What is social media advertising?
With social media advertising you pay a platform to show your message to people you define yourself. On LinkedIn you do that on attributes from someone's profile, such as job title, seniority and company size. On Meta, meaning Facebook and Instagram, you target interests and behaviour, or your own lists such as website visitors and customer contacts.
That difference from a search engine shapes how you use it:
- Nobody is searching for anything at that moment. You interrupt someone in their feed, so the message has to land in one glance.
- You also reach the people who weigh in but never search themselves, such as a director or a buyer.
- You pay for reach, not for a question that already exists. That makes advertising on social media a channel for demand generation, not for capturing demand.
In our campaigns for B2B clients, LinkedIn and Meta are the two platforms that matter. TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat stay out of this article for that reason.
LinkedIn or Meta: who are you looking for, and at what stage?
Guides on social media advertising usually list the platforms and leave the choice to you. We turn that around. Choosing between LinkedIn and Meta is not a matter of taste, but of two questions: who are you looking for, and at what stage of the buying journey is that person.
Pick LinkedIn when you want to target role and company. On LinkedIn you can upload a list of company names and, within it, choose the roles that take part in the decision. It is the channel for becoming known at companies that are not searching yet. How that works, from formats to billing, is in our article on LinkedIn advertising in B2B.
Pick Meta in two situations. The first is recognition: someone visited your site or saw you on LinkedIn, and then sees you again on Instagram or Facebook. The second is the owner who buys for themselves: a webshop owner, a freelancer or the owner of a small company. Those people are their own purchasing department, and Meta reaches them outside working hours.
How we use that channel is on our page about Meta advertising for B2B.
| Who are you looking for | At what stage | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Decision-makers at companies in your customer profile | They do not know you yet | |
| The same decision-makers | They already saw your site or your LinkedIn post | Meta, as repetition |
| Owners who buy for themselves | Any stage | Meta |
What does not work is running Meta cold to find new companies. Targeting by role or company is less precise there than on LinkedIn, and in our campaigns a cold campaign therefore landed mostly with consumers. That shows up as plenty of reach and cheap clicks, with no meeting behind them.
How we approach social media advertising in B2B
We work in four steps, and the order is the point: first who, then where.
- Who are you looking for. We pin down which companies and roles you want to speak to, and whether the buyer decides alone or on behalf of an organisation. That is your ideal customer profile, and it decides the platform.
- LinkedIn for people who do not know you yet. Decision-makers at companies in your profile see you on LinkedIn first, with a message that fits their role.
- Meta for recognition and for the owner. Whoever visited your site sees you again on Instagram and Facebook. If the owner buys for themselves, the campaign starts here.
- Measure with sales. Every enquiry reaches the account manager with campaign and platform attached, so you see per channel which meetings it produced.
Without a link between your site, your CRM and the ad accounts, steps three and four are out of reach. Then only cold reach is left on Meta, and nobody knows which channel brought the meeting.
What we saw
In our campaigns we saw that Meta only starts working in B2B once the audience consists of people who already know you, or of people who make the purchase decision themselves. Two projects show those two situations.
At Partnify, a platform for freelancers, the freelancer is the buyer. There we ran social advertising from launch, first across Europe, and then focused on the countries with the strongest leads.
1,250 freelancers signed up
At Mitsubishi Forklift Trucks the buyer is a company, and nobody orders a forklift from their feed. There Meta ran on recognition: ads per industry for logistics, manufacturing and wholesale, with retargeting of people who had already visited the website.
ads per industry for logistics, manufacturing and wholesale, with retargeting of website visitors
How do you measure the return on social media advertising?
Not inside the platform. Ads Manager and Campaign Manager show impressions, clicks and cost per click. In our campaigns a click on LinkedIn costs more than a click on Meta, and neither one is a meeting.
So measure outside the platform, with sales:
- Enquiries per platform, with the campaign attached, in your CRM.
- Sales meetings that follow from those enquiries, reported back by the account manager.
- Companies from your customer profile that visit your site after a campaign, identified with a tool such as Leadinfo.
- What account managers hear at the table: "I saw you come by".
That is how you compare LinkedIn and Meta on what they deliver instead of what they cost per click. How you build that pipeline, from first awareness to meeting, is in our article on B2B lead generation. On Meta you can also send the sales from your CRM back to the platform, so the campaign learns which leads become customers.
Choose the platform by who you are looking for, not the other way round
Social media advertising in B2B does not start with the platform but with the question of who you are looking for. LinkedIn for decision-makers who do not know you yet, Meta for recognition after that and for the owner who buys for themselves. Judge both on the meetings with sales, not on the figures in the ad platform.
