Why your B2B social media marketing doesn't work

There are 5 reasons your B2B social media marketing brings no results. In this article I'll show how to stop making boring posts and get business growth instead.

“Social media is dead”

Yeah, because you probably post like this (and it’s time to stop):

1. Links to your blog or website

Social media platforms hate links unless you’re paying for ads.

People often hate links too, so even if it’s an internal link (e.g Linkedin to Linkedin), it’ll be perceived negatively.

So many midmarket company pages on social media are just walls of links to their blog posts with no value to the platform or its readers. That’s the opposite of what you need to do.

2. Feature/product announcements

Can bring a lot attention and engagement (surprisingly).

But this happens if the benefit is clearly explained and its promotion is orchestrated.

There is a team (or two) behind every successful launch you see on X or Linkedin. It’s not “organic” per se. It’s boosted by bigger pages before it gets to people’s organic feeds.

Even when you have followers built over years, your announcement post can flop completely. That’s because what you need are active viewers and algorithmic distribution. (and if you don’t want to depend on that - build your email list)

So whether you’re paying for such promotion or you have active followers, you better be sure that the post is good. Your intro and caption text must hook the viewer and then your video/carousel itself must explain your benefits and the mechanism clearly.

You can do an “abstract” launch, without much explanation, but either way it needs to be interesting to your target audience.

3. Reposts

Reposting from your company page to your personal page is like driving with the handbrake on. People follow people. Personal Linkedin pages grow >4x faster than company pages.

Reposting from other people without adding any commentary can help you build relationships and promote good ideas. But it will not grow your page. When your buyer sees the page where every post is just repost, why would they follow or convert from that?

When reposting makes sense: One of the methods I see is employees and C-suite reposting and supporting CEO’s/Founder’s content. That’s like boosting I explained in the previous section.

4. No focus on the right audience and topics

I will cover this in a separate email, so stay tuned.

TLDR is: Write as if you’re talking to an intentionally smaller audience, about topics they care about and make sense for your product/brand.

Stick to providing value to your target decision maker, using their language. Don’t dilute your message down to try to appeal to everybody. And don’t talk about random topics and personal things too much.

This helps the algorithm find people to show it to. This helps readers to understand it’s for them. This helps you build the audience that your business needs.

5. AI

“We just replaced our whole marketing department with AI”

Yeah, and it shows.

Using AI to do 100% of writing is not just lazy, but hostile to your readers.

Good AI writing is a difficult skill. Inexperienced marketers and founders who want to “focus on more important things” produce such an obvious and tasteless slop that there’s no wonder social media does nothing for them.

If you think “there aren’t that many fully ai written posts out there”. That’s because algorithms don’t show this trash (usually). You can find it when browsing through people’s profiles and see how lazy people can be.

There are 3 ways to use AI for writing:

1. Learn actual skills like writing, copywriting, social media content writing, AI prompt/skill creation. Then create a system that produces meaningful results automatically. But be aware of the fact that whenever something changes (e.g content stats data, AI model updates) your whole machine can break
2. Use AI to do just certain tasks. There is no right answer. Some people use it for research and ideation, others hate it for research and ideation. Some people write 10% of the text (concepts, idea dumps, drafts, etc), then use AI to write 80% of the text, then do 10% manual editing. Some people use it to create graphics, not the text. Just play with it and find what works. That’s semi-automated AI-augmented mode
3. Or post slop

If you want good writing without the work - hire a professional writer.

What to do instead

I covered multiple ideas in my featured section in Think Like a CMO article:

Never treat social media as something you MUST do in B2B.

Instead, make yourself WANT to do it (by making it easy).

"Post 5 times this week" is a checkbox that produces boring sludge no one wants to read.

Instead:
- sit down with your co-founder or strategic advisor, list EVERYTHING impressive you achieved last 2-4 quarters
- sit down with your sales director/head/lead, list EVERY top customer objection by how common they are
- sit down with your HR, list things that brought your best hires

Use content structures and hooks that you see working right now. Post these 3 content buckets. See what outperforms the rest - double down on that.

That's how you make a flywheel of value-packed posts that are both easy to produce, and brings you business results.

Good content = Outcome + Education + Relatable stories as proof

P.S. Do you want more results from social media with less work? Work with me - book a free consulting