B2B social media content vs. content marketing: Balance engagement and lead generation
Table of contents
B2B marketing regularly leverages digital content, websites, and social media. Businesses must engage their audience through multiple channels, leveraging social media content and content marketing to maximize impact. However, these two approaches serve different purposes and require distinct strategies. While social media content fosters engagement and brand awareness, nurtures relationships, and creates leads, content marketing builds authority, gives educational value, and nurtures leads over time. Striking the right balance between the two can make both marketing efforts better impact your brand’s awareness, consideration, and revenue growth.
For example, Oktopost effectively integrates both approaches. It uses LinkedIn to share bite-sized insights on social media marketing while driving users to in-depth blog posts, case studies, and webinars. Our posts often feature industry trends, best practices, and engaging visuals that spark discussions while linking to longer-form content on our website. This strategy is being implemented on Oktopost’s LinkedIn page and blog.
What is B2B social media content?
B2B social media content refers to the posts, updates, and interactions businesses create and share on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Unlike content marketing, which focuses on long-form and evergreen materials, social media content is designed for immediate consumption, engagement, and brand visibility. It includes short-form updates, industry news, interactive polls, and video snippets that spark conversations and encourage direct audience interaction.
Goals of B2B social media content
A great example of this is our LinkedIn posts, where we share quick insights about B2B social media marketing, employee advocacy, and content distribution. Our posts encourage audience interaction through questions, polls, and PDF carousels while subtly guiding users toward our blogs, case studies, and other resources on our website.
📌 Example: Oktopost’s LinkedIn Post
One recent post highlighted the importance of employee advocacy in social media marketing, featuring a short and engaging caption, an infographic, and a link to an entire blog post.
Guidelines for creating effective B2B social media content
B2B social media content should be concise, visually compelling, and interactive to maximize engagement. Posts should align with industry trends and address common pain points among the target audience. Diverse content formats—such as LinkedIn carousels, short-form videos, and infographics—can enhance visibility and encourage shares.
📌 Example: Oktopost’s Infographics on LinkedIn
Oktopost frequently shares infographics breaking complex B2B social media strategies into easy-to-digest visuals. These posts perform well in engagement and shares, helping Oktopost expand its reach.
Oktopost research proves the impact of content types
Social media content strategy performance measurement proves that different content achieves different results.
Deep dive into companies’ LinkedIn posts with external links.
Quick insights:
- Image Galleries and PDF posts consistently drive higher engagement and impressions, indicating their potential for impactful storytelling and brand connection.
- Despite their limited use, text-only posts deliver strong engagement and reach, particularly when external links are not included.
- Posts with external links are essential for driving clicks. Still, engagement metrics often lag behind other content types; however, it is safe to assume that people who click on a link to your post show interest in what you said by clicking and not by liking.
- Video posts remain a popular format with or without external links; their metrics indicate potential for improvement, especially in engagement and clicks.
What is B2B content marketing?
B2B content marketing is the strategic creation and distribution of valuable, longer-form content designed to educate, inform, and nurture potential customers. Unlike social media content, which is often short-lived and engagement-driven, content marketing focuses on in-depth resources that address specific industry challenges. Examples include blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, webinars, and podcasts.
Goals of B2B content marketing
The core objective of B2B content marketing is to generate and nurture leads by guiding prospects through the buyer’s journey. Businesses use educational content to build trust, positioning themselves as industry leaders who offer solutions rather than just products.
This image from Illumination marketing demonstrates the main types of content marketing methods
📌 Example: Oktopost’s Blog
Oktopost frequently publishes high-quality blog content that helps B2B marketers navigate social media marketing challenges. Recent posts cover best practices for optimizing content and leveraging employee advocacy for brand amplification.
How to optimize your content for SEO, AI, and Social search
Employee advocacy B2B: A complete marketing strategy guide
Guidelines for creating effective B2B content marketing
Successful B2B content marketing requires deeply understanding audience needs and search intent.
Content should be well-researched, data-driven, and optimized for search engines to maximize reach.
📌 Example: Ungated guides and gated guides
Oktopost offers gated and ungated content, such as playbooks and research reports, that provides deeper insights into B2B marketing trends. These assets serve as lead generation tools, requiring users to submit their email addresses before accessing the content.
Ungated
The guide to planning your 2025 B2B social media strategy
Gated
The social media manager’s guide to bottleneck-free content creation
📌 Example: Customer case studies
Oktopost offers customer case studies featuring how customers use the Oktopost platform and achieve remarkable results, increasing engagement, website traffic, and revenues through social media marketing management. All case studies are available for downloading and sharing with additional team members.
Building social content and campaigns together: a cohesive strategy
An example of integrating social media content with content marketing is Oktopost’s LinkedIn strategy. We use short-form posts, infographics, and employee advocacy to promote our blogs, case studies, podcasts, and webinars.
📌 Example: Oktopost’s LinkedIn Webinar Promotions When Oktopost hosts a webinar, we create a multi-phase LinkedIn strategy that includes teaser posts, countdown updates, registration posts, and post-event summaries—ensuring maximum engagement at each stage.
Recommended flow of a LinkedIn content marketing and social media campaign
| Phase | Content marketing activity | Social media activity | Example from Oktopost |
| Awareness | Publish an industry insights blog post or podcast. | Share key takeaways on LinkedIn. | Blog post on employee advocacy with a LinkedIn infographic. |
| Engagement | Create an infographic or short video summary. | Post an engaging poll or discussion. | A poll on LinkedIn asked about social media marketing challenges. |
| Consideration | Publish a guide or case study. | Share snippets with a CTA to download. | Whitepaper on B2B social media trends promoted via LinkedIn posts. |
| Decision | Host a LinkedIn Live or webinar. | Promote the event with countdown posts. | Webinar on social media ROI with LinkedIn video teasers. |
| Retention | Publish a customer success story. | Feature testimonials and user-generated content. | Case study of a successful Oktopost customer campaign. |
Conclusion and key takeaways
Balancing B2B social media content and content marketing is essential for an effective digital strategy. Oktopost provides an example of how businesses can use social media to engage audiences while driving traffic to in-depth content.
📌 Final Takeaways from Oktopost’s Strategy:
✅ Use LinkedIn posts and infographics to generate engagement and lead users to blogs.
✅ Use social media to promote podcasts even if they are an audio-first content platform
✅ Create long-form content like guides and case studies for lead generation.
✅ Host webinars and LinkedIn Lives to provide real-time insights and build authority.
✅ Leverage employee advocacy to expand reach and drive organic engagement.
By studying Oktopost’s LinkedIn and content strategy, B2B marketers can be inspired by an engagement-focused approach that delivers measurable results.
Whether through LinkedIn carousels, gated content, or interactive polls, finding the right balance ensures a high-impact marketing strategy.
