The Strategic Use of Social Media in the Business-to-Business Context. Two Social Media Users’ Clusters

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an exploratory study that focuses on Greek companies’ social media use, in the context of business-to-business. Specifically, we make a set of hypotheses, regarding that: (1) social media use will be related to enhanced business performance, and, (2) services’ producing companies will use the social media more intensively, than their goods’ producing counterparts. In order to test our hypotheses, we addressed to a randomly selected sample of 800 companies and collected data from 210 volunteer marketing and social media managers (response rate 26.3%), using the LinkedIn as the research field. A series of statistical analyses, using the SPSS 21, provided reliability and validity of our research measures. Our hypotheses were supported by advanced statistics. Correlation analysis provided evidence for our first hypothesis. In turn, cluster analysis depicted two clusters, the ‘SM Innovators’ and the ‘SM Skepticals’, which were significantly related to the services’ and the goods’ producers, respectively. It appears that SM inclusion in b-to-b marketing plans is related to enhanced business performance. Also, SM Innovators reflecting the services companies are more beneficial, than their goods producing counterparts. Implications to academics and practitioners are also discussed.