Finding the Joy and Value in Social Media for B2B Brands and Businesses

B2B Social media often carries a reputation for being bland and overtly professional. The reputation is warranted. After all, we’ve been trained to ignore the waterfall of boring, corporate content labeled “thought leadership” in our LinkedIn feeds.

Embracing personality and creativity on social platforms significantly enhances audience engagement and deepens connections. When B2B social media breaks away from the conventional corporate mold, there’s a valuable shift. Humor, relatability, and a conversational style capture attention and build trust and loyalty. So loosen up and don’t fear becoming just a little unhinged. 

This approach turns social media from a simple broadcasting channel into a dynamic space for meaningful interaction and engagement, highlighting its role in business growth and innovation. It’s also fun to create and manage.

Our latest webinar, featuring 4B Marketing Director of Content Aaron Rosenbluth, 4B’s Social Media Designer and Manager SJ Gingras, and 4B Director of Strategy Sam Grise, uncovered the reasons to move away from a staid, tiresome approach to B2B social and into something far more interesting.

Read the complete transcript below, or watch the webinar replay above to learn how to eliminate boredom and frustration in B2B social media management and see genuine positive results.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

SJ Gingras, Social Media Designer and Manager, 4B Marketing

Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content, 4B Marketing

Sam Grise: Thank you all so much for joining today. We’re getting ready to discuss the value and joy you can find within B2B social media marketing. 

My name is Sam Grise; I’m the director of strategy with 4B marketing. We’re a tech channel business outcomes-focused marketing agency. Ultimately, our approach focuses on the five key business pillars: driving revenue, reducing cost, reducing risk, cash flow optimization, and asset utilization. Whenever we build a strategy, we think about those five pillars. How are we touching three to five pillars to help drive a business forward? A hot topic in the space today is B2B social media marketing. And I’m fortunate today to be joined by two of my colleagues at 4B Marketing. I’ve got the content team with us, so I will pass it over to Aaron to introduce SJ and do an introduction.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Rosenbluth, Director of Content at 4B Marketing. I’ve been with the company since its inception and a little before. I’ve been dealing with social and content for over a decade. So, I’ve watched how this has evolved and changed. We have worked with both B2C and B2B companies on the both sides of our business. However, primarily when I was doing more day-to-day management, it was for B2B businesses. So, I’ve had a unique seat to watch the changes and how they’ve impacted how you market B2B brands on social media. But my fantastic counterpart, SJ, is joining me here. They’ve been responsible for bringing new life into some of our own and then our clients. I’ll be honest, at times, relatively bland B2B approaches to social media. But I lean on SJ heavily for all things regarding social because they are of the generation that grew up in this, understand it, are “extremely online,” and bring a completely different energy to the conversation, and I trust them implicitly.

SJ: Thanks, Aaron. That’s a great intro.

Sam Grise: SJ, go ahead and introduce yourself. But that was pretty awesome.

SJ: Thank you for that. I appreciate you and your expertise. It’s been an excellent partnership. So, I’m excited to talk about B2B social.

Sam Grise: Awesome. Great. Let’s dive in here. I want to touch on something you mentioned, Aaron, that sometimes B2B social media can be bland. There’s a massive opportunity to gain participation, relevance, and trust—all of these pieces that can drive success for your complete marketing stack. One thing that SJ has done on our side is to make our LinkedIn profile more varied. It’s been a lot of fun to watch over the past couple of weeks what’s happened with events and different holidays that we’ve had coming up, some of which have been at my expense, which has been a little bit fun. It’s always a good time, right? You can make it a good time. And so one of the first topics I want to discuss is, you know, what are you gaining from participating? Right. There is a massive opportunity in the space to utilize social media successfully. And so, Aaron, I want to open it up to you first: Where should social media fit within your architecture from a marketing tech stack perspective? What tactics are we utilizing, and what can you gain?

Aaron: Yeah, yeah, great question. So, I want to preface this by saying we’ll get into this later when we discuss setting reasonable expectations. I view social media for B2B or B2C as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy and tactics that come out of the strategy. It’s just one piece in an overarching puzzle. So what you gain from participating, however, is that you’ve got another channel at your disposal. Um, and in some ways, if you think about it from our standpoint, it’s a channel where you can get a little bit broader, break away from strict brand guidelines, get creative, have fun if you choose, and build a lot of awareness if you are consistent. You’re doing things and speaking the correct language to the people that want to hear from you. So, again, I don’t want to jump too far ahead. A lot of this relates to how you set reasonable expectations. Because I’m not going to sit here and tell you that you should always expect or gain a lot of direct ROI from B2B social. But you have another channel to let your personality, thought leadership, expertise, and all of this come forth straightforwardly to your audience. I would say directly to the consumer, which doesn’t apply but does in a way. You can get directly in front of the people you want to with this channel, which we all know everyone is hanging out virtually all day long to the detriment of productivity in some cases. But you need to be able to speak directly to your audience in a specific place where we know they’re hanging out if you’re not participating.

