Ask a founder who has run a consultancy for 20 years how clients used to find them, and you’ll hear a familiar list. A past client passed on their name. They met someone at an industry lunch. A partner at an accounting firm sent work their way. In most cases, the buyer learned about a provider from the provider, or from someone who knew them well.
That’s still true for a lot of founder-led firms today. But the path a buyer takes before that first conversation looks very different. A prospect might follow your posts for months, read your profile, ask a peer what they think of you and compare you with two other firms, all before they get in touch. In this post, I’ll walk through how social media became part of the B2B buying journey, what the research showed at each stage and what it means for a service business like yours.
When the seller held the information
For most of the 20th century, business buyers depended on suppliers to learn about their options. Information came from sales meetings, brochures, trade shows, industry directories and the Yellow Pages. A buyer who wanted to check out a provider had few ways to do it on their own. They could ask a colleague or call a reference, and that was about it.
For professional services, this meant the founder’s network did much of the marketing. If you were well connected in your industry, work came to you through people who knew your reputation. If you sat outside those circles, it was hard to get noticed, however good your work was. Relationships decided who got considered.
The 2000s: search engines and online profiles
The spread of websites and search engines in the early 2000s gave buyers their first real way to research providers without a sales call. A buyer could now read about your services, look at your client list and form a first view before picking up the phone.
LinkedIn launched in 2003 and grew fast. By 2007 it had 10 million users and was opening offices around the world, including in Australia. In those early years, most people treated it as an online CV. It was a place to check someone’s work history, and few people posted there. Even so, it gave buyers something new: a way to look up the person behind a firm and see who they were connected to.
2012: buyers start doing more on their own
In 2012, CEB (now part of Gartner) published a study with Google called The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing. It surveyed more than 1,500 decision makers and influencers across 22 large B2B organisations. The headline finding was that the average customer was already 57% of the way through their purchase decision before they engaged a sales rep. The report also noted that buyers were turning to their personal networks and public information, more and more through digital and social channels, to diagnose their own problems and form opinions about solutions.
The 57% figure became one of the most quoted numbers in B2B marketing, and it’s worth reading with care. As CustomerThink pointed out, it’s an average that hides a wide range of behaviour, and buyers keep researching after they speak to a supplier. The direction was clear, though. Buyers were doing more of the early work without you in the room.
2014: social media enters the buying process
Two years later, IDC released a Social Buying Study produced with LinkedIn. It found that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level and vice-president executives used social media to support purchase decisions. The buyers who used social media most were more senior, had budgets 84% bigger and made 61% more purchase decisions than those who didn’t. In the final stage of a purchase, when the stakes were highest, online professional networks were buyers’ number one source of information.
Keep in mind that LinkedIn helped produce this research, so it had an interest in the result. Still, the pattern it described will feel familiar to most service firms. Senior buyers were using their online networks the same way they had always used their offline ones: to ask peers, check reputations and lower the risk of a bad decision. The IDC white paper also found that buyers’ top concern about social media was that vendors and salespeople would not be authentic. That concern still shapes how buyers read your content today.
2018 to 2020: the shift speeds up
By 2018, Gartner’s research showed that B2B buyers spent only 17% of their buying time meeting with potential suppliers. I cover what that means for your first calls in Most Buyers Choose Before They Call (link when live). Then the pandemic arrived.
McKinsey has tracked B2B buying habits for years through its B2B Pulse survey. It found that before 2020, about half of buyers preferred in-person and other traditional contact when researching and evaluating suppliers. When COVID-19 stopped face-to-face meetings, remote and digital self-service spiked. Buyers settled into an even split between in-person, remote and digital self-service, which McKinsey calls the rule of thirds, and that split has held ever since. Buyers now use an average of ten channels in their buying journey, up from five in 2016. McKinsey’s 2026 research confirms the rule of thirds still holds, with interest in digital self-service edging up.
