Is there really a point in Business to Business marketing (B2B) via twitter?

In this research article by (Swani, K., et al.,2014) I discovered how although companies like to target consumers using twitter as a form of social media, there is an area for businesses to use twitter to target other businesses (a form of B2B marketing) as well as the prevalent (B2C marketing). I will be discovering whether B2B twitter marketing is an effective form of communication, how businesses should target other businesses using twitter and how the communication and encoding process of what businesses state in their tweets to other businesses and consumers differ.
 This is important in discovering if Simplified Education should contact other businesses via twitter to make business propositions.

Firstly a short overview of what Twitter is:
-It is a social networking site
-It is a type of microblogging service which is a type of blog that lets users publish short text updates (Webopedia, 2014)
-The 'tweets' that users send out to communicate have a 140-character limit (Swani, K., et al.,2014)

According to (Kumar & Mirchandani,2012; Michaelidou et al., 2011; Rapp et al., 2013)
Businesses use social media to communicate with each other to increase brand awareness, and brand loyalty etc. The communication process between businesses differ from the communication process between business to consumer when tweeting so an effective way of communicating needs to be established.

It was interesting to find out the differences between how businesses and consumers convey their product offerings and how they make there decision-making processes.
For example, according to Swani, K., et al. 2014, In B2B transactions, due to to the detailed and complex nature of their transactions this causes buyers to be more involved and use high levels of cognition in transactions.
On the other hand in B2C transactions, consumers make their transactions with businesses rather impulsively, (Swani, K., et al. 2014) and instead use lower levels of cognition. This fact slightly helped in deciding what the tweets should state. For instance, (Swani et al 2014) discovered that businesses can put emphasis on conveying either their corporate brand strategies to other businesses such as intangible attributes of their brand including reputation .eg., (Cisco, IBM, DuPont,GE, Intel) (Swani, K., et al,2014) or a brand can put emphasis on conveying individual product offerings, for example, Unilever has a range of product brands like Dove but this doesn't convey the company's reputable attributes such as being an innovative company.
 It was stated in the hypothesis that the best method businesses should use is using their corporate brand strategy in messages in business to business marketing to motivate their customers to engage with their brand messages. Although this method is not as effective with business to consumer marketing.

Therefore it was concluded that:

H1a.

Corporate brand names appear more frequently in B2B tweets

than in B2C tweets.

H1b.

Product brand names appear more frequently in B2C tweets than

in B2B tweets.

Another difference between B2B and B2C marketing is information sharing online. The article proposed that within B2B marketing, buyers are really keen in knowing detailed specifications about the product they are buying. Marketing online can allow you to post links in tweets that can encourage someone to click on the link and find out more details about the company or product. For example, Cisco, IBM, and Accenture include cues such as "learn more", "read on" in their tweets to link prospects to white papers, testimonials, videos, product specifications, and other potentially valuable information,in exchange for detailed personal or company information (Swani K., et al, 2014). Now in terms of Twitter, it is proposed that within B2B marketing the use of hashtags will be more prominent in business marketing because buyers like information searching more actively than consumer audiences. The hash tags can include things like (e.g., #intel-powered,#cisco-linksys, #ibm-db2, and #avaya_nes) (Swani K., et al, 2014).
Therefore the hypothesis is that

Embedded links and cues for additional information search appear more frequently in B2B tweets than in B2C tweets.

H4b.

Hashtags appear more frequently in B2B tweets than in B2C tweets more frequently in B2C tweets than

in B2B tweets.

The final difference between b2b and b2c marketing that will be investigated as I found this interesting, is the selling strategy approach. One method of selling strategy is the use of direct calls. Direct calls to purchase are explicit statements encouraging prospective buyers to make an immediate purchase (Swani, K., et al, 2014). They are usually direct statements like "buy one get one free" and "shop today". Again, because of the complexity of business to business transactions, using direct selling approaches like this does not really cater to their best interest of other buyers. On the other hand, this type of selling strategy would better fit B2C, due to the fact the emphasis often is on selling and encouraging impulsive buying amongst consumers and the selling strategies convey this type of impulsive behaviour (Swani, K., et al, 2014).

Therefore it is concluded that

Direct calls to purchase appear more frequently in B2C tweets than

in B2B tweets.

Finally to test these hypothesis' an experiment was conducted, an analysis of the message strategies of tweets from the Fortune 500 companies were tested by research assistants.

The results confirmed h1a that corporate brand names do appear more frequently than in B2C tweets, but results denied product brand names appear more frequently in B2.

Secondly, supporting H4B the use of hashtags appeared more frequently in B2B tweets than in B2C tweets.

And lastly in support of H3, direct calls to purchase appear more frequently in B2C tweets than in B2B tweets.

The study did prove that there is indeed a difference between B2B marketing and B2C marketing. These implications from the experiment and the article in general suggests to businesses to keep on having a social media presence despite what they think of how effective Twitter is. Information from other research I have learned also suggest this as a lot of businesses who have a website, or a social platform like Twitter usually perform better in their business prospects. The strategies that the current businesses employed like conveying their brand attributes in their tweets more rather than product offerings seemed effective and therefore suggest to other businesses to employ the same strategies.


References

Kumar, V., & Mirchandani, R. (2012).Winning with data: Increasing the ROI of social media marketing.

MIT Sloan Management Review,54(1), 55–61.

Michaelidou, N., Siamagka, N. T., & Christodoulides, G. (2011).

Usage, barriers and measurement of social media marketing: An exploratory investigation of small and medi-

um B2B brands. Industrial Marketing Management,40, 1153–1159.

Rapp, A., Beitelspacher, L. S., Grewal, D., & Hughes, D. E. (2013).

Understanding social media effects across seller, retailer, and consumer interactions. 

Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,41(5), 547–566

Swani, K., et al., Should tweets differ for B2B and B2C? An analysis of Fortune 500 companies' Twitter communications, Industrial Marketing Management (2014)

Webopedia 'Microblog' (2014) [Online] <http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/microblog.html> [Accessed May 30th 2014]