Social Media Isn’t a Lost Channel for B2B

I don't have to convince you that social media matters for B2C brands. As a consumer, you likely engage with your favorite brands on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok on a regular basis. Some brands that come to mind that are crushing it on social media are Duolingo, Glossier and Ryanair.

Although B2B brands (especially the industries we find ourselves in at Four Columns) tend to be less fun and flashy, don't make the mistake of thinking those brands have no use for social media.

Look, I get it. Nobody's making a valve go viral. …Right? (Stick around.)

I've spent the last six years writing for clients in manufacturing, oil and gas, heavy industrial and plenty of other industries that people would call "boring." They're not boring, by the way. But they are the industries where I hear "social media isn't for us" most often. So here's my case for why that's a mistake, and what social can actually do for a B2B company that doesn't sell to consumers.

Don't our buyers just live on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn matters for B2B, and I'm not here to talk you out of it. But it's one channel, not the whole map. Your buyers, future employees and neighbors spend time on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok too, and if your brand only shows up in one place, you're missing most of the conversations happening about your industry.

When we bring this up with B2B leaders, I usually hear some version of three objections:

• "Our buyers aren't on Instagram." Maybe not in their "buyer" hat. But they're definitely on it in their "person scrolling at lunch" hat. (More on that in a minute.)
• "Nobody wants to see our equipment." You'd be surprised. Some of the most-watched brand content on the internet is big machines doing big things.
• "Our business runs on relationships." It does! That's exactly why social matters. Social is where relationships get warmed up before the first call and kept warm after the deal closes.

None of those objections are wrong, exactly. They're just incomplete.

Who's actually on the other side of the screen?

A person. The plant manager, procurement lead or ops director evaluating your company is the same person who watches the Duolingo owl unhinge itself on their lunch break. They don't stop being human when they clock in, and the platforms they scroll on don't stop shaping what they think of you.

That matters because B2B buyers do most of their homework before they ever talk to you. In 6sense's 2025 Buyer Experience Study of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, buyers didn't make first contact with a seller until they were 61% of the way through their buying process. And 94% had already ranked their shortlist of vendors by preference before contacting any of them.

94%?! By the time your sales team gets the call, the buyer has usually already picked a favorite. The question is what they saw while they were picking.

Our CEO Doug walked through a hypothetical industrial buying journey in ROI Realities: Part I: a Google search, a website visit, a LinkedIn post, a colleague's recommendation, a trade show booth, a follow-up email. Every one of those touchpoints played a role. Now add the ones that happen off LinkedIn. The buyer's coworker sends them a YouTube video of your equipment in action. They check out your Facebook page to see if you're still active. They see your crew featured on Instagram at a community event. Those count too.

Can an industrial brand really pull this off?

Remember that valve joke? Some of the most famous viral videos of the last decade came from companies that sell trucks and excavators, not lip gloss.

• Volvo Trucks, "The Epic Split": Jean-Claude Van Damme doing a split between two reversing semi trucks to show off Volvo's steering. It passed 59 million YouTube views in four weeks, became the most-viewed automotive commercial on YouTube at the time, and more than tripled Volvo Trucks' YouTube subscribers. A truck ad!
• Caterpillar, "Stack": For its Built For It Trials series, Cat had operators play Jenga with 27 blocks weighing 600 pounds each, using five excavators, loaders and telehandlers. It's a product demo. It's also genuinely fun to watch.
• Oilfield and trades creators: Spend five minutes on TikTok or Instagram and you'll find roughnecks, linemen, welders and equipment operators building real audiences just by showing what their workday looks like. If individual crew members can make this content work, your company can too.

Yes, the Volvo and Cat videos are more than a decade old, and no, you don't need a Van Damme budget. Here's what this looks like closer to home, for two of our own clients:

• Cornerstone Mechanical: Cornerstone sees Facebook as a recruiting channel, so that's where we focused. In April 2025, their page had 75 followers. By April 2026, it had 533, more than seven times as many. One change that helped: we stopped posting the same thing everywhere and started tailoring posts to each platform.
• UTEM: UTEM has let us get creative with video, and it's paid off in two directions. Externally, the videos show that UTEM is a great place to work. Internally, employees have gotten really into the shoots, which says a lot about the culture on its own. That's only part of the story. Read the full UTEM case study to see the rest.

The point is that people are fascinated by how things get built, moved, drilled and made, and by the people who do it. Your industry has more interesting content sitting around than you think.

