TL;DR
Most B2B tech companies waste time on the wrong social platforms. LinkedIn is still the centre of gravity for enterprise sales — but YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram each have a specific job they do well. The trick is knowing which one fits your buyer, your product, and your team's capacity. Here are ten things that actually work.
1. Know which platform your buyer actually uses
This sounds obvious. It isn't. I see Series B companies agonising over their TikTok strategy when their buyers are CIOs who've never opened the app.
The rough map: LinkedIn for enterprise and mid-market B2B. TikTok for developer tools, open-source projects, and anything where individual practitioners drive adoption bottom-up. YouTube for complex products that need explaining — anything with a learning curve or a considered purchase. Instagram for employer brand and culture, not demand gen.
Pick one or two. Do them properly. Ignore the rest until you've earned the right to expand.
2. YouTube: build a library, not a channel
YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. For B2B tech, that matters more than subscriber counts.
Think about what your buyers search for when they're trying to solve a problem. Product demos. How-to walkthroughs. Founder explainers. Customer stories. Integration guides. Every one of those is a video that lives on YouTube forever and ranks in Google.
Loom built a massive audience by making their product the content — short screen recordings showing how to use Loom, which simultaneously demonstrated the product. Notion did something similar with template walkthroughs that double as product tutorials. HubSpot went broader — full educational series on marketing and sales that happen to funnel people toward their platform.
The pattern: useful content that would still be valuable if you removed the branding. That's the bar.
3. TikTok: show the humans behind the product
TikTok works for B2B when you stop trying to make it look like LinkedIn.
Behind-the-scenes engineering content. Founder hot takes. "Day in the life at a Series B startup." Quick product demos that feel native to the platform — not repurposed webinar clips with a logo slapped on top.
Figma has leaned into design community content on TikTok and it works because their users are already there. Duolingo is the extreme example — their unhinged owl mascot has 13 million followers — but you don't need to go that far. Shopify does well with founder stories and quick business tips that feel human.
The common thread: personality. If your company culture is buttoned-up and corporate, TikTok probably isn't the place. That's fine. Not everything needs to be everywhere.
4. Instagram: culture and recruiting, not sales
Instagram is where potential hires decide whether they want to work for you. It's where partners check if you're a real company. It's where investors look to see if there's energy behind the brand.
It is not where enterprise buyers make purchasing decisions.
The best B2B Instagram accounts show the team, the office, the events, the retreats. Stripe keeps theirs clean — product launches, team moments, developer conference highlights. Canva uses it as an extension of their design brand. Neither is trying to generate pipeline from it.
If you're hiring aggressively, invest here. If you're not, a post every couple of weeks is enough to look alive.
5. Short-form video works everywhere now
Here's the efficiency play. A single 60-second video — founder talking to camera, quick product demo, customer testimonial — can post to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and LinkedIn. Create once, distribute four times.
Vertical format. Subtitles baked in. Hook in the first two seconds. That's the template.
The maths on this is hard to argue with. One hour of recording and editing gives you a week of content across four platforms. Compare that to writing four separate blog posts or designing four sets of static graphics.
6. The 80/20 rule: 80% value, 20% product
Educational content builds an audience. Product content shrinks it. That ratio — roughly 80/20 — holds across every platform.
The value content is the stuff your audience would watch even if they never bought from you. Industry insights. How-to guides. Honest takes on market trends. The product content is launches, features, case studies — important, but only to people already in your orbit.
Most companies get this backwards. They post product updates to an audience of nobody, then wonder why growth is flat.
7. Founder-led content outperforms brand content
People follow people. Not logos. This is true on every platform but it's especially true on TikTok and LinkedIn.
A CEO on camera — even a slightly awkward one — beats a polished brand video with stock footage and a voiceover. The data on this is consistent. Founder posts on LinkedIn get 3-5x the engagement of company page posts. Founder-led TikToks outperform brand accounts by similar margins.
The resistance is always the same. "I'm not a content person." "I don't know what to say." "I look weird on camera." None of that matters as much as authenticity does. Your buyers want to know who's behind the product. Give them that.
