Introduction to B2B Social Media Marketing

From being a ‘once a week’ link on LinkedIn, to now being a fully fledged channel to generate B2B leads, B2B social media marketing is currently going through its resurgence era.

With 75% of B2B buyers using social media to inform purchasing decisions, and 84% of C-level and VP-level buyers influenced by it, having a proper social media marketing strategy needs to be at the forefront of any inbound marketing plan.

But how do you do it? What’s the ‘new way’ of doing social media for a B2B business?

In this guide, we’ll explore why 95% of B2B marketers use social content as part of their content marketing strategy. We’ll also delve into how effective both an organic and paid strategy can be for B2B businesses, whilst giving our full B2B social media marketing strategy away so you can use it for yourself.

Only a single piece of the puzzle

Social media is a channel, and it should be utilised as part of a wider inbound marketing plan. Read our introduction and steal our Inbound Marketing playbook today.

What is B2B Social Media Marketing?

B2B social media marketing is the practice of using social media platforms to promote a business’s products or services to other businesses.

It involves creating and sharing content that is relevant to professional audiences to build brand awareness, generate leads, nurture client relationships, and drive business growth.

This practice is usually utilised over several different channels, including:

• LinkedIn - The Mecca for B2B marketing
• Instagram
• Meta
• X (or Twitter)
• Threads
• TikTok

And, truthfully, any other social media network out there. Wherever your audience consumes information, you should be there sharing content from your inbound marketing plan.

But is promoting content in this way any good?

Is B2B Social Media Marketing Effective?

Here’s the thing - I (the author) used to think B2B social media marketing was ineffective at driving leads and achieving commercial goals. You promote your hard-worked content through an engaging post on social media, which supposedly does two things: drives traffic to your website, and converts into leads.

But, according to acquisition tracking, very little was driving bottom-line revenue for the business.

Why is this? Statistically (according to Datareportal), people use social media primarily to connect with friends and family (51.5%), fill spare time (39.0%), and read news stories (34.4%). What they’re not there to do is learn about inbound marketing or, more importantly, make key B2B business decisions about whether to use a marketing agency or not.

However, a quick Google search (with a little AI help) tells me that:

No, social media marketing is not ineffective in B2B. It's a powerful tool for B2B businesses to reach their target audience, build relationships, and drive revenue. 79% of senior-level B2B marketers believe social media is effective in achieving their objectives.

So how can this be?

Well, there’s been a seismic shift in the B2B buying journey since the inception of inbound marketing back in 2006. Modern B2B buyers increasingly favour self-directed research, seeking information in their own time and preferred formats, often without direct engagement with sales representatives. This aligns itself with the capabilities of social media platforms and promoting content via channels like LinkedIn.

B2B social media marketing no longer acts as an ‘add-on’ to your inbound strategy. It now caters to the new B2B buying journey, helping consumers:

• Explore solutions on their own terms - social media empowers buyers to independently discover, compare, and evaluate options without needing to speak to a sales rep.
• Consume content in their preferred format - whether it’s video, text, or infographics, platforms, especially LinkedIn, allow people to deliver insights in multiple ways that suit them.
• Revisit stages of the journey with ease - with the B2B buying process now nonlinear, social media makes it easy for users to circle back to earlier stages like research or evaluation as needed, on their own time frame.
• Build trust through consistent value - posting useful, relevant content over time helps position your brand as a trusted expert and go-to source in the eyes of potential buyers.
• Stay connected without direct sales pressure - buyers can follow, like, and engage with your brand passively before they’re ready to convert, maintaining a low-friction touchpoint that nurtures interest over time.

With a now completely nonlinear buyer’s journey, B2B social media marketing is a brilliant way to maintain touchpoints with your target audience, deliver consistent value, and continue nurturing prospects, without the need for them to fill out a form or even go on your website in the first place.

We touched on social media being very effective at building trust with your audience. Today, trust is one of the biggest barriers to success for B2B businesses, and according to a survey by PwC, there is a glaring gap between the trust consumers have in companies (30%) and the trust business leaders think consumers have in their organisations (87%).

B2B businesses have found a clever way to make B2B social media effective despite a mistrust in vendor-led content: The ‘personal brand’.

Personal Brand vs Company Brand

First of all, what is a personal brand in the eyes of B2B social media marketing?

