In our webinar What the hell are B2B marketers supposed to post on social?, Bri Chapman (Sr. Social Community Manager at Apollo.io) and Carmen Vicente (Social Strategist and LinkedIn Top Voice) shared what's working on LinkedIn right now.
We got more questions than we had time for, so our speakers answered the rest below.
Watch the webinar on demand
Missed it, loved it? The full recording is here:
1. If you were building a content strategy from scratch for an independent musician with very little reach, would you prioritise a distinctive brand narrative, a niche community, or experimenting with distribution first?
Asked by Hanja Marovic
Answer: I'll be honest, I don't have direct experience building a content strategy for independent musicians, so take this as an assumption rather than expert advice.
But my instinct would actually be to prioritise distribution first.
You can spend months crafting the perfect brand narrative and building a beautiful identity, but if nobody discovers your music, none of that matters. I think there's sometimes too much emphasis on getting the branding and positioning just right before putting anything out there.
I'd experiment with different platforms, formats, and ways of telling stories to see what actually gets people interested. Let the audience's reactions help shape the narrative rather than trying to figure it all out in a vacuum.
And maybe a slightly controversial take: you don't need to build a community before you have something people want to gather around. Sometimes you need to get in front of people first, earn their attention, and give them a reason to stay.
I'd rather see someone publish 50 imperfect experiments and learn from them than spend six months building a strategy document nobody will ever see.
2. Speaking about "speaking", do you feel LinkedIn without video won't work?
Asked by Camilla Szymanski
Answer: I don't think video is required! What LinkedIn rewards is originality. In fact, many of my top performing posts on my personal page and our brand page are either one-liners or carousels with short captions. The data also shows that carousels get more engagement than video right now, and brand video views dropped about 36% last year.
LinkedIn IS, however, moving away from giant walls of text tagging a million people or companies. No one wants to read a novel, they want you to arrive at the point quickly. Less is more!
So... I treat video as a source of content, not the whole strategy. I'm on camera a lot, but you don't have to be! IF you do want to explore video, make it work hard for you. Record one strong talk or POV, then turn it into a short clip, a carousel of the key ideas, a quote graphic and a text post. Match the formats with how people actually use the feed.
3. As a solo operator (e.g. a consultant), how do you share your work-related failures without seeming less competent to prospects?
Asked by Kristina Evawin
Answer: You shouldn't just share the failure, you should share the lesson you learned.
Don't post that you lost a client or made a bad decision. Explain why it happened, what you missed, and what you do differently now. That's actually a great way to demonstrate expertise without constantly having to tell people how good you are.
Adam Holmgren from Fibbler is a great example of this. I like how he openly shares his learnings, experiments, things that didn't work, and the reality of building a business.
People don't expect consultants to get everything right. They want to know that when something goes wrong, you're capable of recognising it, learning from it, and fixing it.
And honestly, I'd trust someone who can openly talk about their mistakes much more than someone whose LinkedIn makes it look like they've had a flawless career. Nobody's buying that anyway.
4. How does LinkedIn's LLM measure relevancy?
Asked by Areti Zoi Katsivelari
Answer: The LLM analyses the actual meaning of a post, not just the keywords.
For example, imagine you write about how marketers use AI to automate reporting. LinkedIn can understand that this topic is relevant to people interested in:
- Marketing automation
- AI tools
- Marketing operations
- Data analytics
- Reporting and attribution
Even if those people don't follow you or haven't engaged with posts containing the exact words you used.
This is called semantic understanding. LinkedIn creates representations (embeddings) of both members and posts, then compares them to identify relevant matches.
It considers things like:
- Your professional background, industry and skills
- The topics you engage with
- Posts you read, comment on, share or spend time viewing
- Topics you repeatedly skip
Interestingly, LinkedIn says its newer models can analyse more than 1,000 historical interactions to understand how someone's interests evolve over time.
5. AI is useful for visuals, landing pages and other marketing content. But could its widespread use make audiences lose interest in AI-generated content?
Asked by Chloé Schnepf
Answer: I actually think we're already heading in that direction, and it's going to become a real challenge for marketers.
AI makes it incredibly easy to produce more content, but I think we're confusing the ability to create content with having something worth saying.
There's also some research pointing in this direction. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Business Research found that consumers showed lower loyalty and less positive word of mouth when emotional marketing messages were AI-authored rather than human-authored. The effect was smaller when AI was used for editing rather than creating the message.
What I'd recommend:
- Use AI for production, not for your point of view. Let it help you execute ideas faster, but don't outsource your thinking.
