There is a common way of managing social media in Kenyan companies that seems perfectly reasonable at first. Someone in marketing, sometimes operations or admin, is given access to the company’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and perhaps TikTok accounts, and social media becomes one more item on that person’s list of responsibilities. They write the posts, create or source the graphics, publish the content, respond to comments, prepare reports and occasionally run an advert.
For a small business with limited activity, there is nothing particularly wrong with this arrangement. The problem begins when the company expects social media to do much more than keep its pages active. Once the objective is to build reputation, generate demand, support sales, communicate with stakeholders and establish the company and its executives as credible voices in the market, the work becomes considerably more complicated. At that point, the company isn’t really managing a few social media accounts. It is managing a communications function.
The distinction matters because the person responsible for social media is often being asked to perform several different jobs at once. Someone has to understand the business and its audiences. Someone has to develop the content strategy. Someone has to write. Someone has to design. Someone has to produce video. Someone has to understand the platforms and their changing distribution systems. Someone has to monitor conversations and respond to customers. Someone has to interpret the data. Someone may also need to understand paid media.
One person can certainly handle several of these responsibilities. What becomes difficult is expecting one person to handle all of them well while also performing the other duties that usually sit within a marketing role.
This is where many companies run into a problem. They look at the output rather than the system behind it. If a social media manager publishes three times a week, the company can see three posts. What it cannot see as easily is the research behind those posts, the conversations that were not pursued, the customer questions that revealed a problem, the opportunities that were missed, or the strategic thinking required to make the content useful in the first place.
The same mistake would seem unusual in other parts of the business. A company would not normally expect one person to be responsible for accounting, financial planning, collections, auditing and tax simply because all of those activities involve money. It understands that finance is a function made up of different responsibilities. Social media deserves some of the same thinking.
That doesn’t mean every company needs to hire a large digital team. Most don’t. The more useful question is what the company needs to keep close to the business and what it can reasonably access from outside.
What should stay in house?
The things that depend heavily on knowledge of the business should generally remain close to it. That includes the company’s positioning, its understanding of customers, its commercial priorities, its institutional voice and the decisions about what it should be known for. It also includes access to the people who actually know the business.
A strategic communications agency such as Carlstic can help a company develop its communications strategy, but it cannot replace the company’s knowledge of its customers. An external creative team can produce a strong visual, but it may not know which product feature is causing customers the most frustration. An agency can help turn a CEO’s thinking into an article, but the experience and judgement that make the article worth reading still have to come from the business.
This is particularly important for B2B companies, where much of the value of communication comes from demonstrating competence rather than simply attracting attention. A consulting firm needs its consultants to demonstrate expertise. A financial institution needs its leadership to communicate confidence and understanding of the market. An engineering company needs technical people who can explain what they know. A professional services firm needs its partners and senior executives to be visible to the people who might eventually hire them.
A social media manager cannot manufacture that expertise. They can package it, find the story in it and make it easier for the market to understand. They can turn a conversation with an engineer into an article, a presentation into a series of posts, or a CEO’s observations into useful commentary. But the underlying knowledge has to come from somewhere.
How should social media be measured for B2B companies?
This is where social media reporting can become misleading. Companies are often presented with follower numbers, likes, impressions and reach. These numbers are easy to collect and easy to put into a monthly report. They aren’t necessarily the numbers that tell management whether social media is doing anything useful.
A B2B company with 650 relevant followers can be commercially more valuable on social media than one with 16,000 followers. The question is who those followers are. If the 650 include procurement managers, CEOs, investors, consultants, industry specialists and potential clients, they may be considerably more valuable than a much larger audience with little relationship to the company’s market.
Reach still matters. Engagement still matters. Audience growth matters. But for B2B companies, the more useful questions are whether the right people are seeing the content, whether decision makers are engaging with the company’s ideas, whether people from target organisations are visiting the website, whether qualified enquiries are increasing, whether executives are becoming recognised voices in their fields and whether social interactions are contributing to meetings, proposals or opportunities.
Not all of these can be attributed neatly to a single LinkedIn post. B2B buying decisions rarely work that way. A prospective client might encounter a company’s LinkedIn page in January, read an article in March, attend a webinar in April, receive a referral from someone they trust in June and finally contact the company in August. Social media didn’t necessarily generate the sale by itself. It may, however, have helped create the credibility that made the company worth considering. That is a different kind of value, and it requires a different way of measuring social media.