A personal brand refers to the unique identity, values, and voice an individual communicates online.

In the context of B2B social media marketing, it’s about how professionals, especially leaders, subject matter experts, and client-facing employees, position themselves to build credibility, trust, and influence within their industry or niche.

There’s no surprise, then, that personal branding has become such a major focal point in B2B marketing. With 61% of people more likely to trust recommendations from a friend, family member, or influencer on social platforms than vendors (38%), it solidifies the point that people are more likely to buy off people, not brands.

The social media algorithm has picked up on this. According to a study by RefineLabs, despite employees having a 46% lower follower count than their company page, they averaged more than 2.75x the impressions and 5x the engagement per post.

So what does this mean? Does this show that you should halt all posts from your company page and direct them all to personal profiles?

Well, no.

To build a brand, you need to be posting on your company’s social media profiles. That way, when anyone searches for your solution, you’ll be seen as present and actively finding ways to solve your prospect’s problems through your content.

However, alongside this, you should be actively encouraging your subject matter experts and leaders to promote and talk about this content, in their own words and relating it to their own stories.

This way, you’re leveraging the power of personal brand, but also contributing to the marketing efforts of the company, while delivering a level of authenticity and person-led content that pushes your efforts just that bit further.

What is B2B Paid Social Media?

Although this guide is mainly teaching you our playbook for organic B2B social media success, we can’t talk about this topic without discussing B2B Paid Social Media too.

Similar to other PPC options like Google, Bing, etc., B2B Paid Social Media refers to the use of paid advertising on social media platforms to promote products, services, or content to your target audience.

Unlike organic social media, which relies on unpaid posts and engagement, paid social ensures your message reaches a specific, targeted audience through sponsored posts, display ads, or promoted content.

Although this guide is specifically sharing our playbook for B2B social media marketing success, we felt we couldn’t talk about this subject and not mention that paid social media is a very effective channel. Unlike traditional PPC, paid social helps you target more specifically, even if your audience isn’t searching for your solution at this moment.

This makes it especially powerful as a tool for generating demand for your perfect-fit companies and decision makers, as you can target them with content that will grab their attention and help them in their day-to-day, without them having to actively be looking. The effectiveness of this is that, when they do come into market, they’ll resonate their problem with your solution, positioning you first against your competitors.

So yes, when done strategically, paid social media is highly effective for B2B marketing. Our top tips for making the most out of paid social are:

Focus on the platforms that matter most – Prioritise channels like LinkedIn for professional targeting, but consider others like Facebook or Instagram depending on where your audience engages.

• Create platform-specific content – Tailor your messaging, format, and creative to suit each social channel, rather than repurposing the same post everywhere.
• Continuously test and optimise – Run A/B tests, monitor performance, and adjust campaigns based on what’s working to maximise return.
• Be smart with your budget – Invest in campaigns that support clear business objectives and deliver measurable impact, not just broad awareness.
• Make it part of a wider strategy (obviously) – Ensure your paid social efforts complement your organic content, SEO, and lead-nurturing tactics for a joined-up approach.

B2B Social Media Marketing Examples

There are many examples of social media marketing working for businesses, especially in the B2C sector. However, in B2B it’s a little rarer.

Examples from companies such as Cognism and Alice de Courcy spring to mind, utilising her personal brand and releasing a book called ‘Diary of a CMO’, which explains her findings as a Chief Marketing Officer and how Cognism helped her in that role. But also, Refine Labs has got social media marketing down to a fine art with their constant barrage of useful webinars and videos, alongside first-party research to whet the appetite of B2B marketers.

We do want to share an example from our social media marketing to give insight as to how we drove success using the playbook we’re sharing below.

We created a ‘social-first’ mini-series called ‘HubSpot RevUp’, helping B2B marketers get a seat at the revenue table and show ROI using HubSpot. This worked as a webinar that generated a myriad of content, including blogs, video snippets, and an email newsletter. Through promoting the content across employee social media channels, the company's LinkedIn page, and email, we generated:

• 44 Leads
• 9 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
• 2 Sales-Accepted Opportunities

Now, we can’t share those that turned into customers, but what we’re trying to share is that, if used in the right way, B2B social media marketing can generate revenue and tangible leads. You just need to use it in the right way and have the correct playbook.

