Benefits of Social Media in Business-to-Business Customer Interface in Innovation

The aim of this research is to explore social media and its benefits especially from business-to-business innovation and related customer interface perspective, and to create a more comprehensive picture of the possibilities of social media for the business-to-business sector. Business-to-business context was chosen because it is in many ways a very different environment for social media than business-to-consumer context, and is currently very little academically studied. A systematic literature review on B2B use of social media and achieved benefits in the innovation context was performed to answer the questions above and achieve the research goals. The study clearly demonstrates that not merely B2C’s, as commonly believed, but also B2B’s can benefit from the use of social media in a variety of ways. Concerning the broader classes of innovation –related benefits, the reported benefits of social media use referred to increased customer focus and understanding, increased level of customer service, and decreased time-to-market. The study contributes to the existing social media –related literature, because there were no found earlier comprehensive academic studies on the use of social media in the innovation process in the context of B2B customer interface.