- Don't sacrifice personality for perfection. Sometimes a slightly imperfect, human piece of content is much more interesting than a beautifully generated visual.
- Bring original experiences into your content. Your opinions, customer stories, experiments, failures and insights are much harder to replicate than a nice graphic.
- Be selective. Just because AI allows you to publish 10 pieces of content a day doesn't mean you should.
6. How do you get buy-in from a marketing/sales team that keeps asking to see the ROI from social, when there's never a clear line from social to pipeline?
Asked by Megan Sergison
Answer: I've carried a quota, so I totally get why sales wants a straight line from social to pipeline. BUT that line just doesn't really exist for social, and pretending it does sets everyone up to be disappointed. SO, I really try to agree up front on what social is actually there to do, which is mostly building trust and being the brand people already know when they're ready to buy.
You can use signals here too. For example, a "how did you hear about us" field on demo forms, bumps in branded search, deals where the buyer was engaging with our content, and how often reps are sending our posts in their outreach.
Also, MAKE SOCIAL USEFUL FOR SALES! Customer storytelling can really move pipeline, so make sure you meet with sales often, listen to their calls, and build strong relationships there.
7. At least 50% of our ICP isn't on LinkedIn, and the rest don't check it often. Would you change your recommendations for other channels?
Asked by Josh Cragun
Answer: Absolutely. I'd change the whole strategy.
I'd stop treating LinkedIn as the primary distribution channel and start treating it as one touchpoint in a much broader strategy.
My first question would be: where are these people already spending their time when they're looking for information, learning something, or trying to solve a problem?
Because I wouldn't try to convince people to use a platform just because it's where we're comfortable creating content.
8. How do you build a social team when your creatives prioritise client work and your boss wants daily posts?
Asked by Julia Angle
Answer: Oh, I feel this one. I think there's a common misconception that social media is something you can squeeze in between other marketing priorities, when in reality, doing it well is a job in itself.
Especially in an agency, where creatives are understandably measured by client deliverables, expecting them to consistently drop everything to create internal social content isn't a sustainable strategy.
My first recommendation would be to stop building your social strategy around occasional creative availability. Build it around the resources you can reliably access. A few things I'd try:
1. Separate content that needs a designer from content that doesn't. Not every post needs a custom-designed visual. I'd build a few repeatable templates for:
- Text-led opinion posts
- Industry statistics and insights
- Tips and educational carousels
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Team stories and employee spotlights
Save your creative team's time for bigger campaigns, videos and high-impact assets.
2. Create a content bank. I'd dedicate one session per month to collecting ideas from the team. Ask designers, strategists, account managers and leadership:
- What interesting things have you learned recently?
- What questions do clients keep asking?
- What trends are you noticing?
- What projects are you particularly proud of?
- What unpopular opinions do you have about the industry?
You can turn those answers into weeks of content.
3. Give creatives predictable, limited commitments. Instead of asking for help whenever you need something, negotiate a fixed amount of time with your creative team, for example two hours every other week for social content. That makes it easier for them to plan around client work and gives you some consistency.
4. Repurpose EVERYTHING. One webinar, podcast, campaign or interesting client project can become several social posts. Don't think of every post as a new creative brief.
5. Challenge the daily posting requirement. This is probably the most important one. I'd ask your boss what the actual goal is: visibility, engagement, leads, brand awareness? Daily posting is an activity metric, not a business outcome. If you have to sacrifice quality, strategy and engagement just to hit a daily quota, it's not worth it.
And one thing I'd tell your boss: if daily posting is a priority, it needs to be resourced as a priority. You can't have a daily publishing expectation, occasional creative support and no additional resources, then expect a consistently high-quality social presence.
9. What are good LinkedIn benchmarks, when engagement is uneven or low even for established, recognised creators?
Asked by Elen Laboda
Answer: I actually agree with you. LinkedIn can feel incredibly unpredictable, and I've also noticed that even well-established creators with strong personal brands can have posts that receive surprisingly little engagement.
I think one of the challenges with benchmarks is that they all tell such different stories. Engagement rates vary depending on whether we're looking at personal profiles or company pages, the size of the audience, the industry, the content format, and even how engagement is calculated.
So I'm not sure how useful average engagement benchmarks really are. They can give you a general direction, but they don't necessarily tell you whether your content is performing well.
I also think LinkedIn is different from platforms like Instagram or TikTok. I'd focus less on chasing viral numbers and more on whether you're reaching the right people and starting conversations that matter.
