B2B marketing is simply how businesses promote their products or services to other businesses, rather than directly to individual consumers.
It works because B2B decision makers are (spoiler alert) also human beings. And that’s where the similarities between B2C and B2B social media marketing end.
So how do you stand out from your competition and attract new customers from social media? Do customers even care what B2B brands post? (Yes.)
Keep reading for all of our best B2B social media marketing tips to reach your goals.
You may have heard the famous phrase from Bryan Kramer, “There’s no such thing as B2B or B2C marketing, only H2H (human to human).” Kramer wasn’t suggesting both groups use the same social media marketing strategies.
His point was that both groups need to understand their customers and create relevant content for them, instead of confusing B2B marketing with “just be more formal.”
A few of the key differences between B2B and B2C social marketing are:
- Multiple stakeholders: B2C marketing speaks directly to a customer base where only one person (or family group) needs to decide to buy. In B2B marketing, there are many stakeholders involved, and usually not all of them will see your marketing messages on and off social.
- Increased need for trust: B2C customers need to have faith in brands to make a purchase, but this is especially critical for B2B because who they partner with impacts their business and client base, too.
- Focus on thought leadership: Thought leadership content builds credibility and allows brands and leaders to show how their experience differentiates them from the competition.
- Longer sales cycle: Typically, B2B purchases are larger with more negotiations and considerations, which takes much longer than a B2C customer adding bath bombs to their self-serve online cart.
- More difficult to measure: Attribution from social media is easier to track for B2C where many transactions occur online, where UTM links and analytics tools can map the journey. For B2B, most transactions occur through salespeople and while social media does influence B2B buyers, it’s not as quantifiable.
Hint: Make B2B social media attribution easier to track and report with Hootsuite Social Listening.
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The right B2B social media marketing channels depend a lot on your industry, time available to invest, and business goals… but here are some things to keep in mind.
Go where your audience is active
Sounds basic, but key for success. This doesn’t mean automatically jump on the most popular social platforms, which are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and WhatsApp in 2025.
Source: Statista
If you don’t already know where your customers spend their time on social media, you can start with demographics based on your ideal customers. Keep in mind that this covers all users, not only platforms people use mostly for work. (More on this later.)
Source: GWI
Prioritize business-focused platforms — but don’t ignore the rest
As the only B2B-focused social platform, LinkedIn is an obvious choice. LinkedIn has over one billion users in over 200 countries, including executives from every Fortune 500 company.
LinkedIn used to be primarily for networking and seeking job opportunities but it has evolved into a hub for thought leadership and other B2B content, which continues to increase: sessions are up 11% in 2025 vs 2024.
You should definitely be on LinkedIn but alone, it’s not a strategy. Marketers still say Facebook is the most important platform for B2B social media marketing in 2025, alongside LinkedIn and Instagram.
Don’t be afraid to branch out and experiment with new platforms.
Video is for B2B too
Many social platforms feature short form video, such as Instagram Reels, that B2B organizations can use to their advantage.
But don’t sleep on long form video either: 29% of B2B buyers, including 25% of enterprise-level buyers, search YouTube for demos or reviews to aid purchase decisions.
Source: TrustRadius
Video is the perfect medium for demos and reviews, two of the most impactful types of content for B2B social media marketing. When asked what most influenced them, 69% of B2B buyers responded with product demos, and 56% said user reviews.
Pro tip: Whether you decide to launch a YouTube channel or just want to optimize shortform videos, stand out with our top social media video tips for going viral.
Focus on 2-3 platforms at first
It’s better to focus on two or three platforms first and get traction with those before expanding to other networks, especially if you’re not already active on social media.
Once those platforms start to grow and you have a steady workflow for keeping them active, it’s much easier to scale that momentum and process to new platforms. As opposed to launching on All The Platforms right away, getting overwhelmed, and failing to publish consistently or engage your audience.
Pro tip: Posting the exact same content to each platform is (often) a no-no. Use our free social media strategy template to tailor your approach on each platform.
The actual social media marketing activities you execute depend on your business goals, target audience, and platforms, but it’s safe to say having a proper social media strategy is key.
1. Map content types to funnel stages
To get the best business results from social media, you need content that fits into each part of your marketing funnel:
TOFU (Top of Funnel)
Social media posts that generate awareness and interest in your brand.
These posts are either the first your audience sees from you or push interested prospects into the consideration stage.
Examples: “Day in the life” posts relatable to your customers’ industry or occupations, trending memes applied to your industry, etc.
MOFU (Middle of Funnel)
Content aimed at interested buyers to move them into the consideration stage where they’re strongly considering purchasing.
At this stage, customers are comparing reviews, features, pricing, and more and may reach out for a demo or quote.
Examples: Educational content about product features, demos, case studies, etc.
BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)
Social content that helps bring it home: converting leads into customers and fostering retention and loyalty for existing customers.
For B2B social media marketing, it’s not likely your social content alone will mainly drive conversions, but rather support long-term loyalty and relationships.
Examples: Customer appreciation posts, testimonials, social impact content, etc.
