Most B2B companies seem to view social media as an irrelevant channel. It’s often argued that social media seems to be reserved for consumers only. While it may be true that social media is a lot more popular for consumers than it is for businesses, to completely ignore it is selling your B2B short.

Most digital advertising campaigns run on one of three categories: affinity, intention and remarketing. Social media channels might find it difficult to capture an audience based around intention, but there are definitely a few scenarios where social media can be highly effective for B2B companies.

Social media is a great way to engage an audience at the very start of their journey to purchase. If you map out a complete timeline of purchasing decision for B2B end-to-end, you will see that at a certain point you need to capture an audience.

Dynamic prospecting is the basic idea of using machine learning to predict which news feed items that your audience would most likely want to see. Unbeknownst to most, Facebook uses the sites that are open on the same tabs as Facebook on a desktop computer to predict whether an audience would like to see a certain product.

Is it ethical? Debatable. Is it effective? Absolutely.

In social media, dynamic prospecting might seem like a gigantic waste of money if you’re trying to get quick wins, but as we all know, playing the long game is almost always better for revenue. With a long buying cycle, dynamic prospecting can be the best thing for your business in finding new audiences to target.

Remarketing is usually reserved for Google display ads. While Remarketing is usually highly effective for Google Display, the effective click-through rate and cost-per-click make Remarketing on Google only really useful if the audience is on their way to a purchasing decision.

Remarketing on social media can be highly effective in certain scenarios, provided you install the Facebook Pixel on your site. If an audience member hits your site, Facebook Pixel will automatically tag that audience member, so that next time they log on to Facebook they will see your site. This can be just as effective as Google Display, and with a combination of dynamic prospecting and remarketing, you might find your B2B able to access audience members it never was able to before.

So there you have it. In short answer, yes, social media is relevant for B2B.