Purpose This paper aims to identify content strategies on social media that influence engagement and to analyze those operations to describe important features for co-creation and trust. Design/methodology/approach This paper addresses the question of how social media content can influence engagement by using a medium-sized Swedish company for an empirical case study. This empirical study is based on a participatory action research methodology. By using the company account on LinkedIn, the authors experimented with relational content to understand the effects on customer-perceived value and trust. Findings Results reveal that action-oriented messages had a more significant impact on engagement than product-oriented messages and value-based messages. Originality/value This paper builds on the existing literature in two ways: drawing upon business-to-business relationships and perceived value and using recent advances in the use of social networking sites to understand the value of co-creation through a participatory culture.