Sam Grise: Yeah, that’s a great point. I want to touch on a couple of things and open up to SJ on one of the pieces you talked about that goes outside the brand guidelines. Right. Getting your personality out there that’s an opportunity. And I know SJ with our LinkedIn, personally. You’ve done a great job with that. I would love your perspective on gaining that voice, tone, and personality through social media. What are your thoughts?

SJ: That’s also a great question. The exciting part about breaking away from your brand guidelines is that you can break away from the language you typically use. You can be a lot more casual and a lot more relatable. And we have examples of really good social later in the presentation. But something that I’ve noticed from them is that they’re talking almost like to a friend, casually to their audience in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily get from a lot of these B2B brands. They’re very professional, very buttoned up. But the fun part about social is that you can break away from that and let your funky, funny, witty, relatable personality shine through. And sometimes, that’s what might catch someone’s eye. It’s surprising and exciting.

Sam Grise: Love it, Love it. And it comes into our next slide: what are you missing out on for not participating? Right. We’ve talked about some benefits of getting our voice, tone, and personality out there and speaking in a casual audience. And one of the big pieces that both of you touched on is the audience. We’re able to connect with our audience. Right. One of the biggest misses of not participating is that you can’t have that direct outreach to your clients. In the tech channel and sales in general, it’s a relationship team. We know the touch points have increased to close a meeting over the past few years. Right. By closing a meeting, that being the end goal, get that introduction meeting right. From seven touch points with phone calls, digital ads, and emails, all of those pieces up closer to 25 to 30 touch points. And so you’re missing one of those big touch points that you can have that isn’t intrusive in your face. It’s fun. It gets your voice, tone, and personality out there so you can have a real relationship beyond signing up on the dotted line and getting this box. Right. But Aaron would love to open it up to you for your thoughts. Some pieces may be missing if you aren’t participating in social media.

Aaron: Yeah, I agree with everything you said. Going back to what I said earlier, it is a place where you can speak directly to the people you want to get in front of. Consider how you’re doing that and approach it correctly to get their attention. But it comes back to this one-to-one relationship that somebody can feel like they’re having with your company whi, which relates to what SJ just said because, you know, opening it up to having more of a conversation. Sure, be professional, but do it in a way that honors the reasons that people are going to social, which a lot of the time is to find a distraction from whatever they’re doing at that moment.

Sam Grise: Yeah. So if you’re, if you don’t do that, you’re missing an opportunity to create a direct connection with a person so that they understand who you are. They want to understand who you are because of how you approach society. Your energy, your vibe, your tone of voice. That turns them into somebody who may not be a customer today but is developing an appreciation for you. And loyalty. They may be a customer, and you’re deepening that loyalty. But social media is an exciting and unique place where you can speak directly to the person you want to. If you’re you, Sam, you’re the individual, you can connect with the person you’re trying to sell to. However, as a brand, you can personify your brand in a way that you wouldn’t in other channels and create a one-on-one interaction feeling that returns to a different approach. You know, a lot of what we see are B2B brands that sit on this pillar and speak down to the audience. They pump out their self-evolving content rather than looking at it as, oh, this is my opportunity, to be honest, to have my brand operate like a person and get personable in a conversation with somebody. You know, attract them with witty, engaging, thought-provoking, and relatable things. So you’re missing out on all of that. Why wouldn’t you put it? It’s there. It’s relatively. Well, I’m not going to say it’s cheap because you have to invest a lot into it to get things out of it. But it’s there. You don’t have to pay in some ways to be there, so you should use it. There’s a lot to the game, and I’m glad you brought up the investment because that segues us into Our next topic, which is realistic expectations diving into realistic expectations; we need to have a realistic expectation for the whole marketing effort. However, specifically with social media, it is a hot button. And really, because there are many different ways to go about it.

You can do organic, which we’ve heard multiple people tell us. Just hack the algorithm. Right. Just hack the algorithm, which is such a funny thing to hear. Right. Because it doesn’t work that way. Right. It just doesn’t. And then. So that’s organic, and then there’s paid as well. Right. What are the expectations we should have from an organizational standpoint on each? Right. What does that look like? Because when you’re talking up to leadership, they’re on those five business drivers. Right. They’re focused on reducing costs, driving revenue, and reducing risk. That’s what they’re focused on. A big piece for realistic expectations is how we set those for leadership so they know what they’re investing in. And so, Aaron and SJ, I’ll open this up to both of you from a realistic expectation standpoint: how do we even get started on realistic goals for social media, and where does it go throughout our marketing journey? 

