B2B Marketers: LinkedIn is not always your best platform

When it comes to B2B marketing on social platforms, there is something almost Pavlovian about the way many marketers default to LinkedIn. Intuitively, it may make sense. LinkedIn is the platform where you wear your work clothes. It’s where your posts showcase your business acumen, where you interact with like-minded professionals. Think of it as a giant online Rotary Club. Meet the right people, and there are deals to be had, jobs to be won.

But LinkedIn may not always be the right choice, even for companies whose marketing is exclusively B2B. There are good reasons not to overlook a little player in the social space called Facebook. In fact, Zuckerberg.com has some advantages over LinkedIn that should compel you to take another look at what might be an all-too-narrow LI strategy. Here are some things to consider:

The universe.

To begin with, there is the sheer size difference between the two platforms. Earlier this summer, Facebook reported its audience had grown to 2 billion active users. Let that sink in. More than one-quarter of the earth’s population is on Facebook. Put another way, if you exclude the world’s two most populous countries, there are more active users on Facebook than the entire rest of the planet. Just as impressive is the speed in which it has been growing. Facebook’s signed up its second billion users in just the last five years.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, counts 443 million users, just over 100 million of whom are active every month. Sure, that’s a ton of folks, but it pales in comparison to Facebook. Facebook has 1.3 billion active daily users, more than 10 times that of LinkedIn. The size differential makes David vs. Goliath look like a fair fight.

You are who you are.

Many of us have our work world persona and a distinct home life persona, and we like to think there is an impervious line that separates the two. But the fact of the matter is, you are the same person in both worlds – you may just expose different parts of yourself in each. If you are an engineer with product development skills, an MBA and work for a Fortune 1000 company in the Midwest, none of that part of your professional DNA goes away once you log on to Facebook.

You may see yourself on Facebook as a dad who likes the Bulls and Bono, roots for Purdue, enjoys mountain vacations and Game of Thrones, but behind that personal veneer is still that engineer. And more often than not, Facebook knows that side of you as well and is poised to market to you. So even though you may not be strolling through the corridors of Facebook as if you were at work, don’t be surprised to see content in your news feed that relates to the professional side of your life.

Dollars vs. cents.

Ever seen the old Saturday Night Live commercial about the bank that only makes change? When asked how they made money, a bank official deadpans, “Simple: volume.” Facebook actually has a true-to-life advantage when it comes to volume, and as a consequence, its rates for reaching target audiences are far below those of LinkedIn – dramatically so.

Targeting algorithms.

What has made both platforms an essential part of any outbound marketing strategy is their respective capacities to target specific demographic and user segments – i.e. your key audiences and prospects. Facebook offers far more ways to slice and dice that user profile data, giving you not only a greater set of options but, in many cases, more precision in your targeting.  A case in point: among Facebook’s vast targeting options is the ability to target users based on their behavior (both online in the real world).  You can target people based on recent charitable donation to veterans causes, for example.  Want to find credit union members, pinpoint heavy TV viewers or focus on frequent business travelers?  Facebook lets you target these users based on their behavior.

B2B marketing works really well on LinkedIn, and there’s nothing really wrong with a content strategy that focuses on it. But don’t make the mistake of letting LinkedIn be your exclusive B2B social strategy. There’s a reason that Facebook has grown to be such a dominant cultural phenomenon, and it goes well beyond cute cat videos.