What’s the point of a B2B social media presence?

My philosophy on B2B social media strategy and how it contributes to ROI.

Hey!

Welcome to Social FIles—your no-BS guide to growing a successful B2B social media presence.

Quite the week, huh?

If you missed the news: Social Files is independent. What changes?

Not much, for you. The 2 most notable changes to the publication will be:

  • I’m reducing my sending cadence from 2X per week to 1X per week (Monday 5pm EST). This lets me give each edition more focus—better content for you. I’m stoked.

  • The newsletter already leaned this way, but now I’m making it official—B2B social and content is the focus of my content going forward.

So, if you’re in consumer social and want to stick around, I’d love to have you! But if you don’t care to read mainly B2B stuff, I also get it. Zero hard feelings.

This transition is a massive win. There are so many content ideas that I’ve had brewing in the back of my head that I’ll get to execute on. I get to go deep on 1 send per week, versus writing to hit a deadline. Again, I’m stoked.

If you have any questions, shoot me a reply and I’m happy to clarify whatever!

Now, let’s get into today’s deep dive.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

What’s the point of a B2B social media presence?

My philosophy on B2B social media strategy and how it contributes to ROI.

Whether you’re in-house at a company or part of an agency, we all need one thing to actually do anything meaningful with our social strategy:

Buy-in.

My goal with this piece is twofold:

  1. If you’re a social media marketer or an agency operator, this piece will give you the tools you need to go into a pitch meeting confidently.

  2. If you’re a founder or CMO, this piece will explain why you should listen to your team in said pitch meeting.

Now, we need to clear something up.

Brand awareness is a half-truth.

In marketing, certain phrases get repeated so many damn times we all assume they must be true.

My (least) favorite:

Organic social media is a brand awareness play.

Yes. Organic social does lead to more brand awareness. Yes. Brand awareness is helpful.

But to say ‘brand awareness’ is the only value a strong social presence brings your company is to massively undersell what a content engine and do for your business.

Be careful if you’re a marketer trying to sell organic social using the ‘brand awareness’ angle. Brand awareness doesn’t bring in revenue. At least, not directly.

And I don’t know if you’ve seen, but it’s getting pretty nasty out there with budget cuts right now.

The farther you are from revenue, the faster you get cut.

It’s harsh. It’s also the truth. I’ve seen a lot of talented social and content marketers get impacted in the past few months.

They get hit by layoffs not because organic social is far removed from revenue, but because it’s perceived as far from revenue. Let’s change that.

Consumer mind control—I mean, mindshare.

Social media content does beget brand awareness.

How does that lead to MRR?

I apologize. I’m gonna parrot a worn out marketing stat. But, it takes about 8 touch points with a customer before they buy from your company (subject to vary, of course).

Every time a customer sees your company while they scroll LinkedIn, or peruse X, that's a touchpoint. I’m not saying once a customer sees 8 posts you print $$$. But each touchpoint moves you a step closer.

And when that prospect is ready to buy a product in your category, your company is going to be the first one that comes to mind.

Here’s a real world example.

Say you run a marketing agency. Your agency’s specialty is paid media for DTC brands in the health and wellness industry.

So, you post 1-2 posts per day on LinkedIn and 3-4x per day on X, sharing your playbooks and promoting customer stories.

There’s a new, bootstrapped founder who just launched their wellness company. They’re too small to afford an agency, but they start using the tips you share. Something interesting starts to happen.

Using information from your posts, this founder is able to scale their sales using Meta ads. Within a year, they’re doing $600K in revenue. The company’s growing, and the founder is starting to get pulled in too many different directions to spend his day in ads manager.

He needs an agency.

Now, let me ask you. Which agency do you think he’s going to choose?

Your agency, or the other agency who’s dark on social but has spammed his email inbox with 17 cold email follow ups.

Easy choice. You get the sale because you stayed top of mind (and got him results through your free material).

See how this works? By staying active on social media, you cement yourself as the default option in your customer’s mind.

Bonus tip: the customers you get through inbound marketing (like organic social) will likely be less of a headache, and stick around for longer.

Shorter, easier sales cycle.

Everyone I talk to on the sales side in the past couple of months has reported the same thing. Reply rates for cold outbound messages on LinkedIn are at an all-time low. Same with email.

I mean, are we surprised? The majority of cold outbound I get is painfully bad. It’s the equivalent of going up to a random person in Times Square and begging them to buy something from you.

Now imagine you followed that person in Times Square around for the next hour and asked them to buy your stuff 13 more times. Yeah. That’s what your customers feel like when they get a poorly orchestrated SDR outreach flow on LinkedIn.

When a random reaches out your default is to ignore. But when a friend shoots you a DM, you respond (unless you’re horrendous at texting like yours truly).

Why?

I know, like, and trust them. Forgive me for the marketing cliche, but it’s true.

Here’s where it gets cool. We can use social media content on LinkedIn and X to give your team doing outbound the same vibe as a friend reaching out.

You share your company’s philosophy on the problem you solve. You share customer stories that build social proof. You share your own story in a way that’s relevant to the way you sell.

If someone’s been in your orbit for more than a few weeks, they should clearly understand what your company is and what problem you solve. They should also feel like you’re a normal person and not a spam bot.