Aaron: Yeah, expectation setting is the whole thing regarding B2B social. You should not sit here expecting it to be a primary revenue driver. It’s challenging in many ways for a B2B business to draw a line and direct ROI from social media to revenue. It is a supportive element to everything else that you’re doing, your complete marketing mix. That’s why we go back to what I said at the beginning. You know, it’s not the only thing that you should be doing. It’s a distribution channel for all of the other things you’re doing related to content for blogs, lead magnets like videos, whatever it is you’re putting out there. Video is increasingly important in social media depending on the platform—so realistic expectations. You know, I don’t, I wouldn’t sit here telling people that you’re going to see a direct line of revenue from this thing. Developing social goals can also be a moving target. You know, you should have the ultimate goal of engagement, and you can take engagement and marry that to website Traffic. You can see where your traffic sources come from, whether or not they’re coming in from social. There are various ways to track things in a campaign to see that. And that gets you closer to understanding if it’s driving revenue for your business. But it’s, you know, it’s not something that you necessarily should sit here going like, I’m going to invest all of my hopes and dreams in this thing, becoming like a giant money maker for me. Unless you’re selling a T-shirt or something, you can buy through Instagram, which is a very different conversation than we’re having today. So I think just being evident on what your goals are as a company and then part looking at the complete marketing strategy and understanding where social media can fall into that strategy and then just being very diligent about monitoring your traffic sources for your site, putting pixels on pages for remarketing. There’s a lot of benefit to that. It allows you to develop an audience for people who engage with your content and continue to market to them in various ways. So. But yeah, don’t, don’t. I’m not going to say that someone should sit here expecting they will earn a lot of money from social media marketing, particularly for B2B, which isn’t reality most of the time.

Sam Grise: Yeah, I would agree with that. Aaron and I also use social media as an experiment because you don’t know if something will work until you try it. We’ve been doing that on our 4B social with these funny posts. We’ve been photoshopping Sam and Greg into movie scenes, and we’ve found that that is working, and it’s all experimentation. A realistic expectation is you won’t know if something works until you try it. It might not work, but it might work. So it’s interesting the way that you can kind of the way that we understand that it’s not necessarily going to be a huge revenue driver. It frees you up to allow it to be this experimental, fun, unique channel where you can just put your lens on it and see what happens.

Sam Grise: I love the side of experimentation on this as well. A big part of the expectation is that using one tactic to drive revenue is no longer successful. No, just sending emails is not going to be successful. Just doing digital advertising is not going to be successful. Just doing cold call campaigns is not going to be successful. So, from an expectation perspective with leadership, let’s manage the whole campaign as one investment. And all of the tactics that go into that will be touch points that help with that. Whether we like it or not. We all have to go through the funnel, right? We have to go through the marketing funnel. So, understanding where these tactics can come into play will be successful. And so, from a social perspective, it’s a massive trust signal. This company exists; this company is out there. The real people behind this are having honest conversations with us and engaging in dialogue. That’s the expectation is, you know, from the campaign, not just, hey, one social media post is going to drive things for us. Right. Be consistent. It needs to be a trust signal wrapped into a more extensive campaign because one tactic no longer exists. And so, a good example is that you’re hosting a webinar. Like us, right? What did we do before this?

We sent emails, we sent social media posts, and we did stuff on Instagram. Is our audience on Instagram? Maybe not, but it’s fun; people get to see it. People in my network know what I’m doing. Those pieces are touchpoints, and they have successfully gotten conversations going. I am posting stuff on Instagram that I wouldn’t think would be where our customer base would be. Right. All those pieces are coming together, which should be the expectation, not that I will invest $10,000 into an advertisement on social media this week. I’m going to get it. It should be for the bigger picture of driving revenue for the business, which is what we should be doing. So, the tactics go into it. But I see you, Aaron; what do you want more? The thing you’re making me think of is related to this, and you’re drawing my memory. Another thing about this highlights the reasons for being there, which also plays into expectations and relates to SEO and overall brand building. So today, you know, the way that Google is constantly changing its algorithms all the time and what it’s looking at now because of the proliferation of AI content, just sort of the same old keyword stuffing, the old school stuff that people are for whatever reason continue to do sort of lazily from a content perspective. Google looks at how brands’ overall awareness is everywhere, including social media. So, you know, it wants to see what you’re doing out in the real world, what you’re doing on social, putting all the pieces together. So it’s another touch point in that marketing mix that tells Google that you’re a brand, that people trust you’re real, and they care about you. I thought about that while you were speaking; it plays into all this. It’s another brand-building channel you need to use that only helps support the rest of your activities related to marketing. So stuff. Well, that’s a great point. There’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of noise out there. Google and all of these social media sites have algorithm updates consistently. So there isn’t one trick pony that’s going to work. It takes multiple aspects for it. But even the trust signal, I hadn’t even thought of that. Right. The trust signal to the marketplace is what I was thinking. Right. For buyers and consumers of technology. However, on the back end, the trust signal to Google is constantly updated. Right. To help with search results. And all of those pieces are so important. Right. We can touch on multiple aspects from a social media perspective. But it brings us to our next point, which is, you know, who are you competing against with social media? I know this is a big topic, and you both opened my eyes to some of the stuff from a competitive landscape perspective, but I’d love to ask you because you’re doing social media for B2C. B2B. You’re all over the map on what you’re doing from a time perspective of posting all these things. Who do you see in the competitive landscape regarding social media?

