There’s No Secret to Building a B2B Brand on Social

Every few weeks, a CEO asks me some version of the same question: What’s the trick to building a brand on LinkedIn or X? What they’re usually hoping for is some overlooked tactic: an algorithmic shortcut, posting schedule that magically unlocks reach, or content format only insiders know about.

Unfortunately, there is no hidden playbook for building a durable B2B brand on social. The people who succeed are not doing anything exceptionally clever or proprietary. They are doing a small number of relatively obvious things with unusual consistency, and they are doing them long after most people would have gotten bored or self-conscious and stopped.

The formula is simple.

1. Pick a north star and commit to it publicly

Every strong B2B brand on social is associated with a single, animating idea. Over time, that idea becomes shorthand for the company itself.

Alex Karp made Palantir synonymous with warfare technology as the sentry of Western civilization. Salesforce is one of the definitive SaaS companies. In our little nook of adtech, tvScientific is synonymous with performance TV. And The Trade Desk branded itself the champion of the open internet. Each of these companies picked a hill and kept standing on it, even when it felt repetitive.

Your north star might be healthcare advertising, performance TV, AI creative, retail media, or measurement. The specific topic matters less than the discipline required to stick with it. You need to talk about the same idea, from slightly different angles, week after week, until you are sick of hearing yourself say it.

The moment when you’re convinced you’ve said it all before is usually the moment when the market is just starting to associate you with it.

2. Teach the audience

Once you’ve committed to a topic, your job is to help your ideal audience understand how that part of the world works. Think of yourself as a teacher, sharing your hard-earned expertise, and you’ll feel less self-conscious. The best social content creators think of themselves as performing a genuine service to their audience.

Explain the mechanics. Write about what you’re learning as you learn it. Share the decisions you made that turned out to be wrong, and why. Break down case studies. React to news in your space and explain why it matters.

Most people overthink this. They assume content needs to be highly polished or “insightful” in some abstract sense. In reality, the most effective B2B content is explanatory, lowers the cognitive load for the reader, and makes a complex system feel navigable.

At Sharp Pen, we usually see this work best when content falls into a few recurring buckets: point-of-view posts that articulate how you see the industry, building-in-public posts that show how your thinking is evolving, case studies that demonstrate what actually works, and data-driven posts that anchor your perspective in evidence rather than vibes. Rotate through those consistently, and you don’t need to hunt for ideas.

3. Show up consistently on your page and on others’

Posting on your own page matters. Two or three times per week is enough to build momentum. More is fine if you have the energy and the conviction to sustain it.

But even more important, especially in the beginning before you’ve built an audience, is commenting. Identify the five to ten people who already have the audience you want, and show up in their comment sections a few times per week with thoughtful responses. Go beyond “great post,” but don’t overthink it, either — it suffices to comment on one salient idea from the post that resonated with you.  

That’s how you build relationships — become a familiar voice in an existing conversation. Digital networking mirrors in-person relationships. The difference is LinkedIn immediately puts you in the room with the leading voices of your industry.

The hard part isn’t knowing what to do

An audience on social can drive millions of dollars in inbound revenue, shorten sales cycles, attract talent, and create a kind of leverage that’s difficult to replicate through paid channels alone. It’s one of the most capital-efficient ways to build a B2B brand.

But even if you hire people to help, consistency still has to come from you: the CEO, founder, or leader with a point of view.

There is no secret, and that should be reassuring. But that also means you have a responsibility: to show up, repeat yourself, and demonstrate your commitment in public.

That’s how B2B brands are built on social.