This blog is part of an extensive series on B2B lead generation and revenue growth (and salary growth - the thing that really matters to you).

Your B2B social media content ideas are going to come from your permission asset, or lead magnet. It’s an unlimited source of valuable social media posts.

We showed you step-by-step how to create this in the following blogs:

• This blog about unique selling propositions.
• This blog about permission assets (where the content for your blog comes from).
• This blog about thought leadership permission assets.
• This blog about case study permission assets.
• This blog about buying guide permission assets.

If you’re reading this and you just want to get social posts on your feeds, go right ahead.

What we’re laying out below is part of a lager B2B lead generation strategy. The kind that transforms a business and fastforwards a career.

If you’re interested in that, we’re all for it. You can start with any of the blogs linked above.

Or, of course, we can do it for you and you reap all the rewards.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to take the content from your permission asset and spin it into interesting and valuable social posts.

So when prospects are thinking of spending money with you and check your social media presence, they’ll be encouraged to see you’re real, you’re there, and you’re active.

As with the other blogs you read on our website, we outline how people in different roles in your business can get the creation of your social posts done quickly. Simple steps based on who you are.

There’s a method for owners, directors, and others managing staff at a high level. We call these people Conductors.

There’s a method for sales professionals and others who might be interested in creating a permission asset to help with their main job role. Making this kind of content isn’t their primary responsibility, so it’s done quickly, off the side of their desk. We call these people Curators.

And there’s a method for the marketing manager or marketing generalist or content writer. We call these people Creators.

Find your steps below and get on the path to the revenue growth you want.

How to make 20 good B2B social media posts this afternoon.

You can easily make 20 good quality social media posts from a 1,500 to 3,000 word permission asset.

Do you really need to talk about this on social media?

Yes! Because most B2Bs don’t promote their permission assets well on social media. Or they do it once. One measly social media post about this awesome piece of content.

It’s like putting your best sales rep on one phone call before leaving them alone in the back of the office filing papers.

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Creators, here’s the easiest workflow to get these posts live.

1. Open up the Google doc where the text of the permission asset lives.
2. Open a second Google doc and give it a title like “Permission asset X social media posts”
3. Highlight and copy the exact words from your permission asset that will form the main body of the social media post.
4. Paste those words into your second Google doc.
   1. If you have access to a graphic designer, using the comments function, add a comment that describes the type of image you would like - detailed instructions make it easier for your supporting digital team to bring your idea to life.
5. Do this as many times as you want.
6. Open up the Google sheet you used for your email calendar.
7. Slot in the social media posts over the next 8-12 months, making sure every time an email goes out, a new social post also goes up.
8. Stick to the plan!

Suddenly, you’re doing omni-channel marketing. You're further reinforcing your message where your customers are.

And you’re having an intangible but worthwhile impact on the sales generated via your hard work.

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Curators, here’s what you can do to keep the social media posts flowing.

You can keep a steady flow of social media posts pointing to your permission asset in about 5 minutes of work monthly.

1. On the first day of every month, open the permission asset.
2. Find a passage of text you like in the permission asset (ideally you pick text that’s broken up into short sentences, so when you post it can look like this:
   

1. Paste that text directly into your social media post, and put quotation marks at the start and the end.
2. After the last line copied from the permission asset, add Want to learn more? Or Sound like you? Or Interested? And paste a link directly to your landing page or the blog where the full text of the permission asset is posted.

The thing about social media for B2B is that it doesn’t have to be done perfectly.

Often, all you need is good enough.

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Conductors, here’s what you should do.

As is usually the case, you can do this two ways.

1. Make social media posts a deliverable for your Creator from the start.

You can give them the instructions from the Creators section of this blog and when they submit the posts as part of the final deliverable package, it will be easy for you to spot check whether they followed the directions or not.

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2. Post these regularly yourself

If you use social media regularly. Personally. You can take control of your social media presence and do the posts yourself. Most Conductors won’t want to do this, but there’s no reason you can’t. It’s fast, you know the parts of the permission asset that stand out to you, and your prospects, and you already have access to post behalf of the business*.

Don’t already have access? You might get even more reach from your post if you make it on your personal LinkedIn profile, and simply tag your companies page so it appears in the main feed. LinkedIn tends to favor posts by people vs brands by rewarding them with further organic reach, meaning, more people see your post in their personal feeds.

Like we said, you don’t have to be doing explosively innovative things on social media as a B2B. Just posting useful information from your permission asset will put you ahead of the majority of your competitors, if not all of them.

And something else: a lot of the time, new prospects will visit your social media pages to calm their concerns about your legitimacy. If they see you posting regularly, they’re more likely to become a revenue-generating customer.

So easy posts generated from your permission asset have an often intangible but substantial value to your business.

Generating social posts from your permission asset with AI

Creators, Curators, and Conductors can all use AI to easily generate loads of social media posts from blocks of permission asset content.

Here’s how:

• Write this prompt into ChatGPT - “You are the social media manager at a B2B manufacturer. You recently wrote a piece of educational content for your customers.You would like to promote this on LinkedIn. You will now generate 10 social media posts for LinkedIn from that content. Each post must have a call to action, hashtags related to the content, and a link to www.yourlandingpage.com. Here is the content: paste a block of interesting content from your permission asset here.”
• Repeat this with additional sections of text from the permission asset.
• Paste the posts into a Google doc, and insert them into your social media schedule (in your Google sheet with your email marketing schedule)

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Now let’s talk about growing your B2B social media following.

