Author: Shira Abel Category: Enterprise Marketing URL: https://hunterandbard.com/resources/blog/why-you-should-be-using-a-social-media-marketing-service
A few years ago one of the companies I was mentoring wanted to build their name through free marketing on social media. The first thing these companies do when they start taking social media seriously is talk about themselves. Unless you are the hottest ticket in town, it does not work.
Social media rewards having a distinct point of view. The B2B teams winning on social treat the social media manager as a type of hybrid journalist/marketing role, build an employee advocacy structure, use AI for research (not the final draft), put budget toward the analysts and independent experts their buyers already trust, and make sure LLMs can actually find them. The posting cadence is the easy part. Knowing what to say is the hard part.
A few years ago one of the companies I was mentoring wanted to build their name through “free marketing” on social media. First off, your time is not free, so social media is not free. It simply doesn’t cost like an advertisement does. It’s also going to be organic growth, so it will not immediately have the same punch as an advertisement.
The other issue is the content when a startup founder decides the team needs to do social media. Typically it’s LinkedIn, and often, if there is no marketer with an expertise in social on the team, it’s done badly.
The first thing these companies do when they start taking social media seriously is talk about themselves. Product launches. Funding announcements. Hiring updates. It makes sense: they know their own company, so that is what they post about.
Unless you’re the hottest ticket in town, it does not work.
Social media rewards having a distinct point of view. What it rewards is the thing that makes people stop scrolling and feel like someone is actually talking to them. Psychologists call this a parasocial relationship: the audience knows they have never met you, they know there is a team behind the account, but the content feels personal enough that they start to trust you the way they trust someone they know. Mel Robbins built an empire on this. So did every B2B company whose social presence actually drives pipeline instead of collecting polite likes from employees’ friends and family.
If you are getting started or trying to fix what is not working, the rest of this piece is the playbook.
Most companies treat social media as a distribution channel: make content somewhere else, hand it to the social person, have them schedule it. That is backward.
A good social media manager’s most valuable skill is extraction, effectively acting as a hybrid journalist/marketing role. They sit with your principal engineer, your product lead, your CTO, and pull out the insight that person would never think to publish. Then they translate it into something that fits the channel. The subject matter expert never has to think about hooks, formats, or posting schedules. They just have to know things, which they already do.
This is creative, high-judgment work, and it is chronically undervalued. Companies that treat it like a junior tactical role get junior tactical results.
This connects directly to the point above, but goes beyond the social media manager. Forrester’s 2026 B2B predictions estimate that by year’s end, employees outside centralized content teams will create two-thirds of all B2B content. It is happening whether you plan for it or not.
The companies doing it well give their engineers, product leads, and executives three things: a short set of messaging themes, basic brand guardrails, and lightweight compliance training if their industry requires it. Then they get out of the way. Your principal engineer explaining why she chose one architecture over another will outperform a branded carousel about innovation with your target market.
The practical steps:
Marketing teams adopted generative AI earlier and more aggressively than most functions. The output shows it. How many feeds on LinkedIn are full of content that sounds like it was produced by the same tool?
AI helps with initial research, competitive scans, structural outlines, repurposing long-form content into shorter formats, and data synthesis.
Don’t use AI to write the final published version of anything. The last hardcore edit has to come from a human who knows your market, your buyers, and what makes your company’s perspective different from your competitors. If that person cannot take an AI draft and make it sound like something only your company would say, the problem is not the tool.
Forrester’s same 2026 report found that 75% of enterprise B2B companies plan to increase budgets for influencer relations this year. In B2B, that means industry analysts, independent subject-matter experts, and the niche voices your buyers already follow for credible commentary.
AI-generated content has flooded the internet to the point where buyers have a confidence problem. When trust wanes people default to the voices they already know. Analyst reports and expert posts carry more weight than your brand content because they are independently credible.
Where to put the money:
One thing to know, analysts and independent experts will not attach their name to vague messaging. If you cannot clearly explain your category, your differentiation, and your point of view in a conversation, they will pass. Get that clarity before you pitch the partnership.
Kantar’s 2026 Marketing Trends report found that 74% of AI assistant users actively seek AI-driven brand recommendations. Purchase decisions are increasingly mediated by LLMs and AI agents that recommend based on what they have ingested from public content. Kantar’s line is direct. If the model does not know you, it will not choose you.
What to do:
Every tactic in this piece requires the same upstream work. You have to know what you are talking about and be willing to say it specifically. Your social media manager needs to know what story to extract. Your employee advocates need messaging themes clear enough to riff on. Your analyst partners need a point of view sharp enough to co-sign. And the AI models indexing your content need consistent, specific language to build a picture of who you are.
The posting cadence is the easy part. Knowing what to say is the hard part. Start there.
Hunter & Bard builds brand positioning, messaging architecture, and materials for deep tech, telecom, energy, and hardware companies. We are not a social media agency. But when we engage in a strategic partnership, we review your social ecosystem to make sure your channels reflect the positioning we built together. Get in touch.
Hunter & Bard is a San Francisco-based B2B strategy consultancy founded in 2011 by Shira Abel. We help deep-tech and enterprise SaaS companies fix their positioning, sharpen their messaging, and close $100K+ deals.
We work with B2B leaders who are tired of being overlooked, underestimated, or mistaken for their competitors. Our specialty is turning complex, technical products into clear, compelling stories that win enterprise deals.
We believe that perception drives revenue. If your buyers can't tell you apart from the next vendor in 30 seconds, you have a positioning problem — not a marketing problem. We fix that.
Perception = (Story × Visibility) ÷ Noise
This framework drives everything we do. Your story has to be sharp. Your visibility has to be strategic. And you have to cut through the noise — not add to it.
Shira Abel — Founder & CEO. Kellogg MBA. 20+ years in B2B marketing. Former CMO. Keynote speaker. Published in Forbes, HuffPost, and Wired. Specialist in enterprise positioning and perception strategy.
Daina Reed — Founding Designer & Partner. 15+ years in product and brand design. Former Senior Product Designer at Dun & Bradstreet. Specialist in enterprise UX, visual identity, and design systems.