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 slept a lot and ate too much sushi. The only way to recover after a week of agency life. Lol.

Got a good one for you today. I want to walk you through 7 of the content frameworks I use every week to produce high-performing social content (#5 will blow you away!! kidding, kind of).

Let’s do it.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

My favorite social content frameworks

7 proven models for creating content that gets shared and engaged with

I’ve been in the social & content game for ~7 years now. I’ve posted more than 10,000 content assets. I imagine this is the social media marketer version of “10,000 hours.”

I’ve also picked up a handful of frameworks during that time that allow me to create high-performing social content—that gets visibility and converts—predictably.

Today, I want to walk you through 7 of the frameworks I use every day. There’s even a bonus 8th framework at the end. Oh, and plenty of examples from B2B startups.

Shall we?

Think in Slack groups.

I got this framework from my friend (and talented marketer), Alex Garcia. What does it mean?

Create content that your target customer can’t help but share in a Slack group with their marketing team. Content that ends up in group chats with industry CMOs and CEOs.

I’ll give you an example from my day-to-day. Hampton released a report on agency metrics about a month day. They shared data from their members on revenue, profit margins, gross profit, etc.

All stuff that aspiring agency CEOs want to have benchmarks for. So I read it. I was mind-blown by some of the stats. And I forwarded the report to ~5 of my agency owner friends.

If you want to create content that performs—and converts—don’t optimize for likes. Optimize for shares.

In other words, think in Slack groups.

OMG, WTF, or LOL.

So, I’ve sold you on “thinking in Slack groups.”

How do you get your audience to share your stuff?

This idea from Shaan Puri is one of my favorite ways to guarantee social content is shareable.

Every piece of social content you publish should make the reader (or viewer) think: OMG, WTF, or LOL.

The all caps matters here. The content has to elicit a strong emotion. So strong the consumer feels like they have to share it with their friends. Here are a few examples of the framework in action:

OMG: When hundreds of founders and VCs got a random pizza on their doorstep during Antimetal’s launch, they were surprised and posted it to social. The campaign drove 2M+ views in 24 hours.

WTF: When Cognition Labs announced Devin, the AI software engineer, the launch tweet went insanely viral because of the fierce debate around “replacing” engineers with AI. The launch post has 30M views as of writing this.

LOL: When I would post Hasbulla memes from the Triple Whale brand account and they’d perform unreasonably well every time. I’m serious.

Sometimes, a piece of content will mix multiple. That’s fine. You just don’t want it to have none. That’s how you end up with flatlined social growth.

Debbie at her desk.

This is another one that I picked up from Shaan Puri’s episode on the How I Write podcast with David Perrell. Shaan is a framework machine.

According to Shaan, “BuzzFeed writers used to write to Debbie at her Desk, the bored woman at her desk who wanted a 5-minute distraction.”

They aren’t writing to the “faceless masses,” as David put it in his recap of the episode here. BuzzFeed writers spoke to one person at a time.

Think about how it feels when a YouTuber says “Hey everyone” in a video versus when it feels like they’re referring to one person—you.

David Senra uses this approach well in his Founders podcast episodes. He frequently refers directly to the listener as “you.” He’ll say things like “You and I talked about this in episode XX.”

Social content is a 1:1 conversation—not a mass presentation.

The “over the shoulder test.”

This is a simple framework for creating shareable content in a visual format.

According to Colin & Samir, content that passes the over-the-shoulder test “has such a strong visual hook that if someone’s watching from over your shoulder, they can’t stop watching.”

The example the duo uses is the only YouTube Short to hit 1B views in 2023. Check out their quick breakdown here.

This is a strong framework on its own. But I was thinking how I’d adapt this to B2B marketing, where viral stunts are a bit less common. Here’s what I landed on.

Create visual content that makes someone stop and do a double take when they walk past your desk in-office. This could be a compelling chart or infographic. This could be a meme that highlights a pain point your product solves.

See how this works?

Build a Content Funnel.

When B2B founders & marketing teams try to launch a social motion, the strategy tends to have one of two fatal flaws:

One. The content is too broad and based on general “business advice.” You end up growing “fast” but the audience is low quality and won’t buy your stuff.

Two. The content is too product-focused. I’m not saying to never post about your product. I am saying every post shouldn’t be a lame use-case highlight GIF. You end up with no audience to sell to.

