The buzz about Social Media and Social CRM abound, but more and more people are begininng to evaluate the effectiveness of investing in Social Media
With the help of the TAS Group, Dave Stein and his company ES Research Group just completed a very interesting study–”The New Social Media: Do They Enable B2B Selling?”–which measures the top social media tools’ effectiveness in B2B selling. You can take a look at the key findings at www.esresearch.com/socialmedia the executive summary is available here. The survey was filled out by nearly 400 sales professionals in the U.S.
For the lazy or only mildly interested, here is where they ranked in order of effectiveness:
1. Hoover’s/OneSource is the most helpful in winning B2B Sales at 54%, although 61% of those surveyed used it
2. LinkedIn is more widely used than other social media platforms, with 86% of those surveyed using it, but it helped in winning sales for 42% of those surveyed
3. Twitter is being used by almost a third of those surveyed 31%, but is only producing results for 13% more thoughts on this later
4. Plaxo and Facebook are being used by about half of those surveyed 50% and 48% respectively, who claim be to similar traction as with Twitter – 13% and 15% respectively
The report’s conclusions were…
LinkedIn is the favorite and most-used
Twitter is an anomaly, too new to fully gauge, possibly it will be limited to specific industries as an effective sales tool
Facebook is for family and friends
Fee-based services like Hoover’s and OneSource are very strong in their following and utility