SJ: Who you’re competing against are real people, individuals. And that’s why we say it’s better if your social media feels like it’s an actual person. Typically, someone on social media wants to connect with their friends, an influencer, or a celebrity they like. Only a few people are going to social to check how a business is doing. That’s different from where you go. Usually, you’re going to social to be entertained, cry, laugh, and avoid work. And so you’re competing against real people who are posting. That’s why the approach that we suggest is to feel like a real person. Sometimes, even the approach Erin and I have seen to make your social media manager a persona for your business can be super successful. Talking in first person can be super successful on social media as well. That brings in the relatability aspect, the personability, and the feeling of being more of a person instead of this prominent brand with a big logo. And, you know, that’s. That’s not really why people are on social.

Aaron: Yeah, I agree. I’ll take it a little further, too. You’re not just; you’re. It would help if you also looked at it from the perspective that you’re competing with everything that somebody sees in their feed on that day or at that moment. So, you know, we people are often brand B2B. Businesses are often the guiltiest of this, thinking they’re just competing with their competitors on social media. They’re only looking at their competitors when, in reality, they’re competing with everything that’s coming up in that person’s feed on LinkedIn or Instagram, wherever it is in that moment or a day or a week. So you have to stand out among a sea of posts. To SJ’s point, people’s real people, your professional network, whether on LinkedIn, influencers on LinkedIn, or elsewhere, we all see professional influencers on LinkedIn now. LinkedIn has become an exciting world for this kind of professional influencer idea. But on Instagram or Facebook, these other platforms, it’s your family, it’s every. It’s everything. You are keeping this myopic view that I’m just competitively competing against my competitor. Yeah, they’re there too. But you’re competing for attention. That’s what you’re competing for. And the attention is, you know, you compete with. With your grandmother, if you think about it, that’s good.

Sam Grise: Yeah, that’s good. My mom is on Facebook 24/7, and mine is too. I constantly get videos sent to me, but we’re competing with your mom. She knows what’s going on in the world with Facebook. But something else that I’d like to touch on is the intention span. Right. We’re busy, especially in the B2B world. You’re running, you’re gunning, you’re all over the place. You’re seeing the same thing repeatedly in the feed sometimes. And it looks like the same thing. And there’s no voice, there’s no personality, there’s nothing fun about it. I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day by an individual who called out that I was sick and tired of seeing these posts. I listed 15 different posts that are constantly coming that are the same for everybody. And you know, you’re competing against everybody doing the same thing. So take a risk and experiment with it. Right? You’re competing against the same stuff that people are posting. So, how do you stand out? You experiment with it and have some fun with it. Get your voice out there and your personality out there. Another piece we must call out is that you’re competing against the algorithms. Right. LinkedIn just came out, and they’ve got videos now. They’ve got short-form videos on LinkedIn. So now you’re competing against that attention span. How do you touch that? Right. It’s something that’s constantly changing. And so a big piece of this from who you’re competing against is one, the algorithm; two, the attention span; three, the resources, and the time you put towards it. Right. Consistency will be necessary, especially with things changing with the algorithms. You have to have somebody involved in it. You can’t do a post, set it, forget it, leave it for six weeks, and then return and do another post. You need to be more active. Right. You’re also competing against a resource constraint because time needs to be dedicated to it.

Aaron: Absolutely. You can’t; you cannot just set it and forget it. You have to participate. If people are commenting, your content is slowing them down enough that they care about it enough to want to engage and comment on any of these platforms. You need to, you need to respond. It inspires conversation. That’s why SJ said earlier that sometimes we’d play with the idea of having the social media manager be a character in the feed where they’re saying things like, I, me, my first person, it’s conversation. But if you behave that way and put out a post, that’s great for you. It’s. People are engaging with.

The worst thing you can do is ignore that and walk away, not reply to them. You should respond to every single legitimate comment. When I say legitimate comment, I mean a comment that’s not just like a bunch of fire emojis or any emojis, you know, like, that’s not it. But if somebody’s taking the time to comment, write something. You owe it to them and to the algorithm, which, you know, continues to feed engagement. If you’re conversing with someone, but from a real level, you owe it to that person to respond. It’s just part of not being a jerk in business, too.

Well, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, the barrier to entry, what you’re missing out on if you aren’t participating, what you’re gaining if you are participating. You know, all of this comes back to one thing. And to me, it’s, you know, what’s a win? What is a win within the space? How do we define a win with social media? And I’ve got a personal example of something that has happened recently, but it comes back to the expectations of what we’re trying to accomplish. And one of the things you just mentioned, Aaron, that is a win as well is the engagement side of it. Right. You or the business account, whatever it is, participating in that dialogue is so important. I would love to open it up for you two to answer. Do what you would win on social media. And again, from the lens of leadership. Right. I’ve invested in SGA as a resource to help build our social media presence. How do I define a win? Because we already talked about it being challenging, it gave us this direct ROI. How does that look from a leadership perspective? Hey, we’ve invested time and resources to get this out there. What looks like a win so that leadership knows what they’re getting from this.

