Airbnb’s recent shift in social strategy

Why the unicorn is going all in on founder-led content in 2024

Hey!

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

Hope your week is off to a great start. I can’t believe we’re already in February. I swear, time started moving faster when I launched Compound.

Quick update on how things are going:

  • The team is up to 6 full-time

  • We’re currently at capacity until March (waitlist here)

  • I’m working through how to expand our current offering to go even deeper with our roster of clients. My take has always been less clients, higher quality.

I’ll continue to share updates as we go. Okay. Let’s get into what you're really here for. Today I want to walk your through a recent shift I’ve noticed in Airbnb’s social strategy.

Startups—whether early-stage or enterprise—can learn a lot from this.

Let’s dive in.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Airbnb’s recent shift in social strategy

Why the unicorn is going all in on founder-led content in 2024

There’s a simple reason why, on X, all of Airbnb’s feature announcements come from Brian Chesky’s account first—not the company account.

All we need to do is look at the numbers for the 2023 Winter Release. The answer becomes obvious.

Airbnb’s Winter Release 2023 launch campaign

Let’s check out the data (presented as of writing this piece).

From Brian Chesky’s X account:

→ 2.5M impressions

→ 5.4K likes

→ 810 reposts

→ 256 replies

From the Airbnb company X account:

→ 29.9K impressions

→ 75 likes

→ 40 reposts

→ 113 replies

I’m not a math guy. But if we do some simple arithmetic, you’ll see the company account got just over 1% of the reach that Chesky’s account got on the same announcement.

1%.

People want to follow, engage with, and buy from other people.

This isn’t new, either. We already see this in consumer.

If you look in my closet right now, you’ll see it stocked ~60-70% full of clothes from Represent. A lot of my obsession with the brand stemmed from keeping up with the founder, George Heaton, on social.

The reason I use the carb formula from BPN to fuel my training sessions is because I’m a regular watcher of Nick Bare’s YouTube videos (dude is a machine).

Now back to B2B. If you scroll on LinkedIn or X, pay attention to how many times you see a personal account versus how many times you see a company account. The balance is laughable.

Takeaway: If you have an announcement or release coming out soon, plan to distribute it from your founder’s account if they are active on social media.

This is especially true if you're an early or growth-stage company without the name recognition Airbnb has. They could probably get away with just using the brand account for their releases—your company probably can’t.

Founder-led content isn’t ‘new,’ but I predict it will only continue to pick up as we head into the rest of 2024.

There is some nuance here. I’m not telling you to ditch the brand accounts. These still work well. And there is value in having social properties that don’t hinge on the CEO tweeting daily.

The best companies have both. Airbnb still posted to the brand account on X—the founder account is just where they saw the most momentum based on where user behavior is at right now.

Test it out this week. See if you can get your founder to give you material for a post or two. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. If you need some help getting this founder-led content going, I’ll drop a couple of resources for you to read & watch next.

📚 Further study:

That’s all I’ve got today.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you taking the time to read!

I got a lot of responses last week asking for me to write a Feature Launch Playbook on how to use social to get distribution for new products and features. It’s in progress!

This one is going to be a deep dive, so it may be ready by next week, or it may take a minute. I’ll keep you posted!

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: PS: If you want to apply the above magic, but don’t have the bandwidth internally, apply for Compound’s waitlist here. We may be opening up some capacity soon, so if you want to be first off the waitlist, get ahead now.