Jewel Marketing
Taiwan Content Marketing

B2B vs. B2C: Apples, Oranges & Social Media



By Jason Patterson

Founder of Jewel Content Marketing Agency
Branded social media has gone from golden boy to punching bag in the past few years. Ad fraud, influencer fraud, metrics gaming, organic decline, and AI-generated crap are all taking the shine off. And many are now questioning whether social media engagement has any real business value at all, or enough to justify the expense of doing it well.

But this argument paints too wide a brush, since B2B and B2C social media are two different ballgames.

Is It Truth vs. Beauty?

It's become a trendy claim that B2B and B2C marketing are really not all that different. And I agree that many of the underlying principles are the same. The marketing funnel is the same. People decide with emotions. Branding is important. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But each is still very much its own discipline in the real world, especially when it comes to social media.

It's All About Value

For social content to be engaged with, it must offer something the audience values. But there are differences between B2B and B2C marketing in how that value is created, what audiences are receptive to, and most importantly, what they're likely to share.

B2C Audiences Want To Share the Love

The B2C social content game is won largely through entertainment, working along those principles in terms of audience wants, such as humor, beauty, novelty, inspiration, intrigue, reassurance, etc.

B2B Audiences Want To Learn and Look Good

B2B social content is largely a matter of education, with audiences preferring content that is useful, valuable, or that makes them seem useful or valuable. Not that creativity or entertainment don't matter. They might be the very things that make B2B social content special enough to get shared. They just can't be all there is to it.

It's Objective vs. Subjective Value

The key difference here is that entertainment is largely subjective, and therefore a matter of intrinsic value. If something is funny, it gets shared. And that's it. It doesn't matter who shared it or who made it. What matters is that it's funny.

B2B social media doesn't work like that. Education is knowledge, which is largely a matter of objective value, with some subjectivity thrown in via authority and reputation.

For example, if somebody offered you a choice of free identical online course materials, except one set was from your local college and one was from Harvard, you'd probably choose the latter.

But Is Social Media Engagement Worth It?

The subjective value of entertainment gives B2C brands more options in terms of tactics for social media engagement, but its intrinsic value also creates a big interpretation problem.

To use an extreme example, a B2C brand could ceaselessly post TikTok videos of cats and babies doing adorable things and probably get very good engagement, and maybe a lot of followers, but that engagement could provide little to no value to the brand if they don't sell baby clothes or cat food.

Are Empty Social Media Calories Worth It?

Some B2C brands might be able to sustain themselves this way, but such tactics would probably hurt brands such as banks and insurance companies, as these brands depend heavily on perceptions of trust and authority to drive sales.

B2B brands are like this as well, which is one of the big reasons why branded glitter doesn't really work with them. Another reason is that need for objective value in content that I mentioned earlier. Sizzle can certainly help with a B2B conversion (think HP's "The Wolf" series), but you've gotta have the steak -- you won't get clicked without it.

While with B2C social media, the sizzle often is the steak.

The Problem of Many Hats

A common retort to such B2B marketing heresy is, "But we're all human."

And my retort to that is, "Yes, we're all human, but we're different people when we're with our colleagues, our friends, our spouse, or our kids." And the hat we wear among colleagues, in particular, has a big impact on the social media content we share.

If a vendor of business continuity solutions weighed in on the latest "Stranger Things" plot twist on LinkedIn, three things are likely to happen.

One, the audience loses respect for you. Two, some people would think your account has been hacked. And three, few would share it (except to mock it), because it would make them look stupid, and because the sheer dissonance of seeing such a non-sequitur on LinkedIn would be unpleasant to some.

And nothing goes viral without sharing.

What This All Means

I'm not saying that B2B social media engagement is inherently more valuable than B2C. I've seen B2B companies get so enamored with being busy that they end up creating content that gets consumed but that doesn't really drive leads (HR content, employee-generated stuff, blogs on tangential subjects).

And while such content can have some brandbuilding value, especially if it's good quality stuff, it might not be worth the time of your skilled content people if you're a startup or other non-leader brand with limited content marketing resources.

But with B2B social media being primarily an education game, successful engagement is inherently reinforcing for your brand. If you provide good intelligence and advice, you gain respect and authority. If you don't, you lose people, and business down the road.

But with B2C, respect and authority aren't always the game. Do funny tweets from fast-food restaurants build their brand? Perhaps not directly, but they do indirectly, since they do win attention and followers, which, at a later point, are eyes and stomachs that might be receptive to your "two for $2" sale.

Of course, B2C social media content isn't all branded prom dates. There's plenty of educational content out there in the form of "how to" videos, guidebooks, and the like.

And plenty of brands (Grammarly) are creating legit entertaining content that builds on their brand in some way. But with the sheer variety of social tactics available to B2C brands, interpretation of the data they generate is tricky, and requires more scrutiny.

B2B has fewer options, and thus fewer shortcuts, making engagement interpretation relatively straightforward, and easier to take at face value.

B2B won't go viral on empty calories alone. Metrics can still be gamed to some extent, and any social media practitioner worth their salt will know the tricks, but those tricks will largely enhance or exaggerate, they won't make bad content good.

Maybe It's Meaningless

As to whether social media is worth it at all, I feel that this is a moot point until someone comes up with a better idea, especially now that AI is lowering the cost of keeping branded social channels populated.

We're in an age of small screens and cord cutting. SEM, SEO, and retargeting are good ways to reach people who are already looking (as is social media as a search engine), but you need to get your message in front of people who aren't yet shopping for what you sell and that's still right up social media's alley.

Learn To Live With the Suck

Someone might respond at this point, "But branded social media sucks."

And my response would be, "Your point being? Most advertising sucks." It's always been that way. Most TV commercials are terrible. Most radio ads are annoying. Most print ads are unmemorable. But great ads do slip through the approval process occasionally.

So why don't we have more great branded social media content? I think it relates to the nature of the medium, and how it's changing. Social media is inherently a marathon, a dripfeed.

It's always moving, always scrolling, with content often consumed out of the corner of your eye. This limits the incentive for brands to publish great content organically, especially with less-polished personal content increasingly dominating our feeds.

And pay to play causes brands to treat social media more like a sprint, which really doesn't fit. You simply cannot command an audience's full attention with social media like you can with a less shifty medium.

And there are often too many layers of approvals involved when the social is paid. Too many boxes to tick. Too many stakeholders. Too many cooks. Resulting in bland copy with half a dozen hashtags.

You need good marketers and good creatives to create good social media, not corporate types trying to do the jobs of good marketers and good creatives. And not AI by itself either.

One Last Thing

Despite everything I just said about B2B social focusing on education and authority, I didn't say brands should always be dry and academic about it.

Granted, some brands should be dry and academic more than others (like consultancies). Also granted, some content formats should have a certain pseudo-scientific air (like whitepapers). But dryness carries no competitive advantage on social.

Social media is inherently a wet medium. And you'll always be fighting for attention with splashy content. So it would behoove B2B brands to adopt a little splash.

It would also behoove them to spend less time focusing on products, features, and benefits, which can be hard for B2B brands to explain given the limited time, space, and context you have on social media, and spend more time illustrating category entry points (CEPs), which are situations your prospects might encounter where what you sell can actually be used (where hopefully they recall your name).

B2C brands do this a lot (i.e., "Rolaids spells relief"), but I think B2B neglects this because they think it too common, too B2Cish. But this is how brands are built. And brand familiarity is how B2B is won.

Facts and general information, that one-two punch of B2B marketing, unfortunately cannot be branded.

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