The impacts of social media usage on B2B brand performance

A growing body of research has examined usage and impacts of social media in business-to-business (B2B) contexts (Salo, 2017). Available studies have suggested that communicating the brand and increasing brand awareness are among the most important reasons for B2B firms to use social media (Michaelidou, Siamagka, & Christodoulides, 2011). However, extant research has not explored the mechanisms through which a firm’s usage of social media may positively affect its B2B brand performance. To fill this gap, we suggest and test a model which combines available knowledge from three interrelated B2B streams of studies: branding (Seyedghorban, Matanda, & LaPlaca, 2016), social media marketing (Salo, 2017), and thought leadership - content marketing (Barry & Gironda, 2017)