Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to generating demand for your B2B product using social & content.

Every B2B company can benefit from having an organic social presence.

But there are certain companies where organic social is more important and more effective.

I want to run you through the 5 criteria that indicate a B2B company is set to blow up on social.

And by ‘blow up,’ I mean generate product demand and leads. The stuff we really care about.

Let’s dive in.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

5 signs organic social is a viable channel for your B2B company

How to easily identify if an organic social motion makes sense for your company

I see a lot of social media ‘thought leaders’ shouting about how every company needs an organic social strategy.

They’re half right.

Yes. Every company can benefit in some way from a strong social presence.

Even in B2B. Scratch that—especially in B2B.

But there are certain companies where organic social is:

1. More important.

2. More effective.

And over my years in social content, I’ve picked up a handful of criteria I run through when assessing if a company is a perfect fit for organic social in their content motion.

Let me run you through 5 of them. If you’re in a hurry and want the TLDR, well, here it is:

1. The company is early-ish stage (Seed, Series A, maybe Series B).

2. The founder has an understanding of ‘how content works’ — philosophy, timelines, etc.

3. The product already has word of mouth on social, without a social strategy.

4. The business is survivable without the success of their social motion in the short-term.

5. The business has a clear, specific value proposition.

Now, let me walk you through each one of these in more depth. By the end of this, you should have a clear idea of if social is worth your time.

1. The company is early-ish stage.

Early-stage companies are well-positioned to win on organic social. This is a terrain where they can run laps around incumbents.

I came across a video from my friend JT Barnett that explains this well. JT uses this analogy to get the point across:

→ Small brands = a Mini Cooper

→ Big brands = a semi-truck

A semi-truck is a lot harder to maneuver than a Mini Cooper. It’s not as agile. Once it’s going in a certain direction, it’s locked in. On the other hand, a Mini Cooper can turn on a dime.

JT goes on to explain that big, mature companies take forever to make content decisions because their org chart has gotten so bloated. Each decision has to go through 10+ ‘stakeholders’ (whatever that word means).

At small companies, the marketing ‘team’ is a team of 1. Maybe 2-3 if you're lucky. You also tend to have a direct line of communication with the founder. This is an advantage. You can ship fast. You can iterate fast.

Here’s a heuristic for you:

If your company uses Microsoft Teams, organic social is gonna be tough for you. Kidding. Kind of.

2. The founder has an understanding of ‘how content works.’

To win on organic social, you need buy-in from the founder.

If you're a founder reading Social Files, you probably fit this criteria (if you’re still not convinced, read this essay next).

If you're on an early marketing team for a startup, you’ll want to do what you can to get buy-in (send your founder the essay I just linked).

During my time a Triple Whale, we were loud on social. It was a major channel for the company early on. This was able to happen because my CMO just let me do my thing. And the founders understood social enough to let my CMO let me do my thing. Lol.

You don’t win on social as an early-stage startup by being conservative. You don’t win my rushing the timeline for trust to be built through content.

You win by having a strong, specific point of view and being relentless with experimentation and commitment to the process.

Last week on a client call, I was catching up with a founder we write content for. He was telling me that the company hit a new record month in February. He also noted that they were seeing a massive uptick in inbound from social & word-of-mouth.

You know what else is true?

They've been one of our most responsive, engaged, clients with a founder who deeply understands the importance of social content. I never have to 'pry' for stories, anecdotes, case studies, etc.

And we’ve been at it for 9 months.

Founder buy-in does 2 things:

• It makes harvesting stories and industry opinions for founder-led content easier (so the content will perform better).

• It allows the content motion to compound (because they aren’t ‘rushed’).

3. The product already has word of mouth on social, without a social strategy.

You can make all the social noise you want. If your product sucks (or doesn’t exist), it will be found out.

Just look at what happened to Fast. Remember the hoodies they gave away? Remember the founder doing stunts on a jet ski for social clout?

Honestly? Stellar marketing and ability to hack attention.

But it all falls apart if the product doesn’t live up to the hype.

It’s kinda like when you get catfished on a dating app. Never happened to me. But I have used products that didn’t live up to the hype. And I assume that’s what it’s like.

Please. Don’t catfish your social audience.

To avoid this, make sure your product is worth amplifying.

• Do you have 5-10 happy customers?

• Is your product already being referred to others through word of mouth?

• When people tweet things like “Anyone have a recommendation for X?” is your product getting mentioned in the replies?

