Study on the effectiveness of different types of B2B advertising

Abstract

This paper tries to explore more on the use of social media as a marketing tool in the B2B segment. The extant gap in the theoretical and the empirical world increases the challenges in understanding the adoption of social media by the B2B companies. Moreover, the adoption rate and sentiment for social media vary across sectors, regions, and channels. The most popular channels are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Literature review and Industry reports helped to understand the theoretical and the empirical world. This paved the way for the methodology adopted for further analysis. This paper explores the use of social media such as Twitter, a form of advertising, for three reasons such as persuasive, informative, and reminder. We also gauged the sentiment of the tweet that helps organisations to put their message across succinctly. Since social media use varied across sectors, four dyads were chosen – Power, IT services, Software, and Consulting. The rationale behind this approach was to understand if all organisations use social media to the same extent (adoption), which indirectly confirms the use of social media marketing. Finally, since quantitative analysis is limited to organisations within sectors, expert interviews (qualitative analysis) confirmed the findings of the study.