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October 22, 2026

Are Your B2B Buyers Actually on Facebook?

"My clients aren't on Facebook."

I hear it on a lot of my calls with B2B firms. Different words each time.

The president of a leadership development firm that sells to CEOs: "we made the assumption it would never work."

A property finance broker: "I don't think many of them are just applying for a £5 million loan through a Facebook ad."

A sales trainer: "I don't know that people are going to look for sales training on Facebook."

A strategy consultant whose clients run billion-dollar companies: "I don't know a single one of them that's on Instagram."

It makes sense. Facebook feels like birthday posts and vacation photos. LinkedIn feels like where business happens.

But "my clients aren't on Facebook" is a factual claim. You can check it.

So let's check it.

Who's actually on Facebook

Pew Research surveyed more than 5,500 American adults this year about which platforms they use. Here's what they found:

Now LinkedIn, the place everyone assumes their buyers live:

Read those side by side.

Among college graduates, MORE people use Facebook than LinkedIn. Same for six-figure households.

Your buyer isn't a separate species. They're a 52-year-old with a business, a family group chat, and a phone they look at in bed. 🤷

An executive coach I spoke with, who works with engineering founders, figured this out the hard way. Their buyers are "too busy to be looking at LinkedIn, they're definitely not scrolling the feed." During the work day, sure. At 10pm on a Tuesday, they're on their phone, and the odds are good Facebook is one of the apps they open.

"But they're not on Facebook to buy consulting"

Correct.

Nobody opens Facebook thinking, "Let me find a leadership development firm." Nobody searches Instagram for a £5 million loan.

That broker was right about that part. Then they added, "But you never know."

Here's what they were missing. The ad isn't there to catch people who are shopping. It's there to reach people who have the problem and haven't started looking yet.

That's most of your market. Marketing researchers call it the 95:5 rule: at any given time, the large majority of business buyers aren't shopping for what you sell. Then something changes. A big contract lands, or a key person quits.

When that happens, they don't start from zero. They start with the names they already recognize.

That executive coach again:

"You can talk all day long about why it's a great idea to have a coach. They don't give a shit. Something has changed in their life."

Your ad's job is to be one of the names they already know when that day comes. And to occasionally catch them on the day it does.

LinkedIn costs about four times as much to show your ad

Here's the part nobody mentions when they tell you B2B belongs on LinkedIn.

Metadata, a B2B advertising company, looked at 153 B2B advertisers who spent $57.6 million on ads in 2025. Their numbers:

To be fair to LinkedIn, Metadata itself points out that a cheaper lead isn't automatically a better one. That's true. It's also why we judge ads by qualified calls on your calendar, not by clicks or forms.

But four times the price to be seen is a big handicap when you're testing what works.

That executive coach had tried LinkedIn ads on their own. They spent about £1,500 in a few weeks. Their verdict: "the targeting was hard to impossible," and they were "competing with people with very deep pockets."

Meaning the big consulting firms, who can afford LinkedIn's prices all year.

Your competitors already know this

Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, keeps a public library of every ad running on its platforms. Anyone can look.

On one of my sales calls, I pulled it up for a well-known coaching program aimed at business owners. It had about 30 different ads running at the same time.

They're not doing that because it doesn't work.

When Facebook really is the wrong place

I'm not going to pretend it's right for everyone.

That strategy consultant, the one who works with CEOs of billion-dollar companies? I told them I couldn't help.

Their buyers are the CEOs of a narrow band of very large companies. Their deals start from relationships, peer networks and the occasional article in the right publication. And they told me plainly that advertising on Facebook wasn't consistent with their brand. With all three of those true, ads weren't the answer, and I said so.

Facebook is probably wrong for you if:

If none of those are true, your buyers are almost certainly scrolling past somebody's ad tonight. It just isn't yours.

How ads find the right business buyers

Facebook doesn't let you pick "CEOs of companies with 50 to 500 employees" from a menu the way LinkedIn does. So how do you reach the right people?

Two ways.

The ad does the first filter. An ad that says "Your company grew 40% this year and you're still the one approving every decision" only stops one kind of person. A college student scrolls right past it. A business owner who's living it stops. Facebook notices who stops and shows the ad to more people like them.

A few questions do the second. When someone taps the ad, they land on a short page about you. Before they can book a time, they answer a few quick questions: how big is the company, what's going on, how soon do they need help. Anyone who isn't a fit never gets offered a time on your calendar.

So you're not talking to "everyone on Facebook." You're talking to the few people the ad was written for, after they've told you they fit.

Find out for your market

I run an agency that does exactly this for B2B firms. We run the ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google, and we put calls with qualified buyers on your calendar.

Before we spend real money, we test. We write a handful of short ads, each describing your buyer's problem a different way, and run them for a few days on a small budget. If your buyers respond, you'll know quickly. If they don't, you've found out for a few hundred dollars instead of assuming for another five years.

Everything runs from an ad account in your company's name. And you pay us per qualified call, not per click.

If you've always assumed your buyers aren't on Facebook, book a strategy call with me. Tell me who your best client is and what one is worth. I'll tell you honestly whether ads can reach people like them. If they can't, you'll hear that from me too.