The end of generic content? How organic social is earning a bigger role in B2B

There was a time when generic content like awareness days and holiday posts were almost a staple of the social media calendar.

International Dog Day, Pancake Day, Halloween, National Whatever Day. If it existed, there was a fair chance somebody in marketing was trying to work out how to make it fit to their business.

I vividly remember when I first started out, sitting on a train trying to move little ghosts and spiders around a social graphic. They were holding vials and containers because (obviously) we needed to make Halloween feel a bit more sciencey, and I can still remember us trying to land on wording that made the whole thing somehow feel relevant.

I look back on that quite fondly because there was creativity in it and at the time it genuinely made sense. Awareness days gave marketers an easy way to maintain consistency and visibility; they filled gaps in the calendar, they often created fairly easy engagement, and probably most importantly, everyone else was doing them too.

But lately I’ve realised I see far fewer of them. Although they haven’t disappeared completely, the more tenuous ones certainly seem to have lost some of their shine.

That isn’t to say awareness days no longer have a place; if you are a business working in rare disease, then Rare Disease Day is clearly relevant. Equally, if a particular day genuinely connects to your company’s mission, values, people or audience, there is every reason to acknowledge it. The difference is that the bar for relevance is higher, and the instinct to post simply because a date exists in the calendar feels less automatic than it once did.

Which makes me wonder whether this is actually less about awareness days themselves, and more about how our expectations of organic social have changed.

Has the role of organic social changed?

For a long time, one of the main jobs of organic social was simply to show up. Consistency mattered, visibility mattered, and a full social calendar often felt like evidence of a healthy social presence. None of that has disappeared, but I do think marketers are becoming much more attuned to the difference between consistency and frequency.

Posting five times a week is not automatically better than posting three times a week, and an empty slot in the calendar is not necessarily a problem that needs fixing. The more useful question is whether what you are about to post is actually worth somebody’s attention.

Audiences have changed too, and I think that matters. The novelty of brands simply being active on social has gone; people have seen thousands of awareness-day graphics and generic updates, so naturally the bar for what feels memorable is higher.

That does not mean everything needs to be heavyweight thought leadership, because a funny post, a team moment or something more human can absolutely add value to somebody’s experience of a brand. It does, however, mean there should be a reason for that post to exist beyond the fact that Thursday was looking empty.

LinkedIn is becoming part of the B2B buying experience

LinkedIn, particularly in B2B, now plays a much bigger role in how people assess businesses than we sometimes give it credit for. 

If I am looking at a competitor, a client or a new company, LinkedIn is one of the first places I will go. One of the most useful exercises, in my experience, is looking at a company page with no context at all and asking what you would think if you knew nothing about the people behind the posts.

• What would you assume that business knows about?
• What seems important to them?
• Do they sound credible?
• Do you get a sense of the expertise inside the organization?
• Do they seem like people you would want to talk to?

Internally, it is very easy to justify why a particular post exists because you know all of the context behind it. A potential customer scrolling past it does not have that luxury; they only see what you put in front of them, and increasingly that social presence can act as a kind of ‘try before you buy’.

Years ago, a potential customer might not have experienced the real expertise within a business until they were well into a sales process. Now, they can see it much earlier. 

They can hear directly from your scientists, commercial leaders and subject matter experts. They can see how your people interpret changes in the market, they can understand how you have solved problems for customers, and they can start to get a feel for how your business thinks before they ever speak to you.

That feels like an incredibly valuable opportunity, and perhaps one of the reasons the generic awareness-day post feels less important than it once did.

The most valuable content is often already inside the business

In life sciences especially, businesses are usually sitting on a huge amount of expertise; the challenge is often extracting it and making it useful to the people you want to reach.

A strong case study, for example, can become much more than “we did this for this client and got this result”. Add the people involved, their perspective, the decisions they made and the context around the work, and suddenly it becomes something much more distinctive.

Similarly, a customer quote or a short interview with a team member can often tell you far more about the experience of working with a business than a polished corporate update ever could.

The same applies to market commentary. Posting that a particular trend is happening in your sector has limited value when everybody else can say exactly the same thing; the interesting part is what your people think about it, why it matters, who it matters to, what customers should be paying attention to and whether your own experience gives you a different interpretation.

That is where social starts to become more than a publishing channel. It becomes a way of giving people access to the thinking inside your business.

Is AI creating a new kind of content filler?

There is another shift happening at the same time, though, and that is the role of AI.

Creating content has never been easier. AI can help generate ideas, shape first drafts, turn rough thoughts into something usable and dramatically reduce the time it takes to get from a blank page to a finished post, which is a huge opportunity for marketers.

But it also raises an interesting question: if awareness days once helped us fill gaps in the social calendar, is AI now making it easier to fill those same gaps with something that looks more tailored and strategic?

A generic thought leadership post is still generic – even if it mentions your industry, references a relevant trend and sounds polished. Just as audiences became familiar with the formula behind awareness-day content, they are increasingly becoming familiar with the language and structure of low-effort AI content too.

The technology has changed, but the underlying question for LinkedIn users has not: is this actually worth my attention?

Visibility and value are not the same thing

For me, that is probably the biggest change in how I think about organic social. Visibility still matters; there is still an algorithm and value in being present in front of the right audience. But visibility and value are not the same thing.

Some of the most valuable people in our industry are not the people posting every day; they are in the room having the conversations, doing the work and building genuinely useful expertise. Social media can absolutely be part of bringing that expertise to a wider audience, but the social calendar should not dictate what gets created, particularly if doing so comes at the expense of quality, relevance or usefulness.

So perhaps awareness days have not disappeared because we suddenly decided they were bad.

Maybe they are a small sign that the way we think about organic social is maturing; less about filling the calendar or showing up for the sake of being seen, more about understanding the audience and adding something that is genuinely worth their attention.