u/sculptsocial

The agency I work at was recently passing around a recent study from Semrush, and it had some interesting insights for B2B brands. As AI tools become a bigger discovery engine for buyers, execs, and decision-makers, our content isn’t just being consumed by people, it’s being indexed and reinterpreted by LLMs too.

One of the biggest takeaways (and you’re probably already seeing this in your own AI search results): LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletters, and even Reddit threads are some of the most commonly cited formats in AI-generated responses.

This makes a lot of sense for most of our audiences. B2B buyers are increasingly using AI to understand complex topics, compare vendors, research products and solutions and (big one) validate expertise.

That changes how we should tailor our content. It means clearer, upfront positioning, identifiable terminology, POV-led content, and plugging expertise over branded or corporate copy. Employee-generated and exec content has a big role to play too in building brand credibility and thought leadership.

A lot of B2C brands are using this to increase discoverability within platform, but there’s a huge opportunity for B2B brands to show up outside the platform and influence those lower-funner research stages. We’re learning what the balance between “optimizing for engagement” and “optimizing for trust” really looks like.

Curious if others have seen this article (or similar research) and what your thoughts are. How are you integrating AI discoverability into your strategies? While AI remains a hot topic, it might not be a bad idea to start building these strategies early to stay ahead of the curve.

Hi reddit! I’m a producer at a boutique social media B2B agency and our coverage of onsite events for our clients has skyrocketed in the last year or so.

Partially a reaction to AI and lack of human-in-the-feed, partially a desire to maximize our (mostly remote) clients' in-person social content, and partially a service line that my brilliant teammates have been pitching hard because it works. The proof is in the (digital) pudding: onsite real-time content does numbers.

Since me and my team have been building shoot schedules, editing into the night, and asking “hey, do you have five minutes for social?” more times than I ever thought possible, I wanted to round up my top ten tips for getting the most out of an onsite conference shoot to see if they help anyone else.

1. Get as much approved in advance as possible. Post copy, hashtags, tags, platforms, onscreen graphics… anything you can build and get in front of the client before the actual event starts will save you time in the long run.
2. Sort of counter-intuitively … everything will change. Murphy’s Law applies nowhere as strongly as it does to productions. Have a plan, love the plan, change the plan.
3. Do the ad hoc thing! Someone has a great fit and sparkling personality? Give them a minute with a tiny mic. Catch your execs doing an impromptu warm-up before their keynote? Film it! Have an off-the-cuff idea for a trending audio? Duh. Any avenues you find to build the feeling of “you had to be there” are worth pursuing. Bonus tip: If you see cool swag with your client’s brand on it, always film it. It’ll find its way into an edit.
4. Build your schedule with padding. Add buffer for things like footage drops, review times with your client, and slow upload times. Conference room WiFi is usually bad, expect it. Start the upload and use the time to grab a(nother) cup of coffee.
5. Feed your crew.
6. Feed your crew.
7. Feed your crew.
8. Get your post-pro team onboarded thoroughly before you ever step foot on a flight. I work with a remote team across time zones, so for larger edits with higher-res footage, I’ll make timeline exports and send them to my CD in Italy for her to button up while I’m sleeping. For shorter, on-the-fly edits, I usually do the assemblies myself and send out for polish. Regardless of what you end up doing, make sure you’re not getting pings while you’re on the conference floor shooting asking for graphics, fonts, or music selects (see tip #1). This is literally the top way to ensure that your posts hit publish on time.
9. This might be obvious, but make sure you’re filming for a mix of real-time content and evergreen you can publish after the event. This helps maximize real-time impressions AND gives you a bank of content to work with after the event. If you want the post-event content to be evergreen, pull people off the main conference floor and take their conference badges away.
10. Skip the germ-laden hotel breakfast buffets and pack plenty of Emergen-C. Trust me.

Anything you’d add? Curious if these tips are landing for you.

Happy summer conference season!"

The agency I work at was recently passing around a recent study from Semrush, and it had some interesting insights for B2B brands. As AI tools become a bigger discovery engine for buyers, execs, and decision-makers, our content isn’t just being consumed by people, it’s being indexed and reinterpreted by LLMs too.

One of the biggest takeaways (and you’re probably already seeing this in your own AI search results): LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletters, and even Reddit threads are some of the most commonly cited formats in AI-generated responses.

This makes a lot of sense for most of our audiences. B2B buyers are increasingly using AI to understand complex topics, compare vendors, research products and solutions and (big one) validate expertise.

That changes how we should tailor our content. It means clearer, upfront positioning, identifiable terminology, POV-led content, and plugging expertise over branded or corporate copy. Employee-generated and exec content has a big role to play too in building brand credibility and thought leadership.