8. Repurpose your best LinkedIn posts into video
If a text post got engagement on LinkedIn, record yourself saying the same thing. Different audience, same insight. The post already proved the idea resonates — now you're just changing the format.
This works in reverse too. A TikTok that performs well? Transcribe it and post the text on LinkedIn. A YouTube explainer that gets traction? Cut the best 60 seconds into a Short.
Content recycling sounds lazy. It's actually smart distribution. Most of your audience only sees you on one platform. They'll never know — and if they do see it twice, the repetition reinforces the message.
9. Consistency beats production quality
A weekly iPhone video from the founder beats a quarterly polished brand film. Every time. The algorithm rewards consistency. Your audience rewards reliability. And your team learns faster by shipping more often.
The companies that win at social media content aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones that show up every week, even when the content isn't perfect. Especially when it isn't perfect — because perfect is slow, and slow is invisible.
Set a cadence you can sustain for six months. One video a week. Two posts. Whatever it is, commit to it and protect the time.
10. Measure what matters for B2B
Followers are vanity. Views are interesting but not decisive. The metrics that matter for B2B social media are downstream.
- Website visits from social. Are people clicking through?
- DM conversations. Are prospects reaching out directly?
- "How did you hear about us?" Add this to every form. Track the answers religiously. Social media influence rarely shows up in attribution models because the journey is non-linear.
- Sales call mentions. When prospects say "I saw your video about X" — that's the signal.
If you're measuring follower growth as your north star, you're optimising for the wrong thing. Build for pipeline influence, not applause.
I worked with a robotics company — Machani Robotics — that was spreading itself thin across every platform. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, even exploring TikTok. Five channels, none of them getting enough attention to gain traction. The content was fine. The problem was coverage.
We stripped it back. Their buyers were industrial operations directors — not exactly a TikTok demographic. We killed Instagram and TikTok entirely, doubled down on LinkedIn for thought leadership and relationship-building, and invested properly in YouTube for product demonstrations and technical explainers. The YouTube library became their best sales asset. Prospects were watching three or four videos before the first call, arriving pre-educated and ready to talk specifics. Pipeline velocity increased meaningfully — not because we did more, but because we stopped doing the wrong things.
Sometimes the best social media strategy is deciding which platforms to ignore.
Where to start
If you're a B2B tech company trying to figure out social media beyond LinkedIn, here's the honest order of operations:
- Get LinkedIn right first. It's still where B2B buying conversations happen. Read our LinkedIn guide if you haven't already.
- Add YouTube if your product needs explaining. Start with five videos: a 2-minute product overview, three customer use cases, and a founder story. That's your library foundation.
- Experiment with short-form video. One 60-second clip per week, posted everywhere. See what sticks.
- Instagram only if you're hiring. Keep it human. Keep it real. Don't overthink it.
- TikTok only if your buyer is there. Developer tools, yes. Enterprise ERP, no.
The companies that build real audiences do fewer things, better, for longer. That's the whole strategy.
Common questions
Should a B2B tech company be on TikTok?
It depends on your buyer. If you sell developer tools, open-source infrastructure, or anything where individual practitioners influence the buying decision, TikTok can work — especially short founder takes and behind-the-scenes engineering content. If you sell enterprise software to procurement committees, your time is better spent on LinkedIn and YouTube. The test: is your buyer under 35 and does the purchase start bottom-up? If yes, experiment. If not, skip it without guilt.
How much should we spend on social media content?
Less than you think on production, more than you think on consistency. A founder recording weekly two-minute takes on an iPhone costs almost nothing and typically outperforms polished brand videos. Budget 2-4 hours per week of founder or senior team time, a basic editing tool like CapCut or Descript, and — if you can stretch to it — a part-time editor to handle posting and repurposing. You don't need a studio. You need a schedule you can sustain for six months.
Is it worth hiring a social media manager for a Series B company?
Not a dedicated one, usually. At Series B, you want someone who handles social as part of a broader content and growth marketing role. The actual content — the founder takes, the product demos, the customer stories — needs to come from people inside the business. What you need is someone to edit, schedule, repurpose, and measure. That's a content marketing hire with social chops, not a social media manager in the traditional sense.