After examining the Twitter activity of North American marketing executives in general (Q1 2013), digital marketers (Q2 2013), and B2B marketers (June-August), LeadTail and DNN have set their sights on the behavior of marketers who work at mid-size companies ranging from 500-5,000 employees. Not surprisingly, the study [download page] – which covers activity in Q4 2013 – finds that B2C and B2B marketers are using various social networks to different degrees to share content on Twitter.
The results for the most part correlate with existing notions of which social platforms are more popular with each type of marketer:
- Compared to their B2B counterparts, mid-size B2C marketers are more likely to be sharing content from Instagram (51% vs. 41%), YouTube (50% vs. 42%) and Facebook (28% vs. 13%); while
- B2B marketers are more likely to be cross-posting content from LinkedIn (24% vs. 14%) and SlideShare (18% vs. 9%).
Interestingly, both groups are almost equally as likely to be sharing content from Foursquare, Vine, Pinterest and Google+.
As the analysts remind, it’s worth noting that because the report covers Q4 activity (i.e. the holiday season), certain platforms such as Instagram and YouTube may be over-represented. Indeed, the study finds B2B mid-size marketers, for example, to be far more likely to be sharing content from those networks than the average B2B marketer on Twitter during Q3.
Elsewhere in the study, results show that among mid-size company marketers’ 100 most popular shared content sources on Twitter, 43% were mainstream media, while 34% were industry media. That’s much the same breakdown as LeadTail found in its study of marketers in general.
About the Data: The 504 North American marketing professionals were identified based on criteria such as job function, seniority, and type of company. The study looked at 91,805 tweets and 45,731 shared links. Tweets were published between October 1, 2013 and December 31, 2013. The media number of followers per marketer was 690.