Your topics will vary but here is our content map from 2024 for reference:
2. Align with your demand gen and ABM teams
To make social content that impacts the bottom line, it needs to resonate with your audience. To do that, collaborate with your demand gen and account-based marketing (ABM) teams to align your B2B social media marketing strategy with their insights.
Help expand the demand gen team’s wide net and get more leads from social media with content designed to build brand awareness and curiosity.
Apply the personalized approaches the ABM team is taking to social content to engage more of your target audience and understand their needs better.
3. Set up advanced reporting
The key to proving the ROI of B2B social media marketing is to accurately track impact with tools such as Tableau, Looker Studio, Oracle Analytics Cloud, or others that can connect first touch channels to revenue.
Hootsuite Advanced Analytics offers web attribution, auto-tagging, and many filtering and sorting options to understand which posts and accounts are driving the best results for your organization.
Check out how Hootsuite Advanced Analytics can simplify your reporting life in a few minutes:
4. Work with KOLs (business influencers)
The majority (53%) of B2B organizations are increasing their budget for key opinion leaders (KOLs) — a.k.a. business influencer marketing — this year.
Source: EMARKETER
B2C influencer marketing is growing at a rapid pace too, up 21% year-over-year in total. That’s because it works.
A good approach is to mix the types of influencers you partner with. Choose a variety of nano, micro, and macro influencers to amplify your message. Small influencers tend to get higher engagement, while influencers with larger follower bases can expand campaign reach.
One thing is clear: B2B influencer campaigns should include LinkedIn, especially with the platform’s new First Impressions ads and Connected TV ad format, which enables 300% better targeting than TV.
Plan your next campaign strategically with our top influencer marketing tips for brands.
5. Lean into employee advocacy
Employee advocacy is similar to influencer marketing, except it’s your employees sharing content to promote your organization. These programs turn your employees into brand ambassadors, boosting your organic reach and creating visibility and trust online.
Employee advocacy programs get better results for less money: up to 200% higher click-throughs and 700% more engagement vs. company-shared content, and Hootsuite customers alone have saved $839,000 in ad costs over three years for the same reach.
But all reach isn’t created equal: the reach you achieve through employee advocacy is worth more because it’s about trust, called “the ultimate currency” by Edelman. Brand trust is especially important for B2B sales in uncertain economic times where businesses make safe, risk-averse decisions 70% of the time.
“Trust is the remedy to risk,” says Ian Bruce, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester.
“Trust bridges the gap between a risk-averse buyer and a potential vendor. B2B buyers who trust a company are almost twice as likely … to pay a premium to work with that company than those who do not.”
Of course, for employees to want to take part, a positive workplace culture and rewards for participating are foundational building blocks.
Hootsuite Amplify makes it easy to start and manage your employee advocacy program alongside all your other B2B social media marketing tasks inside Hootsuite. Create pre-approved content for your employees to share with a few clicks, track performance, and start getting more reach and ROI without extra effort or ad costs.
See the power of Hootsuite Amplify in action, then request a demo to experience it for yourself.
6. Understand the potential of dark social
Dark social refers to the private and (mostly) untrackable ways people talk about brands or share content, such as through email, messaging apps (Slack, Discord, etc), and through DMs in social media apps.
Traditional analytics tools can’t track dark social activity, but there are a few ways to measure more of it:
- Create UTM links to better attribute web traffic to its source, including which social platform visitors came from. (Bonus: Easily create these when scheduling content in Hootsuite with the built-in URL shortener.)
- Make sharing content easy with buttons that include options for copying a link or sending via email. Include UTM parameters in the sharing links.
- Use social listening to find customer conversations on autopilot. Hootsuite Listening’s advanced capabilities uncover conversation clusters, understand the emotions behind what people are saying about you online, track competitors, monitor brand sentiment, and identify trends and topics before they pop off.
Social listening can only track public content, but it adds context to conversations your audience is having. For full access to dark social, consider starting your own private community, such as a sub-Reddit, Facebook or LinkedIn group, or on your own website.
7. Turn your best organic content into ads
When content works, double down. Turn your top performing organic posts into ads by either boosting the post or creating a B2B social media ad campaign.
B2B social media ad investment is growing with 60% of marketers planning to spend more in 2025 vs. 2024.
Source: EMARKETER
Your best platforms for B2B ads will likely be LinkedIn and Facebook, both of which you can create and manage ads for in Hootsuite. Save time on ad creation and measure the ROI of your organic and paid content together, right inside Hootsuite.
8. Don’t sleep on podcast sponsorships
Podcasts are popular, and their popularity is only growing, especially among younger generations. In 2012, less than a third (29%) of U.S. adults had ever listened to one, but in 2025, 73% of people listen to podcasts.
A recent Harris Poll survey found that 68% of listeners trust recommendations from podcast hosts, and 35% say podcast ads are more trustworthy than other media formats.
Most importantly, podcast ads convert: 49% of listeners took action from a podcast ad, with 20% making a purchase, 23% visiting the website, and 16% recommending the advertiser to others.
Source: The Harris Poll
Those statistics are focused on a B2C audience, but the same logic applies to B2B podcast advertising.
