Hey!

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

Hope you had a great weekend. I’m back home in LA for the holiday. Went for a run yesterday. A lot more hills here than in Austin (average heart rate reflected that 😂).

Also! Launched a new plan on Bluecast. You can now manage up to 3 profiles in one Bluecast account. Check it out here.

Now, today’s essay is all about how to get your entire company bought into the power of content. Perhaps one of the most important pieces I’ve written.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Building a content culture.

How to get your team posting more, without having to handhold them.

Companies who are content first have a competitive advantage going into 2025.

I think we can all agree that founder-led content is table stakes now. All the cool kids are doing it.

But, the B2B companies I see winning on social all go a step further. It seems like everyone on their team is publishing content to social—usually LinkedIn.

I experienced this back when I was Head of Social at Triple Whale. We had multiple team members active on LinkedIn and X—myself, our CMO, our and our Head of Brand. We had a dialed brand presence ran by yours truly. We had 2 of our co-founders active on social as well, mostly around product launches.

I wrote about this in my essay “How to Build Your Content Ecosystem.” There are 3 parts to a successful social strategy: founder-led content, employee-led content, and company-led content.

Most companies progress in that order. The founder starts posting. They see it work. They become content-pilled and want to get the rest of the team on the timeline.

Problem is, you can’t force employee-led content.

I’ve seen companies try to use these “employee advocacy” tools. They all suck. Probably won’t get me any newsletter sponsors, but it’s the truth. Here’s how it goes:

→ Founder wants to get the team active on social

→ Other team members aren’t as excited about content

→ Founder gets sold on ‘employee advocacy’ software that promises to make team posting easy

→ Reality is the tool just schedules the same, lame, copy-paste message to go out from 72 different team members

→ The content doesn’t even perform well and it looks spammy (hurting your reputation)

Nobody sees a copy-pasted content piece from an employee advocacy software and thinks damn, I want to use this SaaS.

The companies actually doing employee-led content right have built a content culture. Content is ingrained in the DNA of the company. The team members want to post. They’re excited about it. So it performs well.

As a founder, you have the power to create this. It doesn’t need to be left to chance.

But how?

Let’s talk about it. With examples, of course.

Lead by example.

Culture comes from the top. You already know this.

If you want your team to act with a sense of urgency, you act with a sense of urgency.

If you want your team to show up on time to meetings, you show up on time to meetings.

If you want your team to post content on LinkedIn…you post content to LinkedIn.

Every company with a strong Content Ecosystem has a founder who’s been posting for months, if not years.

To be honest, I rarely see it go in reverse. Whenever I get intro’d to a company where the CMO wants to get the CEO ‘posting more,’ it’s like trying to convince an upset toddler to eat their vegetables.

Content culture has to come from the founder.

Take beehiiv, for example. Their team is hyper-active on social. Tyler, their CEO, leads the way with his social content and his newsletter (great read btw).

Or we can look at RB2B. Adam Robinson is the poster child for founder-led content. He’s been posting for 2-3 years now. Now he has his COO Santosh and Head of Growth Dan both posting consistently on LinkedIn.

Or we can look at Chili Piper. Alina Vandenberghe crushes on LinkedIn. And other Chili Piper team members are active on the timeline, too.

If you want your team to take content seriously, treat it like any other cultural shift in your company. Lead by example.

Reward content creation—don’t suppress it.

It blows my mind how tweaked out ‘traditional’ B2B execs can get over a team member trying to build their personal brand.

Say Jane works as a Content Marketer at a B2B SaaS company. Jane starts posting about her marketing learnings on LinkedIn. Maybe 3-5x per week. 7x per week if she’s an overachiever.

Jane’s boomer CEO notices this, and thinks “This is a distraction. I need Jane’s full attention on her role at [Company].”

So outdated. What if I told you that Jane building her audience on LinkedIn would attract leads. And attract A-players for your team. Would you still think it’s a distraction then?

Funny thing is, even if you tell team members not to post, they’ll either post anyway or end up leaving your company.

Smart founders lean in. They want their team members to post. Hell, they’ll even teach their team how to do it.

Exit Five is a great example of this. Not surprising, as their founder, Dave Gerhardt, quite literally wrote the book on founder-led content.

I read a LinkedIn post from Exit Five’s Marketing Manager, Matthew Carnevale, about how he was able to develop the skill of speaking off the cuff in content. He wasn’t great at it to begin with—but Dave had him join on podcasts, host events, etc.

Matt also posts super consistently on LinkedIn. I see his content just as much as Dave’s on the timeline. See what happens when you empower your team to be front-facing?

Include content in your employee onboarding.

This one’s a quick tip. Almost seems too simple. If you want people on your team to post…tell them?

I got this strategy from a conversation I had with beehiiv’s SMM, Bella Rose Mortel.

Every time Beehiiv onboards a new team member, Bella Rose runs them through a social media strategy onboarding.

She says, “It’s where I give them a fun presentation on our social media strategy, why organic social is important, and how beehiiv (as a brand) shows up online.”

This can also extend to your hiring process. No, someone having a big audience on social doesn’t mean they’re good at their job. Many times it’s the opposite.

But if you can find someone with talent and an audience…scoop them up ASAP.

[Side note: check out my full write-up on beehiiv’s social playbook here]

Create space for content.

Again, if you want your employees to create content…tell them that. And give them the space in their schedule to make it happen.

When Unify announced its $12M Series A, they had all of their team members posting to LinkedIn (along with the main post from the founder, Austin Hughes, of course). This play created an echo chamber on LinkedIn.

You couldn’t scroll more than once of twice without seeing a post about the raise.

And even more importantly…the play drove 494 meetings and millions in pipeline.

The team posts didn’t just happen, though. Austin told the entire team to set aside 1-2 hours to write their own personal post.

Your team has a to-do list full of tasks. Left up to their own discretion, they’re not going to let that sit while they write up a LinkedIn post. As a founder, you have the authority to let them know that’s okay—and encouraged.

[I wrote a full case study on Unify’s fundraising announcement blueprint here]

Final thoughts.

B2B folks love to ridicule personal branding as a pet project.

“Just focus on building the best product.”

Yeah. No.

Translation: “Let’s play this game on hard mode because I’m too insecure to have my team members building an audience for themselves.”

Alternate translation: “I’m bad at making content so I’m coping by telling myself it’s not that important.”

If you can sidestep these limiting beliefs, you will make scaling your startup so much easier. Reward content creation. Make it as easy as possible for your team. Hire for it. Give them resources. Create your own content as a founder.

Ingrain content creation into your company’s DNA.

I’ve seen it work too many times—for myself and my clients—to let you sit on the sidelines.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• How we got our first 1,000 customers at OpenPhone (and what I’d do differently) by Daryna Kulya 🎥

• If I Started LinkedIn in 2025, I’d Do This by Tommy Clark 🎥

• What Alina Vandenberghe would be doing if she was a $1m ARR startup by Adam Robinson 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week. It’s not an honor I take lightly.

If you want to start writing content, check out Bluecast.

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark

PS: If you want Compound to run a founder-led content motion for you… save a spot on our waitlist here. We’re at capacity through December, but looking to partner with some SaaS startups in Q1 2025.