While social media remains somewhat of a bit player in driving B2B website traffic, it accounted for about 5% of leads in 2012, per results [download page] from an Optify study. Comparing the largest players within the social media space, Facebook was the dominant driver of site visits, at a majority 54% share, followed by Twitter (32%) and LinkedIn (14%). But, when it came to leads, Twitter was far and away the most important social media source, generating 82% share of leads, compared to just 9% each for Facebook and LinkedIn.
Twitter not only was best for generating leads, but it also showed the highest conversion rates. Compared to the 1.22% average for social media (which was below the 1.6% average for all site sources), Twitter had a 78% higher conversion rate (2.17%), easily outperforming LinkedIn (0.8%) and Facebook (0.74%). That’s despite LinkedIn having the highest engagement rate by pageviews per visit (2.5), and Twitter the least (1.5).
The researchers note that companies with more than one lead or more than 10 visits per month from social media saw relatively high conversion rates and engagement rates, but that the percentage of companies who saw such results was low, indicating an “immaturity in the use of the channels.”
About the Data: Optify’s “2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report” examined more than 62 million visits, 215 million pageviews and 350,000 leads from more than 600 small and medium-sized B2B websites during 2012.
The data was collected using Optify’s visitor and lead tracking technology and includes only US based .com sites with 100 to 100,000 monthly visits. The digital channel analysis includes websites with a minimum of 10 visits per traffic source each month.
