January 29, 2026
Yep – it’s a 101 for finding out if your B2B social campaigns and content are delivering. Think you know it all? Think again. The sands of marketing are shifting…again.
Aligning metrics and business objectives.
Most B2B marketers can tell you the engagement rate.
And they certainly know the level of impressions.
Far fewer can tell you whether their social strategy is influencing revenue. The frustrating part is that this isn’t even marketing’s fault, it’s the disconnect created by B2B generally (using B2C tech) and shorter timeframe demands from senior leaderships demanding ROI.
But trust takes time, and the duration with which this takes time to build hasn’t changed. Mainly because our brains are not keeping up with the tech!
The disconnect between teams and SL isn’t surprising, nor is it uncommon. B2B social sits in that awkward space between brand and performance marketing, generating soft signals that are difficult to tie to hard outcomes.
But measuring effectiveness isn’t impossible.
It just requires looking beyond vanity metrics and building a framework that connects social activity to business impact.
What questions should I be asking of my social?
The hardest question, when put to marketers, usually is: What are you trying to achieve with your B2B social?
A top-of-funnel awareness campaign demands different KPIs than a demand generation push or an ABM-focused content strategy.
(Also, if your push is organic only, you can forget the previous sentence. You’re not going to get any data on this that’s meaningful.)
When running awareness, focus on share of voice within your category and reach among target accounts (this is more LinkedIn focussed). These are leading indicators that your messaging is penetrating the market.
For demand generation, performance metrics like click-through rates, landing page conversion rates, and engagements can give you a strong indicator. We’d always advise using UTM links and using the multitude of tracking options found on social platforms these days.
If we’re being honest with you, you need these set up to really demonstrate value. Pixels, scripts for landing pages – all these things can help demonstrate the traffic flow from social to web. That’s your golden ticket to success. It’s really the only way to bridge that gap between social media’s effectiveness and the landing page conversion.
This can help you answer:
- Which deals had buying committee members engaging with your content in the 90 days before conversion?
- What’s the difference for opportunities with social touches versus those without?
These questions require proper attribution modelling, and yes, you’ll need to accept that last-touch models are essentially useless for B2B social. Multi-touch or even position-based attribution will give you a clearer picture of social’s role in the buyer journey. But then you should always have omni-channel in mind!
Benchmarking
This is a bit of a dirty word in B2B social media – to us anyway. Every industry is different and platforms will all share different data that indicates where the acceptable ranges sit.
It’s important to delve into your industry; do a Google search or sift through LLMs to discover the key benchmarks within your sector and who your target audience roles are within it. You can then break that down by platform, giving you something to work with.
Outline this right from the beginning so SL know what’s being aimed for.
The goal is to identify patterns: which content types drive the outcomes you’ve defined as success? Which fall flat despite effort? Use that intelligence to inform your content mix, not to chase engagement for its own sake.
Quality over quantity
When persuading the top table, numbers win the battle but they only tell half the story.
The quality of engagement often matters more than quantity, especially in B2B social where you’re targeting a specific universe of potential buyers. It’s not easy to get a comment on a post in B2B, but don’t lean on them anyway. Track your reports and see quality of traffic. If you’re driving a lot of landing page visits and you’re targeting the C-suite, then that’s a good indicator you’ve got your messaging bang on.
Build feedback loops with sales to capture these anecdotal signals. They won’t appear in your dashboard, but they’re often the clearest indication that your social strategy is working.
Above all, lining up the campaign strategy with who you’re targeting – pairing it with interesting marketing assets…well, it works.
Measure what matters
Effective B2B social media measurement requires marrying quantitative rigor with qualitative judgment. Run quarterly audits that assess both performance metrics against your stated objectives and qualitative signals from your team and audience.
Your measurement framework should be stable enough to track progress but flexible enough to incorporate new data sources as they become available. Test, learn, iterate, and keep your focus on business impact over channel-specific vanity wins.
Need more help? Drop us a line.