Abstract

Have you ever questioned yourself, what B2B companies are doing on Facebook? As the world’s largest Social Media network in the world, Facebook has fastly obtained the attention of thousands of marketers aiming to engage and communicate with their core targets through Facebook Business Pages. This makes perfectly sense, as Facebook in this context might be perceived as an ideal platform to influence and reach the billions of consumers. However is the same context due for the B2B marketers? When accounting for the higher risk perceptions due to larger complexity and increased need for one-to-one trust building, using Facebook as a communication platform to target B2B buyers might be questionable. Derived from our interest in Social Media generally and our fascination of this worlds largest Social Media site, we have chosen to concentrate this thesis on this questionability. This Master Thesis is therefore focused on gathering an understanding of, how B2B companies use Facebook Business Pages and on that basis evaluate whether this platform is recommendable to apply, when considering that each an every company has limited resources and every marketing channel selection should on that basis be evaluated in terms of the benefits it can provide the companies with. While working with this thesis in hand and on basis of our analysis of 68 Danish B2B companies using FBP, one of the things that quickly came to our attention was that Facebook is not recommendable for each and every B2B Company and the 1 billion users should therefore not be considered as the main point of attraction. Our study has shown that the Facebook Business Pages primarily are recommendable for companies with below 200 followers, 500 employees as well as companies that only target the national markets with their Facebook Business Pages and thereby leave the international aspect out of the picture. Our findings also showed that Facebook Business Pages are not recommendable to apply for sales- and customer-oriented activities but rather for internal communication by focusing on engaging the company's employees, as those are the main drivers behind the engagement on the Facebook Business Pages of Danish B2B companies. Hence, based on our analysis of the 68 Danish B2B companies the B2B marketers should not consider the Facebook Business Pages as a lead generation channel, but rather as a channel for employee engagement.

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A master thesis from Aalborg University

B2B on Facebook?