PARTNERED WITH

Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to growing a successful B2B social media presence.

I know. You’re probably hearing this from every newsletter you’re subscribed to this week. But I really am thankful that you open these every Monday.

I’m also thankful for founders and CMOs who understand the value of organic social in a GTM strategy. And those that don’t content teams to 17 rounds of approvals. Real ones.

Today, I’m walking you through the next step in The Modern B2B Social Media Playbook.

How to conduct a Social Media Audit for your company. You’ll learn:

• Why your content team needs to have a deep understanding of your product.

• The smart way to compare yourself. to your competitors.

• How to interpret your audit and set goals that won’t drive you insane

Shall we?

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How I do a social media audit

My simple, 4-part framework for B2B companies

‘Just start posting’ is terrible advice for a marketing team.

About what?

What’s the goal?

Who are we trying to reach?

Posting blindly is the equivalent of that meme of the women aiming a sniper, but not looking through the scope. Yeah. This one.

Instead of going in blind, you need a checklist. One that you can carry with you into every new social media job, and every new client. Same process. Works every time.

In his new book, Clear Thinking, Shane Parrish uses pilots as an example. Before takeoff, they run through a checklist—no matter how many times they've flown a plane. Having a proper audit checklist will keep you from crashing and burning when you try to get your social media presence off the ground. Or to use a less crude version of that analogy… it will keep you from ending up at the wrong airport.

My usual social media audit has four parts to it:

1. General company audit

2. Industry and competitor audit

3. Social media accounts

4. Goals and targets audit

Run through these four sections, and you’ll remove the confusion around what type of content to post. You’ll also get rid of the worry about what your competition is doing (and how you’ll stand out). Let me walk you through it all.

Part I. General company audit

Social media teams, especially in B2B, often end up siloed. They get shunned to the corner of the room and told to only speak when spoken to. This is how we end up with webinar links plastered across LinkedIn, guys.

It’s 2023. I like to think this is happening less.

As a marketer, you need to deeply understand the company you’re running social for.

I like to do this by asking myself the following questions:

1. What products and services does your brand offer?

2. What are your brand’s values? How do you want to be perceived on social media?

3. What does your brand want the customer to know?

4. Who is your customer avatar? What type of people are we trying to attract with our content?

5. What problem(s) do your customers have?

6. What do most of these customers say about this problem? (This is great for getting a sense of the language your target audience uses)

7. What do most of these customers say about your product?

8. How do your customers like to be spoken to? (ie. humor, education, etc)

Quick tip here if your product is highly technical (which is often the case in B2B SaaS). Ask your product manager, or your founder, to record a Loom video walking you through the product in as much depth as possible.

This isn’t the most fun part of your job. I have a hard time believing anyone truly enjoys sitting through a demo of how an attribution software works. But when you explain your product the way a fine-dining chef can explain each one of their dishes, you will be able to create content that converts.

Part II. Industry and competitor audit

‘Don’t focus on your competitors’ is stupid, idealistic advice.

I agree. Using your competitor’s strategy to influence every marketing move you make isn’t ideal. But don’t you think we should probably have a general idea of what they’re up to?

They’re probably doing some stuff that’s worth emulating. And on the other hand—they’re probably doing some stuff that's insanely stupid (this is your opportunity to stand out).

Here’s the list of questions I typically run through in this part of the audit:

1. Who are your top 3-5 competitors?

2. What angle are they taking on their social accounts? How can your brand stand out from them?

3. What brands in your industry (doesn’t have to be direct competitors) are doing well on social? What is it that they do well? Any type of content that performs consistently for them?

4. What are brands and content creators outside of your industry that you admire? This is the secret sauce.

Pattern recognition is a core skill for any social media marketer. This is your first opportunity to practice it. Your goal during the competitor section of the audit is to identify patterns. What are they doing well that you can emulate? What angle are they taking on social media that you can position your company against?

A few real-life examples for you:

Example 1: Let’s say you’re just getting started on Linkedin. You snoop around your competitor’s page. You notice that they post a shit ton of carousels—and they crush. Might be worth using that format in your content calendar, no?

Example 2: After conducting this section of the audit, you find that your competitor’s brand voice on social is boring. It puts you, and their own prospects, to sleep. They’re probably trying too hard to be ‘professional.’ Their error is your opportunity. You realize that your company should prioritize having some personality on social, and being approachable.