Aaron: Yeah, from my perspective, if you’re speaking to leadership, you will go back to what we said earlier. I would include it in a conversation about the entire marketing mix and the strategy that led us to use specific social platforms because you don’t need to feel that you need to. You shouldn’t waste your time being on every single platform. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you need to be there. So, you look at your strategy, goals, and Persona, and based on the Persona, you determine where you should spend your time and money investing in posting and managing social media. Then you look at that full marketing mix; you show the leadership where it fits in. Ideally, if you’re tracking things appropriately and doing it the right way, you can show where people are entering your site or different touchpoints with social. Ultimately, engagement is visible, and reporting on that engagement is the most direct attribution or win you can show more than anything else. I mean, really. And that’s a vanity. It’s a vanity metric, but that’s what we generally have to work with.

SJ: It’s a good point. Agree. Engagement is making people stop, and you can tell they’ve stopped by engagement. But also, people commenting and being like, this was super funny, or omg, this is so me. Or how whatever they say makes you feel like, okay, I have impacted them in some way, or I’ve made them take time to leave a comment, and it’s positive. And then you can start building that relationship because they expect you to continue posting stuff like that. And then they might start coming back to your page specifically for your silly, relatable content or whatever it may be.

Aaron: Yeah, yeah, that’s. You’re. You’re making me think of something. It’s a good point. Someone might be waiting in the wings for a long time. There’s also the potential that someone is viewing your content, they appreciate it, and they’re not engaging, and then suddenly they are. I mean, I’ve done the same thing. I’ve followed accounts on various vaguely exciting platforms and didn’t want to engage for any reason. It wasn’t something I even thought about. I’m just seeing it repeatedly, and I’m like, yep, that speaks to me. Yeah, okay. And over time, as it builds, yeah, these, these, this is really. They get me. I love this, whatever it is. And then you start to engage. So you have to think about it. It’s different than other channels. It can be vague. From a win perspective, it’s challenging to see from direct roi. And those people hanging out and following you might be looking at your content for a significant period before they start engaging. It’s an exciting space, but it can be once they are. Your content speaks directly to them once you get them hooked, and they feel like you understand them. There’s a real opportunity for deep loyalty there.

Sam Grise: Definitely. Definitely. And for me, an example of a win that, you know, is personal is the trust signal to the marketplace. Right. And the example of that is we were at events, you know, attending events all of September, and we had a bunch of social posts that went out with those events. The main driver was the events, but the social was awareness of, hey, we’re at these events, in your space, and so on. What ended up happening was somebody hit me up on LinkedIn, they reached out to me, hey, saw what you’re doing on social media for LinkedIn, and you know, the tech space would love to chat. To me, that’s a. When is that a tangible ROI that we can tie to that? No, not right now. A bunch of social posts we did, you know, we attended events. There was a bunch of stuff going on. It was the marketing mix. But the reason that conversation got started was social media, right? And that’s a piece that doesn’t have a direct ROI, but it has a touchpoint in that ROI that could come from it. So that’s an example of a win to me. When discussing a win, how do you go out there and win? And for me, two different pieces of it. One is the trust signal, getting personality out there, leaping, and going for it. But another win that comes out of it is employee engagement. And so when I think of this, I think of it on two fronts. One is employees get to see what’s going on on the social feed to understand, hey, this is kind of our voice, tone, personality, relationship status, if you will, of how we operate, which is a lot of fun because new prospective employees want to see that kind of stuff because we’re in the age of return to the office, working remote, right? Covid had a significant impact on that. What does that look like? Engagement on social media is good on two fronts. One is for the external client prospects, and so on, but also for the internal clients. How are the people and employees who are working engaging with it? And that’s a significant piece to having a successful social media strategy, and winning is getting your internal employees involved, right? They must like, share, and contextualize the team’s posts. It’s got their voice, tone, and personality on it. You’ve got your voice tone and personality on it and also touching your network. But that’s my opinion on it. Employees should be engaged because it helps you get the culture side from Your internal people to help win. But then you also get the win to your and the company’s networks. But I would love to open it up to both of you. How do you go about the process to set yourself up for success and call it a win?

Aaron: Yeah, we, I don’t. Yeah, you’re making me think about employee engagement. Some. An example we have coming up is that. And Aaron, you touched on this earlier but thought leadership, you know, your social doesn’t always have to be silly or goofy. It is excellent if it is. But some great examples of successful B2B LinkedIn specifically pages were when their employees post thought leadership on their profile, tag their business, and then their business reposts it. And then, you know, say you go to your business, go to some B2B business, LinkedIn, and you can see all their employees, all their thought leadership, and you can see that they’re smart and know what they’re talking about. They have, you know, a niche understanding of the industry. Representing your team’s knowledge is beneficial and shows your personality more professionally.

SJ: I agree. It comes back to the idea that people tend to trust people more than brands. The people who are the experts within an organization make the organization strong, as does the brand’s identity. So that is always going to be the driver. You see it often, and that’s where we have these influencers like LinkedIn. But you know, your people within a company, if they become genuine and prolific, they’re distributing professional content that shows what they’re passionate about and know. Then, that’s shared on the company page. It develops trust all over the place. But that’s the way to amplify things. And to your point, Sam, to get employees to buy into everything from the culture to social media engagement, all of it. For whatever reason. Well, not for whatever reason. I can understand this. I’ve seen this here and elsewhere. Getting employees to engage with the company’s social media account is hard. Often, people don’t want to do it, especially in a larger organization, because it feels like social media is one of those places where it merges your personal life and your work life in some sense. And people want to have, you know, I understand it but like a rigid barrier between the two things. And it doesn’t help the company from an engagement standpoint because if you’re poised and engaging with your content, especially if they do it shortly after a post goes out, it gives your post to the algorithms an immediate boost that shows engagement. 