You’re going to encounter plenty of charlatans who say the most important thing is to grow your social media following to tens of thousands of “people” or accounts.

We throw those quotation marks around “people” because there’s no way Jim’s Asphalt and Shingles has 20,000 followers on LinkedIn or Facebook.

19,906 of those “people” are not real.

There is no value in a bloated, false social media following.

Over the last decade we’ve onboarded dozens of B2B customers who want to “continue to grow our social media following.” Almost without fail, these customers have worked with an agency in the past that bought social media followers to inflate their own invoices.

Yes, you can spend a few hundred dollars and get a few thousand new followers on your preferred social media platform. But your return on investment is going to be precisely $0.

So why bother with social media at all if you aren’t chasing a large following?

Proof.

Proof to your prospects that you’re still relevant. Still in business. Still engaged with your customers, however few actually follow you on social media.

We (or more accurately, you) provide that proof by repurposing your other content (like the permission asset content you spun into social posts moments ago).

Lots of B2B companies hire younger staff with previous experience in B2C. And they think social media is the answer.

They push hard for more energy to be directed into social media (even if they aren’t in the marketing department).

For most B2Bs, this means paying salaries for people to engage in a channel that creates very few real business outcomes.

The trickiest part of this for Conductors (and to a lesser extent, Creators who share workspace with these social pushers and Curators who work closely with them) is that it's easy for these new staff to dazzle with lots of vanity metrics. Things they can show and talk loudly about.  

Like the 10,000 new followers they helped you land over the last 6 months, or the 150 likes or comments on their most recent post.

In almost every case, those aren't real metrics that are going to drive business.

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So how can you tell what’s actually a great target to chase on social media?

Just look at the biggest brand in your space and their following on any social media platform.

Look at Thermo Fisher Scientific, for example.

For most B2Bs, Thermo is probably bigger than your largest competitor. It’s a publicly traded company with over $40 billion in revenue last year and 130,000 employees globally. If you go to its Facebook page, you’ll see tens of likes on every post.

Looking back to January 2023, the most engagement any post ever received is 41 thumbs ups.

Is Thermo putting out a weak social media effort? No. Because the reality is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if the company has 10,000 likes on each of these posts. Those vanity metrics aren’t going to generate any additional business and revenue at the end of their year.

Every month, Thermo puts out at minimum a weekly post. Most of the time it’s a post twice a week.

And that’s what you should be doing too.

It tells your customers you’re paying attention. You’re alive. There’s a channel where your customers can easily reach out to you, if they want.

But you don't need to hire a full-time social media manager. For most B2Bs, it’s not a fulltime job. It’s just repurposing existing content you've already written and pushing that out into social media.

It’s the dozens of posts you can pull out of your permission asset (which you already did).

But there’s something else your team can do to make your social posts appear infront of more actual prospects.

Individuals in the business (even beyond the Conductors, Curators, and Creators like you) can casually use social media to act as force multipliers on any marketing efforts related to the permission asset (or anything else the business creates).

Here’s how.

Go to Facebook and use the search box in the top left hand side. Search for whatever keyword represents your target customer. In the left column you'll see filters - including groups.

Take a look at those groups. There, your potential customers are joining together and talking about what they do with the products or services you sell.

So what do you do with this information?

A brand, as in your business’ Facebook account, can’t share the content you posted on your social page into these groups. It has to be done by an individual. A user account. This is why it just doesn't happen that often. And this is why it's a good opportunity for you. Your competitors are not doing it.

As an example, we searched for wastewater treatment professionals. Lots of B2B companies could sell into this group. The second group listed in the search results has 18,000 members.

Wouldn't you love for these 18,000 members of wastewater treatment professionals to see the post about electrochemistry equipment that your business page shared and only 2 people engaged with last month?

Join the group with your personal account. Have other members of your team do the same. Usually there's a little form you have to fill out that asks why you want to join the group and confirm that you'll abide by the rules.

Then…

1. Go to your company’s Facebook page.
2. Find a post on your page that is not sales focused (like one of the informational posts that links back to your permission asset blog).
3. Click the share button at the bottom right of the post.  
4. Click the share to a group option.
5. Find the group you want to share to.
6. Add some additional text to give the post context - and include emojis and hashtags (don’t worry, hashtags are easy to find. Just use the search bar in Facebook, type a word related to your permission asset, click posts, and scroll through the posts to see the hashtags other users are sharing).

Now your message is casually in front of many more people than ever before inside of your target market.

You distributed your omnichannel message organically. Nice!

If other members of your team are in the same groups, or actually joined when you asked, make sure they like and comment using their personal profiles within the first 24 hours of the share into the group. This will ensure as many of the group members as possible see that post.

We said it before. You aren’t going to make a viral social media post. And even if you did, it probably wouldn’t have an impact your business. You’re niche. You’re B2B. It’s just not the right way to spend a large portion of your limited energy.

But you can increase the trust you have with prospects. You can find prospects with their guard down. And you can give them value, so they choose you when they’re in market.

And now that your social media accounts are locked down, there’s lots more you can do to multiply the number of leads you get from this valuable content.

That’s all available in the other pieces of this series.

• Turning your permission asset into a blog.
• Promoting your permission asset email marketing.
• Turning your permission asset into a YouTube video.
• Merchandizing everything on your website to maximize leads.

in Marketing

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