We looked at the presence of Accenture, Bain, McKinsey, Cision, Factiva, Thomson Reuters and Euromonitor across various social media platforms such as slideshare, Twitter and Facebook.

How well the marketing teams at top B2B companies are using social media to monitor their brands is questionable though. Based on the results of Alterian’s annual survey published in January 2011, one-third of the nearly 1,500 marketing professionals (mostly US based) surveyed confessed that they have little or no understanding about social media conversations around their brands.

Fortunately, those who said they use a few ad-hoc tools to track and measure social media conversations outnumbered them by a few percentage points (38%).

Nearly four in five markers however, said they’re concerned about their brand being at risk.

We predict that more B2B companies will start to dedicate more resources to understanding the online conversations around their brands. This usually entails outsourcing to specalised service providers or having a junior staff in front of their computer screens each day, surfing and monitoring.

Some quick analysis using online tools or social media

Other than monitoring conversations about your brand, can you use social media benchmarks as a proxy for how your brand is performing online? The answer is yes, to a limited degree.

Such analysis uses free online tools and information and can be done by your own inhouse team.

Alexa

Take Web Traffic statistics on alexa.com for example. While the statistics shown on the site are probably not 100% accurate, it is still useful when comparing competitive figures as broad level benchmarks.

In our chart, you can see examples of incoming links as well as how these brands are placed in the world wide web by alexa.com with regards to how their traffic flow compares with all other websites over the last three months.

Accenture comes out on top here, even though they seem quite far behind McKinsey in terms of Facebook followers (see first chart above). The number of incoming links is a key factor to this success.

slideshare

We also compared the popular presentations uploaded to slideshare by these companies and the topics featured.

Here, you can see examples of the titles of the presentations, how long ago they were uploaded and how many number views each has garnered.

If your strategy is based on demonstrating thought leadership, slideshare is one platform to monitor topics that are popular.

twitter

Another useful social media to benchmark your B2B brand against competitors on, is obviously twitter.

It seems that more people (followers) track the tweets from McKinsey than all the other B2B brands in our sample group combined.

McKinsey also has the most number of fans on Facebook.

Depending on what metrics you decide is more important for your B2B brand (brand cache or online traffic), such simple social media analysis can be quick and easy – and helpful.