Our B2B Social Media Strategy

Here’s where we get to the nitty-gritty - how do you create an effective social media marketing strategy?

Through our many years of helping clients with their inbound marketing strategy - and therefore their B2B social media strategy - we’ve seen the complete evolution of social media and the new buyer’s journey.

Truthfully, this guide isn’t going to tell you the best days to post, or the best times for that matter, but rather how to create a conducive strategy that will resonate with your target audience. Think less of short-term gains, but of longer-term success with B2B social media marketing.

The first step to achieving this is understanding exactly who you’re talking to and why they should listen to you.

Or we can implement this playbook for you…

Building a B2B social media marketing strategy is time-consuming and often a shot in the dark. See how we can support you in building this successfully by downloading our Pricing Guide.

Step 1: Understand your Audience

To begin any marketing strategy, not just social media, you need to have a clear understanding of who you’re targeting. This includes knowing the firmographics of the companies you’re trying to target, the key stakeholders within that business, why they should be interested in your solution, and how you’re going to target them.

We like to split this into two parts: ideal company profiling (ICP) and customer personas.

ICP

An ICP is a strategic definition of the type of businesses that best fit or derive the most value from your solution. Unlike a buyer persona, which focuses primarily on the individuals within an organisation that you’re targeting, an ICP defines the broad characteristics of companies that you’re more likely to receive a greater lifetime value (LTV) from.

When deciding this, most businesses fall into the trap of logos they aspire to work for, rather than those that already see value in their offering. Whilst there’s nothing wrong with being aspirational, your messaging will resonate faster and perform better on social media if you’re laser-focused on companies that best match your existing customers.

The easiest way to define ICP is:

• Exporting your current customer data from your CRM
• Calculating total contract value (TCV) or customer lifetime value
• Identifying shared characteristics among your top-revenue accounts (e.g., sector, team size, tech stack)
• Grouping these into 2–3 ‘profiles’, you can target them with tailored content and campaigns

This gives you a strong idea of what companies you will be targeting with your B2B social media marketing strategy, but you need to combine that with well-developed personas.

Customer Personas

We’ve crafted many articles on how to craft the perfect buyer personas for B2B lead generation, which you can check out, but we still feel the need to mention it here because B2B businesses forget that they’re still marketing to humans, not other businesses. You need to really understand what the drivers to market are for the people you want to work with, what their problems are, and how your solution can solve that for them.

A couple of things to look into are:

• What are their biggest professional pain points? - Understand the problems that keep them from hitting their goals or KPIs.
• What questions are they asking before they even discover you? - Map the early-stage queries they’re searching online, as these shape your awareness content.
• What triggers their buying journey? - Identify what breaks their routine and makes them consider changing providers or adopting something new.
• Where do they go for insight and validation? - Think beyond LinkedIn. Include industry forums, niche communities, YouTube, podcasts, or trusted influencers.
• What concerns might they have about your solution? - Address objections upfront in your copy or social creative, before they even ask.
• Why might they choose a competitor instead? - Be honest about perceived weaknesses and counter them through clear messaging and differentiation.

There are many ways you can achieve this. If you don’t have existing client data or you’re a brand new startup, then conduct interviews with your decision makers within your ICP using tools like respondent.io or other surveying tools. From here, you can ask them questions that help you get a better understanding of their day-to-day lives and the pitfalls they encounter.

If you do have substantial customer and prospect data, then the easiest way to ascertain this is to listen to sales calls to uncover key information about how they came across your solution and what drove them to get in touch with you. As mentioned, there’s no true understanding of your customer if you’re not listening to what they’re saying and feeling.

If you don’t have sales calls or, god forbid, a CRM, then speak to your sales team. Understand the key points from above, and you’ll have a rudimentary key decision maker(s) customer persona that you can begin crafting an engaging narrative that resonates with them.

Final point on this - we’re not huge advocates for AI in marketing. Although useful in some capacity, we don’t believe it’s good at coming up with creative marketing ideas or writing copy.

However, it’s very good at crunching numbers and uncovering trends through data. Tools like ChatGPT can be very useful at making the process of coming up with your ICP and personas very quickly by analysing call logs for you, uncovering the types of companies that derive the most value from your solution, and so on.

