Social media use in B2B context : A multi-case study on the use of social media by B2B companies 

Abstract: In the past decade, there has been a transformation in how businesses are done, many business chose to adopt digitization and others were forced to go with the flow. As a part of this digital revolution, social media has reserved a big share of this transformation in how companies do their marketing and communicate their product and brand image to their customers. Social media in a business to customer context has been very common since the birth of social media, companies had realized its benefit, and however, it is still in an early phase in a business to business context. Social media has become an effective marketing tool for B2B companies, yet, there are still drawbacks when companies fail to know how to use such platforms to their benefit and merely have a shy presence or do not have a well-defined strategy to the use of social media in the most effective way. A vital step when incorporating social media in marketing is to create a clear goals and metrics. However, it has been seen that many companies lack the expertise, resources and the know-how, to implement a social media marketing strategy. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the practices of B2B companies when they use social media without a clearly defined social media marketing strategy, what they do when they use social media.