Usage of social media in B2B marketing communications: An explatory study

People have owned new communication channels thanks to the development of digital technologies. Internet, which is the most important one of those channels, offers to its users the greates communication tool which is called as social media. Businesses have not been indifferent to the massive traffic on social media and rapidly moved their communication activities into social media platforms. Digital media and social media in particular have changed the marketing communications' dimensions. Effective and beneficial usage of social media by businesses have aroused interest by both academia and markets. Although many studies on this subject take place in literature, studies focused on B2B markets are limited. Based upon the lack of studies on this subject, this study aims to contribute to the literature by determining social media platform selection of B2B companies and classifying the social media posts of companies in terms of marketing communication tools. Besides, engagement performance of the shared content have been tried to be measured. For this purpose, 6735 separate posts which take place in 86 different Turkish social media accounts belong to 40 B2B companies have been analysed. In this study, content analysis with a qualitative approach have been applied for the classification. Communicational performance of the posts have been measured by measuring the engagement rates. The results indicate that B2B companies lack a comprehensive social media strategy and tend to imitate B2C company accounts in terms of their social media content.