Just trying to save you time…

Step 2: Have a strong narrative/POV

This is the part where most marketers get lost because they haven’t done the due diligence of understanding their audience.

Think about the last successful B2B social media marketing campaign you remember. Was it one that led with boring content and a stock image? Or was it one that had a strong opinion and thought leadership behind it?

Many B2B companies step back from having a strong opinion or narrative because they don’t want to be controversial or ‘rock the apple cart’. However, people wouldn’t be on your website, subscribed to your emails, or reading your content if they weren’t looking for advice as to how to solve their previously noted challenges.

As Axon Garside Managing Director, Ian Guiver, puts it:

 - that to me is the key thing, adding real value, talking about what we talk about, and finally, I would say, having an opinion because most of us go and ask people. The reason people are watching this now is they want an opinion. They want advice.

People crave real advice from real people. Think back to what we said about personal brand and why it’s so successful in modern B2B social media marketing. People want real-life examples about how these ‘influencers’ have solved the same problems they’re facing at this current moment. The most successful personal brands give that, whilst giving their opinion, and lo and behold, people follow them.

We admit, this is harder than we’re putting it here. However, for businesses, you can look at this through the lens of messaging and market positioning.

Say you’re a SaaS company that helps professional services firms automate onboarding for clients. You might, therefore, position yourself in the market as the ‘client onboarding automation platform for professional services,’ which, to put it plainly, is boring.

Now, look at this through the lens of a powerful opinion. Your target persona, perhaps a frustrated Operations Manager, feels that onboarding is slow, fragmented, and leads to poor first impressions with clients. You can then form a strong, opinion-led narrative such as:

“Clunky onboarding kills client trust - here’s how we’re fixing it.”

This turns a functional product into a mission-led message.

It speaks to a problem your audience is already frustrated with, and reframes your solution as a direct response to that pain point, not just a tool, but a challenge to the status quo.

Marry this opinion and narrative up alongside your inbound marketing content and social media messaging, and you’re on the right track to building a successful brand strategy across all channels.

Step 3: Connect with your Existing Inbound Marketing Plan

We told you that B2B social media marketing was only one piece of the puzzle. Therefore, for it to be successful, it needs to interlock with your Inbound Marketing strategy.

Following obtaining a deep understanding of your audience and creating messaging that will engage them, the next step is to create content that gets in front of your prospective clients.

Fundamentally, the channels you will be using to reach them are:

• Blogs and content marketing - Write informative articles to engage your audience and see yourself as the market leader in your industry.
• Email Marketing - Using your existing database to ‘push out’ and engage people with new content that will remind them of what your solution doe.
• SEO - Optimising your content to show up on search engines like Google and Bing to maximise visibility
• Webinars and Videos - Creating visual content to give a different dimension to your content, making it easier to share on social media.
• Podcasts - Similar to video content, creating an audio-first content platform to drive visitors to your brand.

However, now more than ever, businesses are using a social-first mindset to create content that will get in front of their audience. This is, as we mentioned earlier, because of the shift in B2B buying culture. As the buying process is nonlinear, people don’t have to come to your website anymore to find out information about how to solve their problem. They’re turning to influencers, social media, hell - even ChatGPT for information.

This means that you now need to be thinking more creatively about how you’re going to reach them and the channels your customers use to digest information (something which you should now know from your audience research).

For example, say you wrote a gated eBook and blogs surrounding it. Traditionally, B2B marketers would push that article out alongside a stock image in the hope that users will click on it and convert later on their website. Although not necessarily wrong, you need to think about how people are consuming content on social media. This may be in the form of:

• Videos
• Audio content
• Personal brand
• Snippets

We touch on content repurposing later on for B2B social media, but we just wanted to preface that, although your inbound marketing strategy should be connected, it shouldn’t be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ operation.

Step 4: Use the Right Channels

Another pitfall most marketers fall into is creating content across all social media channels, and not focusing on the ones that, firstly, generate commercial results, but secondly, the ones that your target audience spends the most time on.

For B2B, it’s fairly safe to assume that LinkedIn is the primary social media platform when it comes to promoting your business. After all, approximately 80% of LinkedIn users drive business decisions within their organisations, according to MarketMeMore.