So, you want to have people in your company participate. It also strengthens that internal culture. But if you, if you’re able to encourage them to be thought leaders in their own right and publish on their LinkedIn accounts or wherever it is that makes sense for your company based on Persona where people are hanging out, it’s only going to get them feeling more deeply connected to who you are and it just feeds itself over and over and over. And some of the best ideas I’m reminded of we did a webinar earlier this year with Tom from Tom Bapp from SkyFi, and he was talking about how they’ve done an excellent job of a. What they do is really creative and interesting and fun and still professional on social for the brand. But it comes because they’ve created this internal room where people throw out. Everyone has an idea that they. That is going to be considered. It doesn’t just have to be the social media or content department. Everybody is on social media for the most part today. Everyone has a voice and an opinion. People like to have fun. And so they’re getting their team heavily involved in the ideation process. This means that when that content goes up, they will engage with it because it was their fun idea that got out into the real world. And then it comes back to the joy in aspects of this, which it’s funny. I was talking to Tyler, our director of marketing. He’s like, I’m not sure that joy is what people are after. They’re after results. And I don’t disagree with him at all. I entirely agree with him. But I think if the people doing the work, making the posts, if it’s like SJ or me or any of them, if you’re having fun doing it and it’s interesting to you, ultimately you’re going to invest more in that, and it’s going to come through the other side. People can feel it. You know, when a company on LinkedIn is boring and not engaged. And I don’t say boring; that sounds trite, but that’s true. Suppose people are engaged in creating the content because they believe it will elicit an emotion in some capacity from the person on the other end. In that case, it will feel that way when you see it, and you will ignore it and scroll right by.

You’re spot on. And the joy piece of it is the content creation, the posting, all of those kinds of pieces. I had a part in this, if you will. My voice is coming out of this. And I’ll give you an example. I worked for a company a few years ago, and they had a great social media team. They found articles for us to post and everything like that. But it almost felt like in addition to my job because it was, I have to go in, I have to post, I have to do this. And it wasn’t information for me that I was like, this is awesome. 

This is differentiated. You know, I wasn’t having my voice put on top of it for the marketplace I was attacking or going after. And so there was a challenge there, for me personally, where there wasn’t the joy of, oh, I’m going to go post this. The other aspect of it was this. When I posted it, I went on my LinkedIn page, and everybody I worked for posted the same thing, right? So, the same thing happened over and over again. So why am I even posting it? I just spent 30 minutes, you know, doing this and so on. Having that is the joy piece, right? Putting your brand on it, having your voice, right? And some of that comes from the company, right? Of, hey, we’ve got this post. We want you guys to put your spin on it. Or this post came from Sam Grice at 4B Marketing. He’s the director of strategy over here. Engage, you know, those kind of things as opposed to. We were pulling stuff out of the ether, right? And it didn’t resonate with me. And so that’s part of how you can win, which is to get people excited about it because it’s their thoughts, it’s theirs. It’s what comes back to authenticity. You know what’s happening when I hear that, especially when you. When people are like, I’ve seen this before, companies, you know, fabricate a caption or a post, send it to the entire company, and ask people to publish it. And it’s like, well, that’s cool, but you should tell people to publish it, modify the caption, and put their spin on it because there’s something entirely inauthentic about that. There’s something inauthentic from the employee’s perspective when they’re being told to publish something; it doesn’t feel like something they may be connected to. And, especially today, in social media, we’re in the office; inauthenticity is everywhere. People you can see when someone’s just doing something for engagement that feels inauthentic. It’s like, wow, you’re, I’m seeing it a lot right now. You’re publishing this thing because you know it will get people arguing. It’s not, it’s not real. Whatever it is, authenticity is so important, and making sure that your employees, when you encourage them to engage and to post on behalf of the company or for themselves, is something they care about and believe in. People can sniff out that bullshit. I’ll say it, you know, it is what it is. Like, say it.

Sam Grise: Yeah, it’s nonsense. Like nobody, nobody wants to see inauthentic garbage continually shoved down your throat. And suppose that’s what you’re doing and doing repeatedly, and nobody’s engaging. In that case, you’re teaching the algorithms that your content is not valuable to your audience and will ignore you. You might be creating a hole for yourself. Well, I love the authenticity side of it, and that goes into the deeper root of how you win. And so I want to show some examples of companies doing a great job of this. Businesses that are taking it from, you know, the, not the dick, just the typical post, right? Putting their voice, tone, and personality out there? So that they can be successful. Relatable content, right? For me, Salesforce crushes this with the influencer, if you will, corporate bro. He goes to videos at trade shows and talks about being a mid-market rep and now an enterprise rep and all those things.