A lot of B2C brands are using this to increase discoverability within platform, but there’s a huge opportunity for B2B brands to show up outside the platform and influence those lower-funner research stages. We’re learning what the balance between “optimizing for engagement” and “optimizing for trust” really looks like.

Curious if others have seen this article (or similar research) and what your thoughts are. How are you integrating AI discoverability into your strategies? While AI remains a hot topic, it might not be a bad idea to start building these strategies early to stay ahead of the curve.

The agency I work at was recently passing around a recent study from Semrush, and it had some interesting insights for B2B brands. As AI tools become a bigger discovery engine for buyers, execs, and decision-makers, our content isn’t just being consumed by people, it’s being indexed and reinterpreted by LLMs too.

One of the biggest takeaways (and you’re probably already seeing this in your own AI search results): LinkedIn posts, articles, newsletters, and even Reddit threads are some of the most commonly cited formats in AI-generated responses.

This makes a lot of sense for most of our audiences. B2B buyers are increasingly using AI to understand complex topics, compare vendors, research products and solutions and (big one) validate expertise.

That changes how we should tailor our content. It means clearer, upfront positioning, identifiable terminology, POV-led content, and plugging expertise over branded or corporate copy. Employee-generated and exec content has a big role to play too in building brand credibility and thought leadership.

A lot of B2C brands are using this to increase discoverability within platform, but there’s a huge opportunity for B2B brands to show up outside the platform and influence those lower-funner research stages. We’re learning what the balance between “optimizing for engagement” and “optimizing for trust” really looks like.

Curious if others have seen this article (or similar research) and what your thoughts are. How are you integrating AI discoverability into your strategies? While AI remains a hot topic, it might not be a bad idea to start building these strategies early to stay ahead of the curve.

Hi reddit! I’m a producer at a boutique social media B2B agency and our coverage of onsite events for our clients has skyrocketed in the last year or so.

Partially a reaction to AI and lack of human-in-the-feed, partially a desire to maximize our (mostly remote) clients' in-person social content, and partially a service line that my brilliant teammates have been pitching hard because it works. The proof is in the (digital) pudding: onsite real-time content does numbers.

Since me and my team have been building shoot schedules, editing into the night, and asking “hey, do you have five minutes for social?” more times than I ever thought possible, I wanted to round up my top ten tips for getting the most out of an onsite conference shoot to see if they help anyone else.

1. Get as much approved in advance as possible. Post copy, hashtags, tags, platforms, onscreen graphics… anything you can build and get in front of the client before the actual event starts will save you time in the long run.

2. Sort of counter-intuitively … everything will change. Murphy’s Law applies nowhere as strongly as it does to productions. Have a plan, love the plan, change the plan.

3. Do the ad hoc thing! Someone has a great fit and sparkling personality? Give them a minute with a tiny mic. Catch your execs doing an impromptu warm-up before their keynote? Film it! Have an off-the-cuff idea for a trending audio? Duh. Any avenues you find to build the feeling of “you had to be there” are worth pursuing. Bonus tip: If you see cool swag with your client’s brand on it, always film it. It’ll find its way into an edit.

4. Build your schedule with padding. Add buffer for things like footage drops, review times with your client, and slow upload times. Conference room WiFi is usually bad, expect it. Start the upload and use the time to grab a(nother) cup of coffee.

5. Feed your crew.

6. Feed your crew.

7. Feed your crew.

8. Get your post-pro team onboarded thoroughly before you ever step foot on a flight. I work with a remote team across time zones, so for larger edits with higher-res footage, I’ll make timeline exports and send them to my CD in Italy for her to button up while I’m sleeping. For shorter, on-the-fly edits, I usually do the assemblies myself and send out for polish. Regardless of what you end up doing, make sure you’re not getting pings while you’re on the conference floor shooting asking for graphics, fonts, or music selects (see tip #1). This is literally the top way to ensure that your posts hit publish on time.

9. This might be obvious, but make sure you’re filming for a mix of real-time content and evergreen you can publish after the event. This helps maximize real-time impressions AND gives you a bank of content to work with after the event. If you want the post-event content to be evergreen, pull people off the main conference floor and take their conference badges away.

10. Skip the germ-laden hotel breakfast buffets and pack plenty of Emergen-C. Trust me.

Anything you’d add? Curious if these tips are landing for you.

Happy summer conference season!"

Curious your thoughts on how brands can/will start using Instants? Event coverage for sure, but how else?

Curious your thoughts on how brands can/will start using Instants? Event coverage for sure, but how else?

