Purpose Based on a relationship marketing approach, this paper aims to study the influence of social media use on salesperson performance and its underlying mechanisms from the perspective of salespeople in B2B settings. Design/methodology/approach To test the proposed model, the authors used structural equation modeling with a sample of 196 French B2B salespeople. Moreover, to explore the moderating effect of emotional management between social media use and relationship quality, the authors used the Hayes macro PROCESS for SPSS and the Johnson–Newman’s floodlight method. Findings The authors confirm the direct role of social media use on salesperson performance, and its indirect role through the parallel mediation of social proximity and relationship quality. The empirical study provides evidence for the moderating effect of emotional management on the relationship between social media use and relationship quality. Practical implications Companies should promote the use of social media to increase both the sales and creative performance of salespeople. Moreover, salespeople with low to moderate abilities to manage other people’s emotions benefit strongly from the use of social media, as this directly increases their relationship with their customers. Originality/value The research complements the conceptualization of salesperson performance as a combination of sales performance and sales creativity and shows that emotional management is an asset for social media users to develop valuable business relationships.