Now that 80% of B2B buyers expect the same buying experience as their B2C peers, B2B marketers increasingly look toward their B2C counterparts for inspiration. Social media is one area in B2B marketing where the “consumerization” of B2B is strongly being felt, and nowhere is this shift more significant than in the Canadian lead generation space.

According to a 2017 eMarketer report, B2B marketers in Canada now use tools that traditionally belong to B2C teams in order to help them better understand their target audience and improve their marketing programs. Social media management platforms rank as one of the leading B2B tech spending categories for Canada-focused marketers, with lead generation as a primary goal for their marketing investment.

In addition, findings from Social Media Examiner’s industry study from 2017 indicate that, on some level, B2B and B2C social media strategies continue to converge. This is shown, for example, by B2B marketers’ growing adoption of B2C platforms such as Facebook as their preferred social channel.

All this means that Canada B2B marketers need to look at overall social media developments, not just the partial blips that customarily show up on their B2B-calibrated radar. That’s exactly what we’ll do in this post. We’ll dissect the five biggest social media trends in Canada and talk about how each of them potentially impacts lead generation.

1. Preferences slightly differ from U.S. audiences

Pollara’s latest SOCIALscape report shows that 91% of Canadian adults online have at least one social media account (predominantly Facebook), which they access more often through mobile (60%) than via desktop or laptop (35%).

Using social media data compiled by Statista and research carried out by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, here’s how Canadian social network preferences compare with U.S. users: