Aliza Hughes
TL;DR You need a complete organic social media marketing strategy but your in-house marketers aren’t experts in every aspect of B2B social media and don’t have the capacity to cover all the elements needed.
Organic social media is not a “nice to have” for B2B companies in 2025. It’s a must have. And to do it right you’re going to need to dedicate part of your marketing budget so that it can be done successfully.
We’re not talking about taking the marketing efforts your team is already working on and adapting them for social media. This is about having a social-first attitude and strategy that maximizes your content and designs to highlight your company, product, people and culture.
Why? So when your B2B customer is ready, your company is top of mind, the potential customer already feels an emotional connection with you, and knows that the expertise they are looking for can only be found with you.
89% of executives say LinkedIn is valuable for building thought leadership
Convinced you? Great. Let’s talk about who on your team is going to take on this project.
Your content manager? Could work since they are already familiar with your messaging and you trust them as a writer. But are they familiar with the best practices and rules of B2B social media?
Moving on. Your demand gen person probably has a great feel for your audience on social media. But can they create top of funnel, thought leadership, educational/validation content?
Next! Your marketing intern. Great idea since they are digitally native social media users and know how to connect with their audience. But do they know how to connect with your audience? Do they know what a CEO, CISO, CXO wants and needs to hear? Do they know how to engage this profile?
And who is going to create all the banners, gifs, reels, YouTube videos?
Who is going to run the employee advocacy program?
Who is going to do social listening, engagement, research, outreach and networking online?
Who is going to strategically choose some targeted organic posts to boost to a targeted audience?
This is why it just makes strategic sense to hire an expert B2B organic social media agency to handle your complete organic social media strategy, creation and execution, for 2025
An agency is going to be able to cover all the who, what, where, how and why’s of your organic social media strategy.
You’ll have direct access to experts for every social platform that makes strategic sense for your company, whether it be LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Quora, YouTube… (Yes, YouTube!)
Let’s say I’m your account manager at the agency. I will work with you to craft a strategy and plan that makes sense as part of your larger marketing strategy, but that takes a social first approach. I/my team will create the assets – written and graphic – and make sure they get posted. I simultaneously keep a constant eye on best practices and trends to make sure that your posts and feed continue to look contemporary and innovative.
But it doesn’t end there.
Passive and active engagement: you have a dedicated person to react to engagements on your posts and keep eyes and ears out for mentions or other conversations that are interesting to your company and industry.
Thought leadership: I shouldn’t need to say this but I will anyway.
There is no organic social media strategy in 2025 that doesn’t include thought leadership from your executive team, management or in-house experts.
People relate to people, and you just can’t rely on a corporate only social media strategy anymore. You need to have your team actively sharing their thoughts and ideas with your target audience, AND engaging with them.
(I can’t really talk publicly here about how we do that, but reach out to me privately and I’ll give you the whole run down. Suffice it to say that I’ve had many, many execs say to me “but how will you know how to write thought leadership with my voice and knowledge”, and I’ve never had a problem 🙂
So now we’ve got the corporate channels covered, and your execs are sharing content with their audience. But you have probably 95% of your company that you can still tap into.
This can and will be a whole separate blog but an employee advocacy program is an amazing way to get the rest of your employees actively involved in marketing and tap into their audience.
Your POC, maybe still me at this point, or maybe another member has been added to this account, creates engaging and relevant content for your employees to share. If you’re using a tool like Sprout or Oktopost to run the EA program, then we can do the reporting for this as well.
Not going to go deeply into this topic, though I’m happy to chat about it any day, but you should make sure to have a small boosting budget to complement an organic social media strategy. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but there are specific cases when your posts and campaigns could use that extra push.
As the CMO or an organic social media agency, I would not be the person to run the paid ads campaign, even as your account manager since that’s not my expertise. But we do have someone in-house who runs paid campaigns for our clients with tremendous success.
Lastly, I want to mention events. Every marketer knows that occasionally you need to take your marketing campaign offline and into the real world, and in person events are a great place to do that. But if a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it? Or in this case, if you send a team to an industry event but you didn’t have a strategic social media campaign about it, did it count? And if your company is hosting a conference, even more so!
I have a whole team of people who shine with event strategy and execution. From planning and executing the content strategy, to actually being at the event on the day and creating meaningful and impactful content, this is one of our sweet spots. And when the event is over, it can live on for a long time online with proper content planning before, collection on the day, and execution after the fact.
One thing is clear: one social media manager can not fill all of these shoes. When you’re planning out your 2025 marketing budget keep in mind that you need a team of experts on your side to build and execute a complete and comprehensive B2B organic social media plan.
At ZoecialMedia we have a team of experts who get excited and enjoy working with B2B companies on organic social media. Our in-house experts are thoughtful, strategic and creative and will work with you to get the most out of your channels.
Ready to get started?
Yalla! Let’s do this…
In an ideal world you’d have an unlimited budget for your organic social media but we understand that in reality we often need to prioritize so here’s a helpful chart for how we’d prioritize our organic social media if we were in your shoes:
| What | Priority | Notes |
|---|---|---|
|
Executive thought leadership |
A MUST HAVE |
People relate to and connect to people. Your audience wants to hear directly from your leadership.
|
|
Corporate channel posting |
High priority
|
But probably not at the level that you’d expect. Even 1 post/ week is enough to get started.
|
|
Branding and design
|
High priority
|
Social media platforms are very visual but as long as you have consistent branding, you don’t need expensive equipment and programs to have a beautiful and cohesive look.
|
|
Social listening – passive
|
High priority
|
At the very least someone on the team needs to be responding to mentions and engaging with employee posts.
|
|
Social listening – active
|
Medium priority
|
This is a great way to understand what conversations are happening in the industry and join them. Remember: it’s called SOCIAL media for a reason!
|
|
Employee advocacy
|
Medium priority
|
While ideally I’d put this as high priority as well, it is an additional project to run a successful employee advocacy program. Definitely start with a small trial and grow from there.
|
|
Social selling
|
Low priority
|
It actually depends on how aligned your marketing and sales teams are. Marketing might see this as a low priority but sales might see this as high priority.
|
|
Events management
|
Low priority
|
Until it becomes high priority 😂
Managing your social media when you host events or attend them is important, but only on an as needed basis.
|
|
Boosting |
Giving a little boost to your organic social media can be great for targeted campaigns and lead generation.
|
Low priority
|
Ready to learn more?