However, other channels may have their use depending on your industry, personas, and type of content. Instagram, Meta, and X are all obvious examples of where you can post that the majority of your audience will be. Also, consider YouTube if you’re producing a lot of video content. After all, it is the second-largest search engine on the web.

But make sure you’re not ‘throwing spaghetti at the wall’ and posting on every channel just in case you miss someone out. Focus on the channels that generate real results for you and optimise your content for that channel.

This is why we say LinkedIn is a pretty safe bet when it comes to B2B social media marketing. If your audience is spending time on the platform, they’re hearing about things not only relevant to them, but also to their job.

The types of content they’re consuming on LinkedIn are work-related and professional. This means that, if you’re consistently posting, your content is within the realm of the content they’re consuming anyway. If you have a strong POV or narrative, this means you will stand out among the crowd.

Step 5: Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

As we’ve banged on about, today’s B2B buyers consume content in a variety of formats - articles, videos, carousels, podcasts - and they expect to find that content across different platforms.

Content repurposing ensures you’re meeting your audience where they are, while saving your team time and resources. It enables faster experimentation, too. Rather than waiting weeks to see how a long-form blog performs, social snippets and short-form formats can give you near-immediate feedback on what’s resonating.

There’s also a strategic value in repurposing when it comes to thought leadership.

Recording a webinar, podcast, or even a short conversation gives you a foundation for multiple touchpoints, blogs, audiograms, quote graphics, infographics, and video snippets. This not only humanises your brand, but it also turns individual experts into visible voices across social, further emphasising the personability of your business.

Finally, repurposing strengthens your existing inbound strategy. For example, a blog can evolve into a podcast episode, which, once people are resonating with the topic, can then become a lead-gen asset like an ebook. We’re not saying to replace plug-and-play inbound tactics, but rather elongate their lifecycle and turn them into assets easily consumable on social.

We do this in-house by following these steps:

• Start with a source asset – This could be a blog, webinar, podcast, or customer interview.
• Transcribe and break it down – Tools like Otter.ai can help you transcribe audio. Then use AI tools or manual copywriting to identify key takeaways and themes.
• Adapt for format and channel – Turn long-form into snackable social posts, video snippets for LinkedIn, carousel summaries, or even gated assets like ebooks.
• Track what performs – Use tools like HubSpot’s Campaigns feature to attribute performance back to revenue and report results clearly to stakeholders.

To further summarise this section, here’s what we said on our HubSpot RevUp podcast on this exact topic:

If you’ve got a great piece of content and you can chop it up into lots of different formats, there’s no reason whatsoever why you shouldn’t be doing that.

Step 6: Measuring B2B Social Media Success

Of course, the final step is measuring the effects of your social media strategy. However, there is a slight caveat here. Although a lot of the metrics you will be offered on social media platforms are useful, they’re not key indicators of generating revenue.

There’s no foolproof way to measure attribution 100% of the time, as software like HubSpot will report attribution differently depending on whether they accept cookies or if they left your website and came back at a later date, for example. The easiest way to measure B2B social media marketing success through revenue is via self-reported attribution.

This is very simple to implement. Across all forms on your site, add a field labelled “How did you hear about us?” with an open text option. This’ll allow your audience to share how they first came across your brand and, if they turn into customers, how many of your customers were first generated via social media.

We see it as another piece of first-party data, which gives you a lot of insight as to where your customers come from. However, you should report on other indicators of success, such as:

• Impressions: The total times your content is displayed in a user's feed.
• Shares: Indicates audience engagement and amplification, showing how far your message spreads.
• Reactions: Tracks emotional responses to posts, providing insights into audience sentiment towards your content.

This will help you get a better understanding of how well your content is engaging your audience and how well your message is resonating.

Social and Inbound: The Perfect Match

So there we have it, our B2B social media marketing strategy laid bare for you to use.

Hopefully, you’ve gained a greater understanding of how the buyer journey is more fragmented and self-directed than ever. And that social platforms, especially LinkedIn, have become crucial for reaching decision-makers on their terms, in formats they prefer, and without the friction of traditional sales engagement.

But, as we’ve said, it’s a single cog in the marketing machine. It works best when it’s integrated into a wider inbound marketing ecosystem. If you're ready to see how blog content, email nurture, SEO, video, and social can all work together to generate high-value B2B leads, read our Introduction to Inbound Marketing and steal the full playbook today.