See how that works? Don't overthink this, but try to look for patterns you can exploit in your own social strategy.

To give some of the ‘Don’t focus on your competitors’ crowd some credit, I’d agree with them after you conduct this section of the audit. There’s no need to constantly be looking over your shoulder.

Get a clear idea of the competitive landscape. Understand how you plan to stand out. And then check in periodically (say, once per quarter) to see how you stack up.

Part III. Social media accounts

Here’s where you dive into your company’s current social media strategy.

If you’re launching from scratch, this part’s easy. You have none!

If you’re starting a new job, a new client, or you’re just doing a quarterly audit of your current company’s socials, run through this list of questions:

1. What existing content lives in your brand’s ecosystem? This can be blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, previous social media content, etc.

2. What existing social channels is your brand active on? List these out.

3. Are you mainly posting from the company pages or the founder’s account? Is anyone else on your team active?

4. Are there any social accounts where your target audience is active that your brand is not using yet?

5. What brand voice is currently being used on active brand social accounts? Is there a cohesive and defined voice in place?

6. What type of content (topics, formats, etc) is performing best? Do this for each individual platform

7. What type of content is being published consistently, but underperforms? For B2B brands, this is usually webinar promos

8. What are opportunities for improvement that stand out to you while consuming this content? Try to identify 3-5 pieces of low-hanging fruit

Pattern recognition. It’s back again. The goal of this section of the audit is to identify what’s working and what’s not in your own content ecosystem. Formats, topics, channels, etc.

Are there any underrated content types that you should put more time into? Are there any high-lift pieces of content that just don’t get you much return on investment, or hassle, involved in producing them? I’m sure there are.

Part IV. The goals

Ok. You’ve gone through the process of uncovering what your company does well (and not so well) on social. You have an idea of how you’re going to stand out from the competition on the timeline.

Now that you have all this information, you need to set a few targets to work towards.

Look. I don’t really give a crap about OKRs or KPIs. Call these whatever you want. Nobody ever sticks to these for more than 27 days after the quarterly company on-site they were developed at (am I wrong?).

All that matters is that you have 1-3 major goals to work towards in a defined timeframe. Not 5. Not 7. Definitely not 11.

If you spread yourself super thin across 5+ goals — your social presence is going to be horrendous and you’re going to hate your job.

I get it though. We’re all a bit over-ambitious. We treat our new social media strategy like most Americans treat their New Year’s resolutions. Have you seen a gym in February?

Focus. 1-3 targets. Max.

I’ll use Social Files as an example here. I just got ownership of the IP back and I have some ambitious targets going into 2024.

My main business goal? Increase monthly revenue (going to hold on sharing the exact number, but the point stands). I’ll do this through advertising—sponsors hit me up—and launching a digital product.

To do that, I’ll need to increase the amount of relevant folks like you who read the newsletter. Organic social will be a big acquisition channel for the brand. I practice what I preach.

If I audit my own audience (B2B marketers and execs), they’re most active on LinkedIn and X, so I should focus there. My Q1 targets are simple.

Grow my Twitter account from 17K → ~35K engaged followers by March 31, 2023.

Grow my LinkedIn account from 10K → ~50K engaged followers by March 31, 2023.

Funnel traffic generated from those platforms to my newsletter. I’ll have a better understanding of the exact numbers here once I gather more data.

That is literally it. It does not need to be more complex. I’m convinced people make social media strategy more complex than it needs to be to make it feel like they are doing more work than they are.

Define goals. Make good content that supports those goals.

As always, if this was helpful to you, I’d appreciate you sharing. Forward the link to your marketing Slack channel. Text it to your CMO. Post this article to LinkedIn or X. I always appreciate it.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• How to build a library of evergreen, binge-worthy content by Tommy Clark

• Why your company needs to send a ‘Dump Your Budget’ email by Patrick Campbell

• Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara (reading this book now … good stuff)

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

If this is the first edition of Social Files you’re reading (welcome!), I think you’ll enjoy last week’s as well:

What’s the point of a B2B social media presence?

As always, thanks for reading. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and get offline for a bit.

See you back here next week,

Tommy Clark