So, when your team slides in the DMs (professionally), you’re more likely to get a response, start a conversation, and eventually move to a demo.

Perception management.

There’s value in being a ‘cool’ brand.

There’s value in being a company that your ideal customer actually wants to associate with on social.

So many B2B companies have a sterile social media presence—and that’s being generous. So many of them don't have a social media presence at all.

As long as you aren’t algorithm-chasing and being unhinged because you saw Wendy’s do it back in 2018—having a personality on social media is a good thing.

A few larger B2B companies I see doing this well:

  • Notion

  • Shopify

  • Hubspot

Having a social media presence that people enjoy keeping up with has ripple effects throughout your entire company’s marketing. One example: people in your industry want to show up to events you put on.

When I was at Triple Whale, we threw a conference called ‘The Whalies.’ It was packed. The crazy part? It took place in Austin during the middle of a winter ice storm. Flights got canceled or diverted to nearby cities. Still packed.

This wasn’t a one-off, either. We had events around the world with clients and prospects that were always a hit.

Social wasn’t solely to credit for this (shoutout to our Head of Community at the time, Kevin Newsum). I’m not silly. But our organic social media presence did, without a doubt, help us manage our perception in our industry.

I had another client (this was a ghostwriting client so we’ll keep his name anonymous) who reported ‘feeling like a celebrity’ at industry events when people would come up to him. They’d all seen his LinkedIn content.

Compare that to your typical SaaS company trade show experience. You usually need to fly in your sales team to go and badger unfortunate souls on the conference floor. You’re just throwing bodies at the problem. Wouldn’t it be nice to attract excited customers to you?

When your company, and your founder, are active on social media, you create a sense of FOMO around your company. People want to be on the inside.

Talent and recruiting.

If you’re at a high-growth company, your bottleneck might not even be customers. It might be hiring.

How do I get A+ talent to come fill this position?

If you’re a CEO or in a leadership position, you’ve struggled with this before. I know I have.

Remember how we just talked about perception management and attracting excited customers? Yeah. Same thing applies to recruiting employees.

Word of advice to employees reading this: do not go work for someone just because they have social media clout. I’ve heard nightmares about this.

That said, if you have a healthy work culture and a growing company, amplifying that on platforms like Linkedin will increase the likelihood of top talent lining up to join the team.

This topic, and the tactics I’d use to execute, deserve their own post (reply with the word ‘recruiting’ if you’d want me to write that). But at a high level, post thoughts about company culture, share stories of key employees, share insights from offsite and retreats.

The ROI on an A+ hire is well worth the time it takes to draft up that LinkedIn post.

Inbound leads (duh).

This might sound crazy. Hear me out though.

Organic social media can drive direct demo bookings or self-serve sales.

Don’t over-optimize for this in your content—it will come off like a greasy salesman.

But, as your company gains traction, you should start to see more leads come in directly through LinkedIn and Twitter. I recommend measuring this by having your sales team ask on sales calls: How did you hear about us?

You can also ask this question in a post-purchase survey. Doesn’t matter the exact location, just get an answer from the prospect. As you post more on social, the number of prospects who heard about you on social will increase.

Using link clicks from social posts and link in bio are a bad way to measure leads from social. Sure, track it if you want. But I’ve never used such metrics to inform content strategy. Like, ever.

How much time should you dedicate to organic social before you deem it unworthy of your attention?

It depends on the company. I have clients who started getting leads 1 week after we kicked off. I have others that took 4 to 5 months to pick up steam, but they’re glad they stuck it out.

I like this rule of thumb from Jesse Puji: if you’re testing a new distribution channel, give it 120 days and 50% of your time.

I might be biased, but if you give LinkedIn or X 4 months of your time and you don’t see the obvious ROI, you’re doing something wrong (and we should chat).

I’m not saying organic content is the only channel.

There’s a lot of chatter that ‘outbound is dead.’ I’m not trying to contribute to it.

I mean, how long have people been saying ‘email is dead’ or ‘Facebook ads are dead’ (though they are for early-stage B2B SaaS in my opinion…different post).

Inbound and outbound are both needed to have sustainable, predictable growth in the long run.

My goal in teaching you how to build a B2B social media strategy isn’t to convince you it’s the only channel. It’s to show you how all of your company’s marketing channels can work together to net more leads—and better leads.

What’s next?

This edition is part of a series I’ll be writing called The Modern B2B Social Media Playbook.

I’ll alternate between this series, company case studies + playbooks, and whatever topic I find compelling. But by the time I’m done writing this series, you will have the full roadmap for how to ideate and execute a top-tier organic social strategy.

Might turn this into a course at some point in early 2024. Would that be helpful? Just spitballing here. Let me know.

Anyway, if this was helpful to you, I’d appreciate you sharing. Forward the link to your marketing Slack channel. Text it to your CMO. Post this article to LinkedIn or X. I always appreciate it.

That’s all I’ve got today.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you letting me into your inbox every week.

I’m beyond excited for the next chapter of Social Files, and I hope you’ll stick around to watch it unfold.

If you have any topics related to B2B social and content strategy you’d love to see me dissect, drop me a reply. Always looking for inspiration.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS — enjoy this piece? Forward it to your favorite B2B marketer. They’ll thank you for it.