After examining consumer engagement with B2C brands last month, this month we’re looking at B2Bs.
Overall, consumer engagement was down 38 percent in Shareablee’s business services category, vs the period (Nov. 1-Nov. 30) one year ago. Shareablee provided the data to PRNEWS exclusively.
Engagements, or actions, are the sum of likes, shares and comments.
Our November edition highlighted that consumer engagement with B2C posts also was off considerably YOY (35 percent). The period examined was 9-27-2021 through 10-26-2021.
Turkey Trot?
Though it’s unclear why B2B engagement was drastically off, one reason could be that more marketing and social media teams took Thanksgiving vacations in 2021 vs 2020, meaning fewer pieces of content were posted.
In fact, the volume of content posted was down 7 percent, 111K pieces in ’20 vs 103K pieces in ’21, says Madison Busick, a Shareablee analyst. While fewer pieces of content does not always equate to a reduction in engagement, it’s a possibility.
Another potential reason for the decline in engagement could be that with the pandemic subsiding, marketers spread messages across a more diverse group of platforms. Last year they limited efforts mainly to digital and social marketing.
The majority of likes for B2Bs was on Instagram. When compared against the average of U.S. brands, however, the business services category has a greater share of engagement from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Busick says.
There was also a 10.5 percent increase in fans and followers and a 217 percent increase in YouTube video views in this category. Important to note is that LinkedIn is not included in this analysis.
The most efficient B2B account was Facebook for Business (now Meta for Business), averaging just more than 82K actions for its six pieces of content. The top-performing post from this account was a video that shared “easy advertising tips that’ll help you reach the right audience and achieve your business goals.”
While there were no major content themes aside from promoting services, some accounts did this more effectively than others.
One post, by Instagram for Business, for example, asked followers to ‘tag a small business that sparks joy for you!,” a natural way to promote business and increase engagement.
Busick notes that some brands tried to add humor, such as a Pantone post that cleverly uses everyday objects in design. To highlight CSR initiatives, McKinsey & Company’s post shares upbeat sustainability stories in honor of COP26, the global climate conference held last month in Glasgow. n