How to measure B2B social media success:
- Audience relevance; are the right procurement managers, CEOs, and investors actually following?
- Decision-maker engagement; are leadership figures interacting with the content?
- Website traffic; is social driving visits from target organisations?
- Inquiry quality; are qualified business enquiries increasing?
- Executive authority; are leaders being invited into industry conversations?
- Pipeline contribution; is content building credibility across a long sales cycle?
Strategy can be outsourced too
There is also a misconception that outsourcing social media means handing someone a content calendar and asking them to produce posts. It doesn’t have to work that way. Strategy can be outsourced as well, particularly for companies that don’t yet have a senior marketing or communications function internally.
A growing company may have someone capable of managing day to day marketing activity but not necessarily the time, experience or perspective to step back and answer the larger questions. Where should the brand be positioned? Which audiences matter most? What should the company be known for? Which channels deserve investment? What should social media actually contribute to the business over the next twelve months? A strategic communications firm can provide that layer of thinking without the company having to employ a senior strategist full time.
The process should begin with a proper diagnostic. An external partner should understand the business, its commercial objectives, audiences, existing reputation, competitive position, current communication activity and what is or isn’t working. From there, the company can establish annual goals and quarterly objectives, with clear KPIs attached to them.
Those KPIs should reflect the company’s actual priorities. A B2B company trying to win larger corporate accounts should not judge success by how many people liked its Instagram post. It may be more useful to know whether decision makers from target organisations are engaging with its content, whether qualified prospects are visiting the website, whether executives are being invited into relevant industry conversations, and whether communication is contributing to business development.
The strategy can then be reviewed every month. What changed? Which audiences are responding? Which content is creating useful conversations? Are the original assumptions still holding? Are there new opportunities or reputational risks? Should the company change direction, or continue investing in what is working?
A company does not need a senior communications strategist on staff full time to have access to strategic thinking. It can retain that capability through a strategic communications firm at a fraction of the cost of building the entire function internally.
What about creative production?
Quite a lot of the production work can also be outsourced. Few companies need a full time graphic designer, video editor, photographer, motion designer and presentation designer, all five, on payroll simply because the business uses those skills. If the volume of work doesn’t justify maintaining all those roles internally, specialist creative partners can make more sense. A company might keep its communications coordination internally while bringing in an external team to handle social media graphics, campaign visuals, video editing, photography, presentations, brochures, company profiles and other marketing materials.
This is where a specialist creative division such as BrandStudio by Carlstic can fit into the model. The business provides the knowledge and the strategic direction. The creative team turns that thinking into the visual and multimedia assets required to communicate it effectively.
There is an important distinction here. Outsourcing production isn’t the same as outsourcing the brand. The company should still own its positioning, its voice, its knowledge of the customer and the decisions about what it wants to communicate.
What to keep in-house vs. what to outsource:
| What to keep in-house (the business) | What to outsource (the firm) |
|---|---|
| Brand positioning – defining how the company stands out | Communications strategy – building the year-long roadmap |
| Customer insights – direct knowledge of client frustrations | Creative production – graphic design, video editing, layouts |
| Subject matter expertise – access to internal technical experts | Content packaging – turning executive thinking into polished articles |
| Institutional voice – deciding overall tone and values | Paid media management – handling ad distribution systems |
How many people do you actually need?
The answer is not a large department. A growing company may need one capable internal person to coordinate marketing activity, understand the business, manage approvals and maintain relationships with internal stakeholders. Strategy can be supported by a strategic communications firm like Carlstic. Creative production can be handled by a specialist team. Paid media, photography, video or other technical capabilities can be brought in when required. This gives a company access to a much wider range of expertise without carrying the full cost of employing every specialist.
The important thing is to stop thinking about social media as the responsibility of the person who has the passwords. If social media exists simply so that the company has something to post, one person may be enough. If it is expected to build reputation, support business development, communicate expertise and contribute to growth, the company needs to treat it as a real business function.
It does not require a large department. It needs the right capabilities, the right people around them, and a clear understanding of what the function is supposed to achieve.