A few weeks back I read through Rand Fishkin's blog post about AI visibility and I think the most profound thing he talks about is the 10-step pipeline that AI goes through before recommending a brand. As he puts it, "Every piece of content passes through 10 processing gates before influencing an AI recommendation."

Here's a tl;dr of those processing gates, DSCRI-ARGDW:

• Discovered: can the system even find your content?
• Selected: does it choose to look at it?
• Crawled: can it access it properly?
• Rendered: does your site actually load cleanly?
• Indexed: does it get stored in a usable way?
• Annotated: does the AI understand what it’s about?
• Recruited: is it considered for answering a query?
• Grounded: is it trusted enough to use?
• Displayed: does it show up in outputs?
• Won: does it actually get included consistently?

"Confidence at each stage, feeds the next."

And these steps aren't additive, but multiplicative. You can do 9/10 things right, but the one weak link (poor rendering or unclear entity signals, etc) can be detrimental when it comes to AIs confidence in recommending your brand.

TL;DR: LLMs don't "rank" brands the way search engines do but more so on how confident it is that your brand is the right recommendation.
That confidence comes from:

• consistent, corroborated info about your brand across trusted sources
• presence across multiple “knowledge systems” (not just your website)
• and how well your content survives a multi-step pipeline before it ever gets used.

Make sure your brand presence is strong across the board, not just on one entity.

I feel like social teams are starting to realize something community managers have known for years: The comment is the content.

A funny comment from a brand gets screenshotted.
A smart reply gets more engagement than the original post.
People follow accounts because they like how they interact with others, not just what they publish.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen this happen over and over again with our clients. Proactive comments regularly outperform some of the planned content sitting on owned channels. More engagement, more profile visits, more followers, more conversations.

And the best part: the ROI compared to the effort is wild.

A lot of companies treat the comment section like keeping the lights on. They focus almost entirely on reactive replies and customer support when it really needs to be viewed as a proactive visibility and engagement channel too.

Any of you doing proactive comm. mgmt? If so, how's it working out for you?

There’s been a big shift in how people use social media in their day to day. It’s a shift I’m noticing more and more in both the agency setting and everyday life.

More people are skipping traditional search engines and going straight to TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube when they’re looking for answers. Not just for things like restaurants, travel and lifestyle, but for things like software recommendations, campaign inspiration, and marketing insights.

And it’s not just anecdotal. Research from Sprout Social found that 1 in 3 consumers prefer searching on social first for recommendations, and 51% plan to spend more time on community-based platforms like Reddit in the next year.

So what’s driving it? From what I’ve seen working in social, it comes down to a few things:

👉 People want lived experience, not summarized answers. In a world where everything is searchable, people want proof something actually worked. A real example carries more weight than something that simply ranks well.

👉 Trust has shifted toward individuals. Creators, peers, even strangers sharing honest opinions feel more credible than brand-controlled messaging and paid actors. Especially when it’s clear there’s no incentive behind it.

👉 Context is built into the content (huge IMO). Short-form video shows how something works, who it’s for, and what the tradeoffs are in one pass. On Reddit, you get discussion, disagreement, and follow-ups that add depth you don’t get from a single result.

So what does this mean for social strategy, especially in B2B?

There’s a bigger opportunity to bring humans into the content. More POV, more transparency, more people behind the brand. Less “this is what we do,” and more “this is how we think” or “this is what we’ve seen work.” Showing how something actually plays out in practice is starting to matter more than simply explaining it.

TL;DR It feels like search is becoming less about finding information and more about finding perspective.

Curious if others have noticed this too, especially across B2B channels. 👀

“Our biggest challenge with employee advocacy is adoption.” I've lost track of the number of times I've heard this from clients. But most of the time, adoption isn’t actually the problem. It's that most programs are built like a distribution channel: create content → hand it to employees → hope it spreads.

Which sounds fine…until you remember why people follow employees in the first place. Not for company updates, but for who they are and how they think. So the second a post feels written for someone instead of by them, it kind of dies there.

The programs that actually work are less about “what should we promote?” and more about “who already has something worth saying?” Then it’s just backing those people by helping them shape a POV, turn what they’re already doing into content, and show up consistently.

Over time, adopting this shift changes the perspective from “employees talking about a brand” to “people I trust who happen to work there.” And that's the part that matters. Especially since most future buyers aren’t paying attention to your brand right now...but they are paying attention to people in your space.

Wdyt? Is it a matter of more employees posting or actually building a few voices people want to follow?

I'm a content manager with 8+ years of experience working in social media. I primarily create content across Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit for B2B companies in a variety of industries. Ask me anything you've been wondering about how to level up your social media game.