Social media analytics for business-to-business marketing

Abstract

Organizations continue to incorporate social media analytics into their routines to improve their performance outcomes. However, industrial marketing literature is lagging in that it has only explored the utility of social media as a promotional tool rather than as an analytical tool. Accordingly, this study is one of the first scholarly attempts to extend the concept of social media analytics into the industrial markets and advance a theoretical (vs. technical) perspective on social media analytics. Using the organizational learning lens, we define social media analytics as activities related to the acquisition and analysis of social media data and the dissemination, retention, and utilization of the findings. This theoretical study (i) guides future academic research by providing relevant questions and (ii) offers managerial implications of social media analytics, specifically, in the B2B sales.