In Australia, long lockdowns meant industry events, business lunches and conferences stopped for months at a time. Business relationships still had to be kept up, and a lot of that work moved to video calls, email and LinkedIn. McKinsey’s data suggests the buying habits people formed during that time have stuck.
Today: a younger and more independent buyer
The people making buying decisions are changing too. Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey found that Millennials and Gen Z made up 64% of B2B buyers in 2022, and 71% a year later. Most of them grew up with the internet, and Forrester notes they bring different approaches and expectations to buying than older generations. For many of these buyers, looking someone up online before a meeting is standard practice.
The point of first contact also keeps moving. The 6sense 2025 Buyer Experience Report found that buyers now reach out to sellers around 60% of the way through their journey, and 94% have ranked their preferred vendors by then.
Here in Australia, NapoleonCat’s figures, which draw on LinkedIn’s advertising data, show about 17 million LinkedIn users in 2026, or around 61% of the population. People aged 25 to 34 make up the largest group. Many of the people who will hire firms like yours over the next decade are already on the platform, building habits that will shape how they choose providers.
Where social media fits in a service firm’s buying journey
So where does social media show up for a consultancy, advisory firm or fractional practice? In my experience, it plays a part at almost every stage, even when the final decision still happens over coffee or a video call.
- Before a need exists. Most of your market isn’t buying at any given time. Regular posts keep your name familiar so you come to mind when a need arises. I explain why in Most of Your Market Isn’t Buying Yet (link when live).
- When a problem shows up. Buyers look for people who explain the problem clearly and have a view on how to fix it. This is where thought leadership helps most, as I cover in Thought Leadership for Busy Founders (link when live).
- When someone refers you. A referral gives a buyer your name, and then they check you out online. What Referrals See Before They Call (link when live) walks through what they look at.
- When they build a shortlist. Buyers compare profiles, recent activity and proof of past work. Client stories carry a lot of weight here, which is the focus of Your Client Work Is Your Best Proof (link when live).
- After they hire you. Your content helps the person who hired you explain the decision to their colleagues, and it keeps you familiar for the next project or referral.
If you’d like to see how these stages connect to revenue, How Social Media Supports Business Sales covers that in more detail.
What hasn’t changed
For all these shifts, the basics of how founder-led firms win work are the same. Buyers still want to work with people they trust, and referrals and relationships still bring in most new business for many service firms. Social media now sits alongside those relationships. It’s where buyers check what they’ve heard about you, and it’s how your reputation reaches people who haven’t met you yet.
Social media also has limits. It rarely closes a deal on its own, and a strong feed won’t make up for weak service. Its job is to make sure that when a buyer goes looking, they find a clear and current picture of your expertise. As buyers do more of their research before they call, that picture matters more each year.
Where to go from here
The useful question for your firm is whether social media is part of your buyers’ touchpoints. For most B2B service firms today, the answer is yes. The next question is what you want it to do for your business, whether that’s generating demand, educating buyers, building authority, keeping clients or helping you hire.
The free Social Media Assessment takes about three minutes and points you to the one priority that fits your firm right now. If you’d like a senior review of how buyers see you online, the Visibility Audit includes a written 90-day visibility strategy. And if you’re ready to hand this to someone who can own it, the services page explains how I work, or you can start an enquiry.
Sources: CEB and Google, The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing (2012); CustomerThink, The B2B buying decision process: challenging the 57% myth (2014); Business Wire, IDC Social Buying Study (2014); IDC, Social Buying white paper (2014); iStart, reporting Gartner research (2018); McKinsey, Five fundamental truths: How B2B winners keep growing (2024); European Business Magazine, McKinsey’s ninth global B2B Pulse Survey (2024); McKinsey, The surprising economics of B2B growth (2026); Forrester, Younger Generations Are Shaking Up B2B Buying; 6sense, 2025 Buyer Experience Report (2025); NapoleonCat, LinkedIn users in Australia (2026); Wikipedia, LinkedIn.
