Hey!

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

Hope you got some much-needed rest this weekend and your week is off to a great start.

A lot of fun stuff going on at Compound lately. The team is hitting a stride. Client accounts are cruising. And it still feels so early.

Now. Today’s essay. I’ve got a good one for you. It’s a little confession (I make content mistakes, too). I also share one of Alex Hormozi’s frameworks that set me straight.

90+ percent of the B2B companies I audit make this same mistake.

Let’s dive in.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

The content dilution trap.

1 simple content marketing mistake I made in February (and how I’m fixing it)

I have a confession to make.

I may or may not have blatantly disregarded one of the most frequent pieces of advice I give to founders and marketers who ask me about content.

See, I had ambitious content goals at the start of 2024.

I was going to scale a ton on LinkedIn. Double down on X (or Twitter, if you're still calling it that). Launch YouTube. Even play around with some short-form video on Instagram because that’s getting all the hype right now. Oh, and also still have this newsletter to write.

I think I’ve done a decent job of keeping up momentum across platforms. LinkedIn and X are ‘consistent.’ Newsletter’s hitting your inbox every week. YouTube is okay (started strong and got swamped in February). Instagram is a mess—I’ve accepted that I need to can that for now.

This scattered approach dilutes the efficacy of your content. Content dilution.

Here’s the sneaky part. Because the agency is pushing capacity and we are still getting the majority of our clients via word of mouth, I haven’t noticed the impact of my lack of focus yet.

[To clarify: we get plenty of leads from organic content right now, we just don’t have room to take them on and keep our client roster fairly exclusive. Practice what you preach… you know?]

That said, in Q2 & Q3 we’ll be making a push to grow. When that time comes, I won’t want to rely on ‘decent’ scattered across 4-5 channels. I’ll want an absolutely locked-in lead machine that’s humming on 1-2 channels.

This finally clicked for me when I was reading $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi. He has this framework for channel expansion that goes something like this:

More → Better → New

More: If something is working, just do more of it. If you're posting 2-3x per week on LinkedIn and seeing leads come in, increase volume to 5-7x per week.

Better: Once you can’t increase volume anymore, test variables to make the thing more effective. Once you’re posting ~10+ times per week on LinkedIn, focus less on posting more and more on refining the components of each post.

Can you try new hooks? Can you test carousels versus text-only? Can you test short-form video on LinkedIn, not Instagram (hint: you should)?

New: Only once you’ve exhausted volume and the optimizations you can make on a specific platform, pick a new channel to start testing and repeat the cycle.

By the time you reach the NEW step in the cycle, you should have the team in place to sustain that channel without content dilution. This way, every now channel compounds—and you aren’t playing an exhausting game of whack-a-mole.

I realized there was a lot more I could do on LinkedIn before it makes sense for me to give a crap about something like Instagram.

There are a few lessons I took away from this reflection. They might help you, too.

(1) We tend to overestimate our own capacity. Everyone else might not be able to handle is…but we’re not ‘everyone else,’ right?

Look. You're a special snowflake, I promise. But It’s also more effective to plan your content motion assuming you will have the same flaws and bandwidth constraints as other folks. This gives your plan some slack.

(2) 1-2 channels are sufficient for the majority of early-stage companies. Especially true if you're bootstrapping.

The agency has gone from 0 → not zero (maybe I’ll share revenue one day, lol) off of LinkedIn and X alone. Do I think I’ve truly hit the ceiling on either of those platforms? Nope.

A lot of the clients we work with at Compound are VC-backed software companies. I’d still give them the same advice. Concentrate your capital (and focus) to unlock 1-2 channels at a time in coordinated sprints.

(3) You can repurpose content across platforms. You can’t repurpose engagement & community-building across them.

This is the piece everyone forgets. You want to just post 1x per day and log off. I get it. When you're big enough on a platform, you might have this luxury.

But as an early-stage founder trying to unlock a social channel, you need to be active in the community on these platforms. It’s hard to do this on more than 1-2 platforms at a time.

The takeaway for you?

One word: focus.

Pick 1-2 platforms and scale those until you can’t. If you're a B2B SaaS founder or marketer, I can almost guarantee those platforms are (1) LinkedIn (2) X.

As it’s written in the gospel of Hormozi: More. Better. New.

And I have a hunch you're still in the ‘more’ phase on LinkedIn & X.

Hope this helps.

If it did… share this in your marketing team’s Slack channel.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi 📚

• Memes for B2B companies 101 by Paul Copplestone 🐦

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate the space in your inbox every week. It’s an honor.

If you haven’t followed me over on LinkedIn—check it out here. I post there every day, so that’s the best place to find more B2B content playbooks to hold you over between newsletter sends.

Talk next week,

Tommy Clark

PS: Like I said in today’s message, we’re looking to partner with some B2B companies in Q2 + Q3. Here’s where you can save your spot.

PPS: Here’s the house music mix I wrote this newsletter to. Scientifically proven to 7x your productivity and 2x your pipeline.