Here’s an example. My agency is outgrowing Notion as a ‘CRM,’ so we’re considering other platforms to use (love Notion, just not robust enough as a CRM at scale).

So, I posted this tweet last week.

30 replies. Plenty recommending the usual suspects like Hubspot, Pipedrive, etc.

But, there were a few replies that caught my attention recommending this new CRM software called Attio. They swore by it.

Candidly, I ended up going with Hubspot to minimize the risk of having to switch in the future. But if I were on Attio’s marketing team, this would be an indicator that organic social is a channel worth investing in.

Organic social works best when you're pouring gas on the flames—not rubbing sticks together.

So, double down on platforms where you already have advocates.

4. The business is survivable without the success of their social motion in the short-term.

I have a rule at Compound.

We don’t throw Hail Mary’s.

For a social-led content motion to work the way it’s supposed to, it can’t be the only channel your business relies on to survive.

Why?

It’s simple. When you’re rushing to ‘drive leads’ through social, it shows in your content. Then trust is broken. And then you don’t end up driving any leads, ever because prospects couldn’t care less about your content.

Trust-building through content is a function of time. And your business needs to have enough cash in the bank to let that time pass without drastically changing course.

And let me be clear.

This isn’t to say you can’t ever ‘sell’ in your social content. You and I can both agree that lead generation is the end goal here. I want to bring you revenue. It’s just that the behaviors that lead to big revenue numbers in the long term often contradict those that bring small amounts of revenue in the short-term.

Your business needs to be well-funded enough to run a social-led content motion without worry.

As for timeline:

You should be equipped to run a testing sprint for ~3 months while launching organic social as a channel. By then, you should see signs of life.

[Reply to this email and let me know if it would be helpful for me to put together a full guide on what that 90-day testing sprint looks like]

5. The business has a clear, specific value proposition.

The best content is hyper-specific to one persona. It uses language only they would use. It uses references only they would understand.

When your product is a specific solution for a clearly-defined, singular ICP—crafting a social presence that your ICP loves with content they can’t help but share is doable.

When your company has multiple products, multiple ICPs…it gets tricky.

Do you set up multiple accounts to speak to each ICP? Good luck getting the resources to execute this at a high level.

Do you have certain content pieces speak to certain types of customers? This is more doable with less resources, but dilutes the content on your one profile.

For these types of companies, my recommendation would be to pick with ICP you want to speak to most on social and focus your content there. The problem is a lot of people in leadership may be fearful of ‘missing out on leads’ but not speaking to every possible ICP in your social content. Topic for a different essay, though.

But you get my point. When you have a:

• clear ICP

• clear value prop

• content that speaks only to those

…it’s far easier to slice through the noise on the social timelines and build a cult-like audience of customers.

This is another reason why early-stage companies win on social. B2B startups begin as a point-solution. They solve a specific problem within an organization.

But as the company matures, the messaging gets more and more diluted.

The company might need to speak to multiple audiences. For example, one of their products might be best for sales teams and another might be best for marketers. The social content that hits for each of those audiences is going to be different.

So you end up with this generalized content strategy that doesn’t really speak to one individual. Then you get lost in the noise.

Make sense? Cool. Make sure that doesn’t happen to you.

TL;DR

B2B companies that absolutely rip on social are early-stage with a promising product that appeals to one ICP, and have a founder who ‘gets’ content. The business is also survivable without rushing lead generation through content.

Damn. Maybe this essay could have been a tweet.

But anyway, if this was helpful, share it with an early-stage founder or CMO who’s considering launching a social-led content engine in 2024.

I’ll consider this piece a success if it ends up in your #marketing Slack channel.

🗃 FILE CABINET

Here’s my favorite marketing and business content I bookmarked this week.

• Cave Mode vs Stage Mode by Thomas Frank 🐦

• Traditional testimonials don’t work for B2B companies anymore by Peep Laja 🐦

• Amp It Up by Frank Slootman (still reading this one) 📚

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you reading (or skimming, at least).

Do me a favor: reply and let me know if there’s a B2B founder you’ve been following lately on social. I’m looking for some examples outside of my usual sphere of content consumption to study & create some breakdowns on.

Who’s content are you obsessed with lately?

Will be on the lookout for your message back!

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: Here is the house music mix this newsletter was written to. Toss on the AirPod Maxes (or your headphone of choice), down a caffeinated beverage, and let the content rip.

PPS: If you company meets the above 5 criteria, you might be a good fit to partner with Compound. Join the waitlist here and we’ll be in touch!