Stop Hiding Behind Your Company Page: A Founder’s Guide to the Feed

Your Buyers Want to Hear From You

B2B businesses spend significant effort on building and maintaining corporate social media profiles, promoting offerings, updating followers about corporate news, and distributing marketing content. However, despite regular publications, such social media accounts might find it hard to build a relationship with a target audience. And the issue does not lie in the poor quality of content published. On the contrary, it could be an issue with the lack of people and knowledge behind that brand.

Today, B2B buyers would like to know what the company stands for, what knowledge and experience the founders have, and if the company's solutions solve the buyer's problems. While corporate voice and message tell something about the offering, it is the founder's experience and insight that make it credible.

That is why being involved in industry discussions and making one's expertise known through participation in social media communities helps to get closer to potential buyers, build relationships, and generate demand. This approach allows a founder to lead the business toward growth.

Why the Company Page Alone is Not Enough

The company page is still crucial in B2B marketing efforts. It serves as an official source of information about products, announcements of the company, customer success stories, and anything else related to its activity. When this page turns into the sole voice of the business, communication through it sounds too impersonal.

Corporate channels have their messaging principles that serve the business well in terms of consistency but can also make content look rather predictable and close to content produced by competitors. Customers may clearly understand the benefits a business offers but struggle to identify what makes its thinking different from that of its competitors.

Founder participation in business communications closes this gap, as founders can explain the business vision, challenges in their industry, and experience they gained during the period they were active in the industry.

The Founder's Role in Building Category Authority

The role of a founder of a company in the creation of a category authority is bigger than attracting attention via gathering followers and liking and viral posts. It is necessary to have a consistent voice, a distinctive one, which would be perceived as reliable from the audience's point of view.

Creating a category authority is all about being recognized by the audience as a person who can be considered knowledgeable about a specific area of the market and contribute to discussions about it. Being an influencer does not equal being a category authority; it requires something else.

For instance, a founder of a B2B technology company has the potential to question the assumption that more software leads to better efficiency. The explanation of problems that cannot be solved only by using technology can provide a buyer with a good reason to change his attitude.

This is the difference between influence and category authority. While being influential may lead to attention and reputation, being a category authority can provide a founder with relevance and useful expertise for business-related decision-making.

What Should Founders Bring to the Feed?

Founders don't have to weigh in on every trend in the industry. What they need is a strategic content strategy based on their expertise and understanding of their audience. The report's three-step content matrix makes an excellent first step.

Visionary and Strategic Ideas

Founders can share their view of where the industry is going, what assumptions about the market need rethinking, and what changes the buyers need to expect. Such insights show founders' understanding of the whole category and create the image of a recognized viewpoint.

The goal here is not to make some dramatic predictions for the sake of getting attention. The goal is to inform about the change and give a framework for interpreting it.

Tactical and Educational Content

Such content shows how founders deal with certain business problems. This might be frameworks for making decisions, lessons learned from customer challenges, and mistakes in the industry.

Such insights are valuable even for people who are not at all looking at founders' product right now. Also, they showcase expertise through sound reasoning and not marketing talk.

Lessons: Vulnerable and Cultural

Entrepreneurship requires tough choices, failure, and learnings, which are unlikely to end up in press releases. Founders can reveal some of their learnings that relate to their changed mindset or some valuable insight gained from a specific problem they faced.

Authenticity does not imply revealing personal information without purpose. A story reveals an authentic experience of the founder and the key takeaways for the audience. In total, the above content types help founders to convey their ideas, showcase expertise, and give insights into the human experience behind the business.

Use the Feed to Build Authority and Distribution

Founder-led growth is based on two highly interrelated actions: creating authority and distributing the created authority. Authority is created by taking a defensible position backed by genuine expertise. Distribution makes sure that the perspective reaches the relevant audience that consists of customers, peers in the industry, and stakeholders. Platforms such as LinkedIn can become a good space for B2B founders to participate in professional conversations, while X can be helpful for specific industries and audiences.

Founders need to focus on the content that offers its own intrinsic value on the platform. Rather than every post directing people to a company blog or product pages, founders can discuss any idea, a lesson, or make an observational point right there within the social network post.

This way, founders take into account the nature of social media consumption by people and do not force a click from them but instead provide a good reason to read something valuable and interesting.

Connect Founder Visibility to Demand Generation

The third pillar of founder-led growth is called capture because visibility turns profitable when the engagement creates commercial opportunities. Capture stands for converting the trust built in content generation into relevant conversations, qualified leads, partnerships, and other business opportunities. Capture does not entail adding sales pitches to any posts or every response to comments.

When discussing challenges experienced in a certain industry by a founder, they might get questions about it from other individuals who deal with the same issue. A well-composed reply may help start talking about their problems and, if needed, showcase company capabilities.

It should be a job for marketing and sales departments to detect such opportunities. They will help recognize relevant inquiries, generate the content for the conversations, and guide the leads further. The goal is to align founder visibility strategy with commercial objectives without damaging credibility acquired with content generation.

Not all engagements result in revenue straight away; sometimes it helps build relationships, awareness, and future opportunities. For a founder-led growth strategy to work, it is necessary to see these contributions without equating attention with demand.

How Marketing Can Help the Founder Show Up Consistently

Founders may have great ideas but little time to produce consistent social media content from them. Marketing can make this easier by becoming producers of the founder's communication.

Regular interviews or sessions for gathering insights will result in perspectives that would be lost during regular conversations, meetings, and presentations. A weekly discussion can result in several pieces of content, as long as the perspectives are interesting and the content is produced in a thoughtful way.

Marketing can then shape these perspectives, clarify them, and adapt them to different formats without sacrificing the founder's natural tone of voice. A lengthy discussion can be turned into several LinkedIn posts, an article for the company's newsletter, or even a short video.

The founder should stay responsible for the content of the message, opinions, and accuracy of the information. Marketing should take care of delivering these perspectives to the audience without turning them into corporate clichés.

Step Into the Feed, Not Behind the Logo

While the company page may help in telling what the business does, it will never be able to substitute the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of the founder himself. By being invisible, companies ignore the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise and reasoning to buyers.

Founder-led growth is a systematic approach that helps in gaining authority by having a unique point of view, sharing insights with those communities that require them, and capturing attention through building up business relationships. It is not about being active or becoming an influencer; it is about giving people access to the valuable expertise they need.

With the help of marketing processes and the message ownership of the founder, social media can transform into something else. Stop depending solely on the company logo to build buyer trust. Step into the feed and share your expertise to let them know about you.