What can social do for an industrial company besides sell?

Here's where I think B2B leaders sell social short. They measure it like a lead-gen channel, decide it doesn't produce leads, and walk away. But for industrial companies, social is doing at least four jobs, and only one of them is sales.

Recruiting

If you run an industrial company, I'd bet hiring keeps you up at night more than lead gen does. Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute estimate that U.S. manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million new employees between 2024 and 2033, and that 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled.

The next generation of technicians, welders and operators isn't looking for you on LinkedIn. In Zety's 2025 Gen Z Career Trends Report, 76% of Gen Z workers said they use Instagram for career advice and content, more than twice as many as use LinkedIn (34%). If your company's Instagram is empty, you're invisible to a big chunk of your future workforce.

Community relations

If you have a plant, a yard or field operations in a small town, your neighbors want to know who you are. Facebook is still where a lot of local communities talk. Sponsoring the high school football team, posting about your safety record or celebrating a 30-year employee builds goodwill that matters when you need a permit, a zoning change or a little grace after a bad day.

The credibility check

Prospects, recruits and partners look you up. When they find a Facebook page that hasn't posted since 2019, they don't think "they're too busy doing real work." They wonder if you're still in business. An active presence doesn't have to be daily. It just has to look alive.

Customer education

YouTube how-tos, product walkthroughs, maintenance tips and safety videos help your current customers get more out of what they bought. That builds loyalty and can cut down on support calls. It also gives your sales team something useful to send instead of another "just checking in" email.

How does social affect whether you show up in search and AI answers?

More than most people realize. AI tools like ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews pull heavily from social platforms when they answer questions. If people are talking about your industry on Reddit and YouTube and your company isn't part of that conversation, someone else is answering for you.

Peec analyzed 30 million sources cited by AI search tools, including ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews. As of March 2026, the top three most-cited domains were Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn. Facebook made the top 10 too.

This Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found brand mentions correlated about three times more strongly with AI Overview visibility than backlinks did. Social is one of the easiest places to earn those mentions, because it's where people already talk about the companies they work with, buy from and want to work for.

Translation: a YouTube video explaining how your equipment works isn't just a video. It's a source an AI tool might cite the next time an engineer asks how that equipment works.

Do you need to be on every platform?

Nope. And honestly, please don't try. Spreading a small team across six platforms usually means doing all six badly. Pick the platforms that match what you're actually trying to accomplish, do those well, and ignore the rest until you have the bandwidth.

Your Goal	Where to Start
Recruiting skilled workers	Instagram, TikTok, Facebook
Community relations	Facebook
Customer education	YouTube
Thought leadership and buyer relationships	LinkedIn
Showing up in AI answers	YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn

A few other honest truths:

• You don't have to chase trends. A dancing excavator might not fit your brand, and that's fine. Show real work, real people and real expertise.
• Measure it differently. If social's job is recruiting, measure applications. If its job is community relations, measure sentiment and engagement. Judging every platform by leads is how good programs get canceled. (Doug's ROI Realities series gets into why that kind of attribution is never simple.)
• Consistency beats virality. One viral video is fun. A steady presence that makes you look alive and credible is what actually pays off.

Where should you start?

Start small and start with what you already have. You don't need a content studio or a Van Damme cameo. You need a goal, a platform and a little consistency.

1. Audit what's already out there. Search your company on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. You might find old accounts nobody can log into, pages a former employee set up, or reviews nobody's responding to. Clean that up first.
2. Pick one goal and one platform beyond LinkedIn. Hiring is hard? Start with Instagram. Lots of local operations? Start with Facebook. Customers always asking the same questions? Start with YouTube.
3. Show your people and your work. Your crews, your equipment, your projects and your safety milestones are more interesting than any stock photo. People connect with people, even in B2B.

Social media isn't a lost channel for B2B. It's an underused one. And the companies in your industry that figure that out first are going to have an easier time hiring, building trust and showing up when buyers start looking.

If you want help figuring out where social fits for your company, reach out to us. We'd love to help you make your valves go viral. (Or at least look alive.)

Tristen Coffee is the Communications Director at Four Columns, where she’s spent the last six years writing for clients in all kinds of industries. She leads copywriting, editing, social media and PR across the agency’s client roster, and she holds a degree in journalism and PR from Baylor University. Her faith is first in her life, and everything else follows from it. She loves to travel, and when she’s in Waco, you can usually find her on a dance floor or at a coffee shop (fitting).