This is my fourth and final post about the findings of Optify’s recently published business-to-business online marketing analysis.  The focus of this post is on what Optify found about social media usage.  (You can read my other posts on B-to-B web traffic and advertising here, here and here.)

Optify, which is a developer of digital marketing software for B-to-B marketing professionals, analyzes web behaviors and releases a report each year.  This annual “benchmark” report is particularly important in that the findings are reported from actual web activity, not from surveys.

The key takeaway findings on the social media front are these:

• Despite all of the continuing hype, social media remains a very small fraction of traffic and leads to B-to-B websites.  In fact, social media has contributed to less than 5% of B-to-B web traffic and leads.

• Facebook drives the more than half of the social media-generated web traffic to B-to-B websites, versus about one-third from Twitter and most of the remaining traffic from LinkedIn.

• Visitors who arrive at B-to-B sites from LinkedIn are more likely to view more pages per visit (~2.5 page views on average) than visitors who come from Facebook (~1.9 page views) or Twitter (~1.5 page views).

• Despite generating more traffic Facebook drives fewer actual B-to-B leads than either Twitter or LinkedIn.

• At this time, Twitter appears to be the most lucrative social media source for leads, with a higher-than-average conversion rate of ~2.1% (defined as a visitor taking an action such as submitting a form).

Because of this last data point, Optify posits that companies should not shy away from considering social media‘s potential as a source for leads as opposed to being just an  awareness tool.

I’m sure Optify’s figures don’t lie.  But I for one remain unconvinced about social media’s lead generation potential in the B-to-B realm.