I’ve lived that, right? So very relatable. Every time he comes up, I stop because I’m like, that is precisely what I’ve lived. I’ve had those exact conversations. And you know, SJ, I’ll let you touch on some of these because I know there’s some strategy behind it. I love that one because I send it to all my friends every time it cracks me up. We’re going back and forth. That gets me talking right about Salesforce. What’s the Salesforce video going to be this year? This year, before Dreamforce, I was looking forward to it. I was excited about it. What’s the video going to be? But SJ, I’ll pass it to you to discuss some of these wins with these B2B brands.

SJ: Yep. I agree that the influencer move is genius. And it again touches on making your brand into a person. Salesforce is not claiming to be the corporate bro. Still, they are working with the corporate bro at their events and representing them with this paid partnership, influencer collaboration. And you can see people in the comments saying, I love this collab. Someone said, I don’t know him, but I like him. You know, it’s. It’s intriguing new viewers who may have never seen that influencer, and now they’re like, oh, this guy’s hilarious. And it’s fascinating you, 

Sam, as someone who has seen this before, you know it’s coming. And to your point, Aaron, this is training the algorithm to say collaborations are working for this account. This profile is succeeding when they do partnerships. And so, you know, it’s. That’s always a good move. We always suggest that doing the. It’s specifically a. On Instagram, you can post collaboratively. And so when you do that, it’s posting the video to corporate bro’s Instagram and to Salesforce Instagram, which is genius because you get the followers and engagement from both profiles on the same post. I love that. Another great thing that Salesforce does is highlight their team. So that other photos show behind-the-scenes photos of their events.

Sam Grise: Salesforce, yeah, is one of the best. They. They have a genuinely entertaining page, and there is some informational content on there, but it’s primarily relatable, funny, highlights their team, and things like that. One piece I want to add is that Salesforce is a data company. Right. CRM, marketing automation, and data. And for them, what makes the data work is the people. And so they’ve taken that kind of as a connection of the business of, yeah, we sell software, but also we’re the data company, we’re the people company. And so they’ve been able to make that connection, which allows that voice and tone to come out as well.

SJ: Totally. Then we have accounts like HubSpot, which has an excellent combination of funny versus engaging their audience more business-mindedly. So, these two posts I included show the duality of their page. So we have, you know, Mercury in retrograde jokes with a little hamster meme. And all the comments are like, oh my god, that’s so me. Or just, you know, laughing emojis. Any engagement is good; we’ll take it. But then they also have Real Talk. They have this kind of series where they have a show called Real Talk. Then, they have different questions and prompt their followers to comment, give their answers, and share their experiences. And that works well for them as well. Then we have ServiceNow, a great example of the thought leadership I discussed earlier. And so there are two images I chose here that highlight two of their employees talking about their niche understanding of their industry and business. And both of those were reposted by their, you know, parent company wherever they work. So, our favorite examples include humor and relatability. And then, if you want to take the more buttoned-up approach, thought leadership is a powerful way to go.

Sam Grise: Yeah. And a big piece that you called out there was the reposting by the company. Right. They’re empowering their people. Right. They are powering the thought leadership. And so they’re reposting to their page and doing that double dip on LinkedIn. Right. It doesn’t have the ability that Reels does on Instagram, where you can post on both, but they’re essentially doing that by reposting to their page with that thought leadership, which is excellent. So we’ve got about 12 minutes left here. A couple more topics I want to get over here are that we’ve talked about how to get started, the benefits, and if you don’t do anything. But what is the barrier to entry? Right. How do I get started? Say that I’ve got a B2B business, we’ve done some social media, we’ve done some LinkedIn, but we need to post consistently. Do you know what the barrier to entry is to get started? Because there are two sides to it. There’s the organic side, the paid side, the platform, and so on. But what is that barrier to entry? What do I need to step over to get started? I would love to open that up to you, Aaron.

Aaron: You first have to understand your audience. It comes back to Persona for me. You know, understanding who they are, what they care about, and what drives them professionally, personally, and emotionally. And so that’s going to do a few things for you. You’ll understand where and what platforms you should invest your time on, whether that’s Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, etc. So understanding them means you’ll know where they hang out digitally most of the time and where you can reach them. It will also help you understand the messaging that will work, whether that’s humorous thought leadership on Slightly Unhinged or all of these things. Knowing who you’re talking to is how to create content they care about. That’s it, the barrier to entry. I mean, outside of that, it’s, it’s. On paper, it’s pretty straightforward.

Create an account, create a plan, and start publishing consistently. But don’t go out there and start throwing spaghetti at the wall. Look at that Persona and get people like SJ and others with varying generations and familiarity with society in the room. Having this conversation can be helpful because you’ve got, you’re getting different perspectives, but certainly having somebody who likes the room, who is going to bring a completely different mindset because they’ve grown up in this space and understand it and live there, you know, come up with that plan and then from there, don’t complicate it. Don’t be so focused on having the most polished content that you don’t wind up doing anything. I think that’s something that you see about; it’s like, I want things to be great and highly polished, but sometimes the most relatable thing is pretty damn raw, you know, so don’t let that be the barrier to posting consistently.

