It wasn’t long ago when B2B brands were considered faceless and impersonal. B2C brands were where the action was, certainly for social media. That’s ancient history. Today’s B2Bs, at least some of them, have enough personality to be effective on social.
For example, the top three most socially active B2B brands in 2018 (IMG Models Worldwide, Pantone and Sotheby’s) tapped Instagram, arguably the most personal of platforms, as their channel of choice, says Ron Lee, a manager at Shareablee, which provided data exclusively to PRNEWS.
While it’s true that IMG Models, Pantone and Sotheby’s seem to have an unfair advantage over less exciting B2B brands--indeed, the trio was tops in 2018 and 2017--the category as a whole posted 1.1 million pieces of content on social last year. That includes 41,000 videos.
Content posted in 2018 was off 18 percent vs. 2017, when B2Bs amassed 1.4 million posts. As you might have guessed, B2B brands’ videos on social easily topped the 2017 tally, with 41,000 videos representing a 27 pecent increase versus the prior year.
The top three were more judicious with their content in 2018. Each posted fewer pieces of content than it did in 2017. It’s somewhat concerning that consumer actions with that content and actions per post were off vs 2017 for IMG and Sotheby’s. Pantone saw a 29 percent uptick in actions per post, Lee says. Consumer actions here are defined here as comments, shares, retweets, likes and reactions.
A newcomer to the top 10 is cloud-based web development platform Wix, whose 2.6 million consumer actions in 2018 was a distant fourth to Sotheby’s 4.7 million.
Still, Wix’s 2018 social activity is notable. Despite a 37 percent decline in content posted in 2018, consumer actions rose 436 percent. In addition, consumer actions per post jumped a whopping 745 percent. Wix’s videos also saw huge growth in consumer actions versus 2017 (up 260 percent).
Wix’s Facebook feed, its top channel, is loaded with inspirational and instructional posts, as well as fun content. “What’s your favorite thing about spring?” one post asks.
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