Social Media That Actually Drives B2B Sales

01 /The Concept

By the time a buyer asks ChatGPT what to buy, the shortlist is already half-formed from what they've seen in social feeds and trusted communities. Rocksalt targets that earlier moment – helping product experts show up in the right conversations before AI search and website visits ever enter the picture.

As Rocksalt sees it, the modern buying funnel has a new shape:

- Buyers first encounter products through social networks – from colleagues, trusted experts, or niche communities. - Then they research with AI chat tools like ChatGPT or Gemini. - Then they visit the websites of shortlisted candidates. - On those sites, they expect to find a trial or demo they can explore independently before deciding.

To get bought, your product needs to appear at the very top of that funnel – in social media – before any of the rest happens. But the relevant social media is vast: theoretically thousands of conversations, posts, and communities that could matter.

Making it harder: in social media, people are increasingly resistant to overt promotion. They want expert opinions – credible recommendations from people they respect, or expert voices they can consult. So showing up in the right places means demonstrating actual expertise, not just visibility.

Rocksalt solves both problems.

You start by telling the platform what topics you can speak to as an expert – naturally, those overlap heavily with what your product does. Then you describe who you want to reach: job titles, functions, roles (procurement lead, CFO, HR manager, and so on).

From that point, Rocksalt sends you a curated digest each morning with links to posts, groups, and discussions where you should show up with something insightful to say.

The AI doesn't just keyword-match – it searches by topic and intent. It also keeps the list short, prioritizing by recency, relevance, and audience size, so you can make a real impact in 10–15 minutes per day.

Currently Rocksalt covers LinkedIn and public Slack channels; X (Twitter) and Reddit are coming soon.

You can leave comments directly from within the platform, and the AI evaluates your draft in real time – flagging whether the tone is right, whether you're delivering genuine insight, and whether the post fits the conversation.

Pricing runs from $20/month for individual contributors to $50/month for small teams and $100/month for larger ones.

Rocksalt just raised $3.5M in new funding – exactly one year after raising its first $3.5M.

02 /Why It Matters

Rocksalt describes itself as reinventing inbound marketing for the AI era. The argument: inbound is now the most effective go-to-market approach – including for B2B products – even though conventional wisdom long held that B2B required outbound: cold calls and cold emails.

And the conventional inbound playbook in social media was to build and run expert blogs. The catch: building an audience for those blogs is itself a massive, ongoing effort.

Rocksalt proposes a shortcut: ride the shoulders of those who've already done that work. Add your expertise into the comment threads of established experts and popular communities, rather than trying to build your own audience from nothing.

In structural terms, what Rocksalt does is very similar to search engine optimization – where the goal is to get your pages ranking at the top of results for the right queries. Rocksalt is doing "social optimization" – getting your expert commentary into the top of discussions on the right topics across social networks.

There's a more pointed issue it also addresses: social media promotion is usually handled by social media managers, who are – to put it gently – rarely deep subject-matter experts in what they're promoting. Meanwhile, the real experts inside any company don't have time to manage social presence.

Rocksalt's pitch to those companies is: "Give your experts the ability to have maximum impact on sales in just 10 minutes a day." Instead of relying on social media specialists who can drive likes but not sales, Rocksalt enables founders, senior specialists, and executives – people whose words carry genuine authority – to be the ones showing up in the right conversations.

Rocksalt also cites research from 6sense showing that "80–90% of the buyer's journey is invisible to sellers" – meaning for most of the time buyers are evaluating a purchase, sellers have no direct ability to influence them. Showing up in the places where buyers self-educate is the only way to be part of that invisible stage.

That 6sense study is pointed: 70% of the B2B buying process happens in anonymous research mode, during which buyers build a shortlist of typically four to five candidates. In 81% of cases, that shortlist is finalized before the buyer ever contacts a vendor. And in 90% of cases, the final purchase comes from that initial shortlist – no amount of sales effort helps if your product wasn't on the list to begin with.

03 /Opportunities

The direction: build platforms that help sellers get their products discovered during the anonymous research phase – before the shortlist is set.

Following Rocksalt's funnel map, that means winning on three fronts: social discovery, AI search visibility, and site persuasiveness.

On the social front, Passionfruit ([covered here](/review/prodavat-mozhno-i-bez-holodnyh-zvonkov)) connects B2B companies with B2B-focused influencers – raising $14M on that thesis. Deeto ([covered here](/review/novaya-era-b2b-prodazh-klienty-klientam)) takes a different angle, turning existing clients into advocates to influence new prospects; the company has raised $17M. Several others – Champion, SlashExperts – have raised smaller rounds in the same peer-advocacy direction, showing there's no shortage of demand.

For AI search visibility, Evertune ([covered here](/review/poiskovaja-optimizacija-uzhe-proshlyj-vek)) raised $4M to help products show up in AI chatbot responses – with Otterly.AI working the same problem. For site persuasiveness, Brand Stori ([covered here](/review/pravila-jeffektivnyh-prodazh-izmenilis)) is targeting B2B website effectiveness.

The overall opportunity space here is large, with multiple entry points across the buyer journey and multiple approaches per stage.

And since effective marketing is existential for any business, sellers will genuinely pay for anything that works. Add in the shift from outbound to inbound as the dominant go-to-market model, and the timing couldn't be better.