Sam Grise: Well, that’s a great point from a barrier of entry; it’s pretty raw, right? You just mentioned that, right? I posted a couple of sentences of thought leadership from the company account of what is a pretty low barrier to entry. You don’t need to get a new technology stack to be able to do it. You don’t need to go out there and get a big list pulled down from Zoom Info or Apollo. You don’t need automation set up. Right. From an entry perspective, start with that. And start with the platforms where you believe that your audience is. Right. We know in the B2B world, LinkedIn is number one. Right. You are so knowing that. Right. The barrier of entry is low. It’s a small investment compared to an extensive email campaign, a direct mailer campaign, a prominent advertisement play, or anything like that. You can start low and small and get going without making this massive investment.

Aaron: Yeah, you just have to start.

SJ: Okay. I mean, it’s true. Yeah. You could take it further. We use publishing tools, and there are things out there. However, most of these platforms also now have native publishing tools. But all it takes is an account to start publishing again. You want. I want to. I want to highlight that. You should be more intentional than that. You should put thought into it. You should consider how you’re going to. How. When are you going to carve out the time to do this? Consistency is important. You can’t just post and then disappear for six months and think it will do anything for you. You want three to five posts a week to be truly effective. And so, to do that, it’s a content monster. You want people to stay energized and energized with what they’re seeing from you. So, you need to think about your actions and understand who you’re talking to first.

Sam Grise: And that’s a great point. That leads us to the actionable steps you can take to get started. Right. One of the pieces you just mentioned was the content monster, right? Having a bunch of pieces to put out there because then that goes into the stale thing of posting the same thing over and over again. And that leads us to our first topic: an actionable step is compiling a list of 100 ideas. So then you have consistent ideas of what you could post instead of what we’ve got in our three to five posts this week. Wait, it’s Monday. We need to come up with three to five more posts. Right. So start with a big pool. Right. Of ideas. All ideas are welcome. The next phase is to examine what people engage with once you have those hundred. Right. How can you piggyback on what somebody else is doing? Ideas like that are where you can carve out your niche in the space.

The last piece is to continue that content engine. Create a Zoom room, a Slack channel, whatever that channel is, with all the employees to throw out ideas. Right. One from an employee engagement, the work from home. Right. Make them feel like they are a part of the culture, which is a big part of it. Right. But then also for engagement of when things are getting posted, that will help a ton. Those are the top three actionable steps for me. But, Aaron, SJ, would you like to add ideas to get things kickstarted for companies just starting their B2B journey?

Aaron: Those are the major ones. That’s what we do. Another thing we can add is thinking about the highly relatable things that are trending at the moment that you can tease. You see this in every space now. I used to see it on things like Instagram and other sites. It is more like what would be considered traditionally B2C platforms, but like people taking memes, viral posts, and viral content and then applying it to their brand, business, and what they do. Yeah, have those topics outlined. So you have this pool that you can draw from all the time, but also, you know, think about being agile and look at when it’s appropriate to take a viral trend and apply it to your business. Because it’s something that people are already seeing everywhere, they’re going to think it’s clever and funny, and they’ll engage in that. That’s a huge step that people often miss.

Sam Grise: Keeping your ear to the ground. Know what’s going on and what’s happening out there. And even though you’re in B2B, some B2C trends can apply. Right. Or even personal trends that can apply to the B2B world. So feel free to take some of those happening over here and put them into your. If you will, your pool of gold will be able to be published as well. So I love that. How to take risks. Calculated risks. But don’t be afraid, you know.

That wraps up our discussion today. I did not see anything come into the chat or the questions. We’ll keep it open for about five more minutes here. But for those who did attend, I 

want to offer this up. Right. We’ll do a complete social media audit for your first five respondents. That consists of not only the brand, tone, voice, and personality of what’s happening within your social media but also, you know, how many posts we’re doing. Where is our audience living? How are we utilizing this today? How does it touch the different aspects of the funnel to help drive those things? Because that’s what leadership is looking for, right? We’re all in this business to be able to help drive revenue, reduce costs, reduce risk, and support cash flow optimization and asset utilization. And so that’s what that analysis would look like. So feel free to email me at sam4bmarketing.com, and I will get back to you if you’re one of those first five respondents who will bring you a social media analysis before we close it up. Aaron, SJ, final thoughts? Would you like to add anything to the joys of B2B social media?

Aaron: Have fun, experiment, let your personality shine, and see what works.

SJ: There you go. I agree.

Aaron: Don’t be afraid to be a little unhinged.

Sam Grise: Yeah, I love it. I love it. Check out the LinkedIn page for the 4B marketing page because there have been some good posts over the past few months. As I said, some of them have been at my expense, which is fine because it’s funny. So that’s all. Yeah. Aaron and SJ, thank you for your expertise and time today to discuss this. Appreciate it. And thank you all for attending. I look forward to our next one, which is in December. So stay tuned for that. Awesome. Thanks.