The power of social media publishing for your content marketing

Content is the unseen force that holds the B2B universe together. It keeps your marketing, sales, and brand strategies in perfect orbit — fueling growth, building connections, and driving revenue across every channel. Without content, everything would spin out of control, crashing into missed opportunities and wasted effort.

But there’s no shortage of content out there. Every day, businesses launch a galaxy’s worth of blogs, podcasts, infographics, videos, and stories, competing for attention, influence, and market share. In this vast expanse, only the most strategic content truly stands out and drives measurable ROI: generating leads, boosting conversions, and winning share of voice.

Smart businesses know that creating great content is just the beginning. To maximize its impact, you need to send it to the places where it will thrive — and today, the most powerful launchpad is social media. Social publishing isn’t just another channel, from targeted posts and thought leadership on LinkedIn to engaging visuals and videos across niche communities. The gravitational center can pull your content strategy into sharper focus and faster results.

What is social media publishing? 

In a nutshell, social media publishing refers to:

• Strategizing social posts
• Creating and scheduling social posts – ideally, to a regular posting schedule 
• Using social listening to create content that targets current high-value themes
• Repurposing content for specific social media audiences 
• Posting UGC (User Generated Content) to your social channels 
• Publishing content via employee advocates
• Publishing content via B2B influencers 

Not all businesses will do all of the above, and plenty will pick and choose the elements they want and need for their specific social media marketing goals. If you have any presence on social media, you’ll have encountered plenty of real-world examples of social media publishing this week alone. It’s the total of a brand’s digital footprint on social media and is very powerful.

Your existing content marketing strategy gets a real boost from social media. Not only do these channels offer a lot of versatility in creating and publishing content, but they also grant you access to some of the most valuable audiences any marketer could hope to find. Once you understand how to target your niche, you can maximize ROI and scale up your content marketing efforts without feeling burdened by the platform’s demands. 

Just how powerful is social publishing? 

Social publishing can bring in high-quality leads. The more originality, insight, and industry wisdom you can infuse your social channels with, the more effectively they will capture the interest of your highest-quality leads. And, in turn, the more you interact with those quality leads, the more insights you will have into them when the time comes to encourage them further down the funnel. 

To give you a sense of the power that a valuable and strong social publishing strategy can be, somewhere in the region of 75% of B2B buyers are on social media. Moreover, a little under half of social media users (globally) rely on social media for brand research. Just under 4 in every five businesses pursuing social selling are performing better than businesses that aren’t social selling.

True, it takes a concerted effort to get those sorts of figures. Many businesses have a social presence that delivers very little R on very little I. 

But to invest in social media and get that high ROI, you don’t need to drain your team’s reserves of time and energy. Social posting requires strong content, which requires a ‘special ingredient’ that spells the difference between virality and complete audience indifference.

Here’s what you need to know about creating the right content for social media the right way.  

How do you create content for social media? 

There are so many ways to generate social media content. If there were a universal, cookie-cutter approach for extracting a significant ROI from your social posts, social media would have long lost its value for marketers. The key is to understand the unique demands of your audience and industry while complementing that highly focused understanding with the most advanced social media publishing tools. 

What to post

First, let’s start with the content itself. There are so many different formats to use. Some will be perfect for your brand, and others won’t take off. 

• Long-form posts are ideal for text-based social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Shorter, text-based posts (i.e., tweets), maybe featuring links to on-site content.
• Snapshots from longer-form content (say, 30 seconds from a much longer seminar or a line or two extracted from an article)
• Infographics
• UGC (User Generated Content)– reviews, testimonials, social posts from their own channels, case studies, posts from community forums…
• Image and video – great for Instagram, but visual media is highly effective anywhere. A picture’s worth a thousand words, as they say
• Promotions and referral incentives are highly effective on social media

How to create content

Surprise, surprise – putting together strong content for social media is a highly creative practice, and it has no right or wrong. When discussing best practices, creating content in advance and scheduling it (more on that below) is way better than working to strict daily or weekly deadlines, even if you think there’s something to be said for working under pressure now and again. 

But there’s more to it than creativity, particularly when you want to be scaling your B2B social media strategy without running up against burnout – or hiring a boatload of extra content creators. 

To do so, you’ll need to use AI-assisted content tools. The Oktopost social media publishing platform utilizes the most advanced AI to complement the work and creativity that marketing teams are investing in their campaigns. Our tool suite includes many types of AI inside, such as (Post Wizard, Content Spark, Message Mixer, Story Slinger)

To streamline content creation, you can also take advantage of the power of content repurposing – AKA, taking previously successful content and repurposing it into new formats. Tweet a salient quote alongside a link to the original, condense a report into an infographic that presents key metrics and insights, or crop a longer video into something that fits TikTok’s short, snappy content preference. 

You can also lean to an extent on user-generated content and reap the rewards of complementing your own work at self-promotion with invaluable social proof from existing customers and influencers. 

Where to post it

Chances are, anyone reading this article has at least one or two social media accounts on the go. From Facebook and Twitter to scroll-happy platforms like Instagram and TikTok, or the B2B favourite – LinkedIn, the list of social media great for B2B content marketing isn’t filled with unfamiliar names. B2C and B2B share much more in common than people think, particularly regarding the value of social media marketing. 

B2B decision-makers have always relied on a strong supply of content before they commit to any particular brand, and, for a while now, they have been increasingly reliant upon social media to find that content. While LinkedIn will always be the obvious choice for B2B, particularly in influencer marketing, it’s important to remember that the boundaries are no longer clear-cut. B2B decision-makers spend plenty of time on various social channels, and the right approach to social posting is a great way to spread awareness and build strong relationships with leads. 

Think beyond your social channels, too. While consistently publishing is the key to engaging your audiences, it’s also work thinking about people who are members of other audiences. Employee advocacy will expose your brand to new social media users in a very positive light, once again, boosted by social proof. At the same time, influencer marketing will do the same, exposing you to very relevant audiences in a very positive light. 

The best cross-platform social media posting strategies look to tailor content to each platform and diversify their reach by publishing through other channels with their niche audiences. 

Scheduling social media posts effectively

In days gone by, planning and scheduling content across multiple social platforms was a time-drain—a necessary burden, but incredibly slow and laborious nonetheless. Oktopost’s platform was created to circumvent the slow and repetitive aspects of social media publishing and ensure a smooth, seamless publishing schedule that frees up marketing manpower and ensures a more consistent approach to social media. 

Creating the space to plan social media posts makes it possible to handle multiple campaigns on social media at scale. Take advantage of the calendar for easy visualisation and collaboration, keep an eye on every social platform and the performance of every single social post, and make your team’s time available for the most essential, specialised aspects of content marketing rather than losing hours per week on repetitive tasks. 

For effective social publishing, you’ve got to keep your finger on the pulse. You’ve got to know your audience, the strengths of your different channels, and the perfect moment for posting (as and when it comes). Then again, you need both hands free, actually, to create compelling content. 

With Oktopost, you can manage both simultaneously, embracing real-time social listening without draining your manpower before content is even created. The right tools will unlock the full potential of your social media presence. All you need to do is embrace them.