Why B2B marketers are getting influence wrong If your influence plan is measured in impressions, you’re probably buying noise. ’Cos buyers are building shortlists without you, Forrester says 92% start with one. So you know how you start planning for lead generation with a list of buyer jobs to be…

Pass the sauce Your next sale is happening in dark social Yippee! Social is getting social again, and it’s brilliant news for brands that know how to show up with something worth sharing. You can feel it in the tiny moments. A forward to a mate. A DM that says…

Make it weird, make it work Chaos culture is the internet’s new default language for attention. It sort of is an all-encompassing terms for absurd humour, fast cuts, deliberate mess, meme logic, and a kind of playful nonsense that’s very online. It’s significant because it matches how people behave now,…

Social commerce is growing up, it’s less about checkout, more about reducing regret Social commerce keeps getting framed as a platform feature. Shoppable posts, live shopping, one-click checkout, the lot. That framing misses the behavioural shift happening under our feet. People are using social to do the hardest bit of…

You know what’s oddly cheering. Most brands have loads of proof that they’re worth buying. By proof I mean the specifics that make a claim believable when someone repeats it to a friend, or a colleague, or their partner on the sofa. Customer stories with detail. Before-and-after that feels properly…

A B2B buying decision rarely happens with one person. It’s usually a buying group with different roles, risks, and opinions, and the deal moves when your champion can explain the choice internally. That’s why forwardability matters more than engagement.

Lurkers are your biggest audience and they’re deciding in silence. They watch in feeds, sanity-check you in comments, communities and reviews, then repeat whatever proof is easiest to quote internally. That’s why social feels harder, it’s no longer a click machine, it’s an answer surface. Ofcom shows AI summaries are now common in search results, and YouTube remains the UK’s biggest social utility by reach and time spent. If your story is inconsistent, your evidence is scattered, or your customer proof is buried, lurkers can’t do the job of trusting you for you.

Meta has started rolling ads into Threads timelines globally from late January 2026. That’s the moment Threads stops being a side app and becomes a paid, recommendation-led public square. Threads has passed 400 million monthly active users, and Meta has put daily actives at around 150 million. The strategic implication for B2C and B2B is the same; distribution gets easier to buy, credibility gets harder to earn. Threads rewards coherence in public conversation, how you answer, how you sound, how specific you are. Treat it as a trust surface, because that’s where decisions get shaped now.

I don’t read a lot of marketing books cover to cover. Most get a flick-through, a speed read (or even a Blinkist), then quietly shelved. But Marketing & Psychology by Dr Tom Bowden-Green and Luan Wise, I read it properly. With a…

2016 is when social stopped being “posts in a feed” and became a ranked system that decides what gets seen, shared, trusted. In 2026 that same logic sits everywhere, in-platform search, Google snippets, and AI overviews that summarise your brand before anyone clicks. Ofcom says around 30% of UK keyword searches now show AI overviews, and 53% of adults often see AI summaries. The uncomfortable truth is that buyers get a machine-written version of you, then sanity-check it with humans in DMs and group chats. Brands win when their claims are clear, proof is easy to find, and real people show up consistently.

B2B marketing feels slower because you’re selling to a buying group, not a decision maker. Forrester says the average buying decision involves 13 people and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments. Add three generations with different trust cues and you get rework, internal debate, and “one more version” forever. Buyers are also doing more research without sales, which makes guessing expensive. This LinkedIn Live with Tejal Patel is about buyer behaviour, trust cues, and what social is doing in research and validation, so you can build one narrative that travels across the group and saves your team time.

Buyers are hunting answers, and social is deciding who they trust The short answer Mahoosive behaviour change for customers is already here. Search is being replaced by an answer layer, and social is feeding it. When Google’s AI Overviews show up, people click less, sessions end sooner, and your carefully-crafted…

We’re closing on 24 December and back on 5 January. Before we switch off, a straight take on what 2025 proved about social, what actually worked, and what we think will matter most in 2026.

Your 2026 plan is hiding in your 2025 panic I have spent the last couple of months sat with marketers who are knee deep in 2026 planning. Everyone is wrestling with the same mix of fear and ambition. Budgets are flat or shrinking, targets are going up, AI is quietly…

Community isn’t a channel, it’s how your social actually works Over the last few weeks I have lost count of how many marketers have said some version of this to me: “We’re thinking about community for 2026.” Often it comes with a hopeful look, as if community will magically fix…