complain. It’s not a naturally combative platform like Twitter often can be. It’s also worth remembering that you’ll usually be dealing with real people on LinkedIn; anyone signing up to Twitter will have to deal with a lot of bots and should factor this into how they measure performance or engagement.”
That’s not to say that Twitter is without its supporters. Vernon argues that the speed and variety of the social platform is a USP: “Users don’t always share content or thoughts that have been pre-planned, well constructed and considered, but can instead Tweet reactively and in-the-moment. Users don’t feel the same pressure to share one solitary post, but have multiple opportunities to engage with other businesses and the public.”
In this sense, Twitter is different in terms of blending the personal and the private: alongside a company account, employees can also have personal work accounts where they can take part in industry debates and tweet about sport, music, cats, cakes and so on. It could be extremely useful to know that a key client’s football team won over the weekend.
But for the B2B world, the quality and reach of engagement on LinkedIn gives it the edge.
JUDGES’ VERDICT: LinkedIn
ROUND FOUR: Ability to measure ROI
Entering the potentially decisive fourth round, the contestants come up against the perennial challenge facing B2B marketers – measuring ROI. It’s an established idea that many businesses struggle to identify a precise ROI from a social platform, basing success on vanity metrics (likes, retweets and so on) rather than value for the company.
According to Adams, this is often not the fault of the platform but of the user: “[Difficulties measuring ROI are] not because of limitation of software, but due to a lack of planning and understanding of what constitutes an ROI. From a B2B point of view, an ROI can mean converting a contact into a phone call or a meeting which can lead to a sale. Both LinkedIn and Twitter are exceptional B2B tools for delivering these sorts of outcomes.”
Sophie Morris also sees it as a mixed picture: “Twitter analytics are better, but because you know the individuals you’re engaging with more on LinkedIn, you can track them better across the rest of your business and, importantly, sales channels.”
Seen as part of a whole campaign – or even better, the whole marketing mix – both social platforms can demonstrate ROI as part of a granular view of marketing’s effectiveness. But on a day-to-day level, the ability to start business conversations quickly, ultimately gives LinkedIn the slight edge: if someone connects with you personally on LinkedIn, you immediately have access to all their contact details, their current role and their career history. On Twitter, you may strike up the conversation, but to proceed any further you will need more than 140 characters and a handle name.
JUDGES’ VERDICT
ROUND FIVE: Getting internal buy-in
As we enter the final round with the contest tied 2-2, round five will be decisive. And it seems that in this category, it will be a close run thing. As Hurst says: “I don’t see why it should be difficult to get internal buy-in for using social media in 2015, especially not the dominant platforms – if you’re not already using both platforms and/or aren’t in a position to produce a solid business case as to why you should be, then you’re quite probably in the wrong job.”
Certainly, Vernon sees the benefits of Twitter being easy to pitch to the c-suite and other members of an organisation: “The biggest sell-in for Twitter is the sheer wealth of knowledge, insight and coverage that’s wide open for anyone to find. The ways in which people and businesses can use the combination of personal and professional insight undoubtedly justifies a time investment into Twitter for any industry.”
But Jonathan Richards, digital director, OgilvyOne dnx, sees it differently: “Getting buy-in for LinkedIn activity is generally a lot easier than with Twitter, as LinkedIn is deemed the platform for businesses and professional networking.”
Moffat agrees with this analysis: “Getting internal buy-in is easy and natural on LinkedIn. It offers more B2B functionality to discover and report on, especially since it has become an expected component of the modern professional’s social presence. This means the range of individuals actively involved on the site will typically be a more appropriate target audience to approach and interact with. Conversely, some professionals won’t bother to create a Twitter account and actively engage with it, while many still don’t see the point.”
The title champion
After an extremely hard-fought contest that went the distance, ultimately, it is LinkedIn that emerges victorious. Twitter is a fantastic tool for reaching lots of people and engaging in industry-wide conversations, and an easier platform for developing more informal interactions.
But LinkedIn is the place where B2B marketers are more likely to find the right people and engage in meaningful business conversations. Twitter throws lots of punches, but when it comes to landing impactful blows, LinkedIn just has the edge.
This is borne out by our Social Media Benchmarking Report: while Twitter is the most commonly used platform, LinkedIn is considered the most effective platform by 58 per cent of marketers versus 24 per cent for Twitter.
That said, despite LinkedIn edging out Twitter in this battle, these two platforms are still way ahead of the pack in the B2B world and look set to dominate the landscape for the foreseeable future. B2B marketers would be well advised to invest time and resources in both to make sure their hats are in the ring when it comes to targeting the right people with the right content and generating the right leads.