As with any ad campaign, targeting is crucial. This B2B marketer suggests starting with five to 10 podcasts, seeing how the ads perform over a month, and then either continuing or replacing them with other podcasts.
9. Make your audience’s lives easier
B2B social media content should provide value to your audience. It should make their jobs easier and offer solutions or insights.
One way to do this is through educational thought leadership content such as:
- industry reports
- trend analyses
- how-to guides
With content that does promote your product, focus on how it will directly benefit the viewer. Try showcasing specific use cases or sharing success stories that highlight a product or services’ value.
10. Incorporate UGC content
User-generated content (UGC) includes any content — text, videos, images, reviews, and testimonials — created by people rather than brands.
Translation: Leveraging UGC can enhance your brand’s authenticity, build trust, and foster a community around your products or services.
UGC serves as social proof that your products or services deliver value. Positive reviews, testimonials, and case studies can influence decision makers to purchase and demonstrate your brand’s reliability.
The pressure to prove ROI is real. Over a third (34.5%) of B2B marketers are placing more importance on proving the ROI of their marketing strategies in 2025.
Source: EMARKETER
Proper attribution and reporting are your ticket to being able to prove ROI. Besides connecting social content with business outcomes, 77% of B2B marketers also use past performance data to justify future budgets.
Getting the right data is critical for understanding how your campaigns are performing and ensuring you have resources to create campaigns in the future, too.
But by “the right data,” we mean the metrics that actually measure impact, not vanity numbers, such as only tracking follower count.
Impactful metrics that prove B2B social media marketing performance include:
- Engagement rate. Interested leads engage with your content. Watch for steady increases in likes, comments, and shares over time.
- Click-though rate (CTR). How many people saw a post vs. how many clicked the link, indicating interest and audience connection.
- Leads. Watch for trends in lead generation, such as if more leads come from certain types of content or at certain times of year.
- Conversions. How often social content leads to a purchase, or other type of conversion, including signing up for a newsletter, downloading a report, or filling out a contact form.
- Revenue generated from social media. The financial value of what social media has brought to your organization compared to ad costs.
- Follower growth rate. Isn’t this just a vanity metric? Not when you interpret it alongside other key signals. Our Consumer Report found 70% of people follow brands because they intend to purchase from them.
So how do you connect those metrics to outcomes? One word: attribution.
Use social listening for tracking attribution
We’ve already covered how powerful social listening is for understanding customers, competition, and trends, but it’s also key for accurately measuring how and where people are finding out about your organization.
Find out more about using social listening for business.
Create attribution models
The B2B customer journey (often) isn’t as simple as clicking one link and making a purchase — boom, one conversion. Attribution models take the simple conversion rate calculation and apply it to more complex sales cycles for a full picture of a customer’s journey.
Depending on your organization, you may already have these in place through dedicated analytics and growth teams, or with an external agency.
Track long-term trends with benchmarking
B2B social media marketing is a long game. But by using a holistic social media performance lens, rather than only tracking gains month-over-month, you’ll uncover long-term trends that signal real growth.
For example, if your content is aligned with your audience, your engagement rate should go up over time. If it’s flat or less, despite follower growth, then it’s time to revisit your content strategy.
Benchmark — or “snapshot” — your social media performance daily, weekly, monthly, and annually to turn individual metrics into meaningful insights about how social media is impacting your organization.
Plus, benchmark your competitors’ performance too to have something to compare against.
How to report B2B social media ROI to executives
When reporting on social media marketing, place the focus on financial return. Definitely mention that your team’s latest campaign just won a creativity award and all the PR buzz it received, and that engagement is up over 20% this quarter so far.
But most importantly, bring it back to money. That frames social media marketing as a profit center, not a cost center.
In your report, this could look like:
- A lower customer acquisition cost, which means marketing is saving the company money.
- Increased customer loyalty, meaning they’ll stay with you longer, spend more, and be more likely to refer you to other organizations.
- Identifying lead generation trends, such as the common “December Dip” in many B2B industries, where incoming leads and deals drastically slow down in December due to time off. Turn trends into opportunities by suggesting a bigger marketing push in November to get ahead of the slowdown.
For more advice, read how to drive more value from social media and download our free guide to social media performance measurement and reporting.
Hootsuite makes everything needed for effective B2B social media marketing easier and faster.
Access basic tasks like publishing content and analytics plus advanced tools including social listening, employee advocacy programs, ad campaign management, team approval workflows, and more — all in one easy-to-use dashboard.
With Hootsuite, you can:
- Craft engaging content and schedule posts at the right time for your audience to see them
- Save time with the OwlyGPT AI assistant for captions, content repurposing, and everyday tasks
- Drive engagement and customer loyalty with rapid replies made easy with a unified Inbox for comments and DMs across all platforms in one place
- Get the full picture of your organic and paid social media performance and ROI with Advanced Analytics and generate customizable reports
- Harness powerful social listening tools to discover what people say about your organization and read minds (almost)
- Start and manage an employee advocacy program with Amplify to supercharge organic reach
- Easily collaborate across your organization with approval workflows, tasks, custom permissions, and more
Schedule posts, create ads, and get more leads with Hootsuite’s all-in-one tools for B2B social media marketing. Try it free today.