A balanced Content Funnel solves both of these flaws.

Top of funnel: TOFU content is meant to garner broad attention. The goal of this content is to generate impressions. We’re using this to cast a wide net.

Middle of funnel: MOFU content is meant to firmly cement you as a go-to resource for your ICP. This content is value-driven (no sales pitches), but the topics are targeted to your ICP.

Bottom of funnel: BOFU content is meant to convert the followers you have attracted using MOFU and TOFU content. It usually has the smallest potential audience on social, which is why you can’t just rely on it over and over and over again.

You balance the content types in your calendar based on what your goals are. If your goal is to rack up mass impressions, skew towards the top. If your goal is to push hard for conversions and exhaust your existing audience, skew towards the bottom.

If your social performance has flatlined, use this framework to assess your content strategy. I wrote an entire 3-part series on how to construct your own (effective) Content Funnel. Read it here.

IRL → URL

So much of the best social content comes from real-life activations.

The best companies I see on social have 2 content tracks:

• Track 1: consistent flow of social content that goes out day-to-day.

• Track 2: one-off, ambitious campaigns that are meant to make a lot of noise in a concentrated period of time.

The idea of “IRL → URL” feeds into track 2.

An example of this would be how Acquire.com uses billboards. They have space on a billboard in New York. They use the billboard to amplify stories of companies using their platform to get acquired. Their founder, Andrew Gazdecki, takes pictures of the billboard and posts them to LinkedIn & X.

Or, remember this Intercom billboard that was making the rounds on social?

Done right, OOH marketing like billboards can feed your social content machine.

Other ways IRL → URL can be used in your social strategy:

• Events. If your company does conferences, happy hours, and private dinners (looking at you, Shopify ecosystem)—make sure there’s a photographer on premise. Photos and videos from events turn into great social content.

• Man-on-the-street interviews. These are a bit played out now, but can still work if done well with a unique angle. Send your social person to a busy spot in town (or even better, an industry conference) and rip a bunch of live interviews.

• Founder-led content. We can apply this thinking to founder-led content as well. A lot of founders try to “think of” interesting content when the best way to grow on social is to do interesting stuff in real life (like growing a successful company) and sharing learnings.

Quantity earns quality.

Marketers can be quite entitled. If we post once or twice per week and the masses don’t come flocking, we look around confused.

Or we’ll see some clip from Tim Ferriss about how playing the volume game is overrated and think that applies to us. How do you think Tim Ferriss ascended to a point where he got people to listen to him?

Quantity—volume—is the most accessible tool you have as an early-stage startup.

Quantity allows you to collect data. I’ve been playing around with short-form videos lately. Over the weekend, I posted a reel on Instagram that got 120K views (my most yet). The next day, I posted another that got a few hundred views. I’ll post another today and see what happens.

When I test a new format on a new platform, I don’t have the luxury of posting once per week and citing my care for “quality” as the reason. Neither do you.

Known well VS well known.

I’ll be the first to tell you I don’t have a massive audience. A lot of my clients don’t have very “large” audiences by most standards, either.

What if I told you that’s the point?

Having a large, untargeted audience does nothing for your B2B business unless you're selling low-priced, entry-level “how to get rich” products.

If that’s your goal, keep publishing the generic advice that’s the business equivalent of a middle-aged white woman’s “live, laugh, love” sign in her kitchen.

If you’re trying to close high-ACV deals with customers you don’t hate, this framework will help you get your mind right. You want to be known well, not well known.

I heard this idea from Adam Robinson, CEO of RB2B (and one of my favorite former clients 🙂). We actually learned this lesson together.

According to Adam (via this post), “Agencies tell you they can ghostwrite and grow your followers with just 1 hour of your time a week. They can, and they will.

It’s one way to start building your brand, and you can see SOME benefit. Here’s the problem...

The best case outcome is that you’re “well known.’

I believe the power of LinkedIn is the opposite. If you create the best content, and figure out how to reach your ICP, you can become “known well”, which is a far more powerful level of trust.”

As an aside, this exact sentiment is why I don’t push super hard on the “time-savings” value prop. The best founder-led content comes from founders who are enthusiastic about content—working with an agency just amplifies that.

But yeah, if you wanna use LinkedIn to grow revenue, aim to be known well by customers you care about. Not “well-known” by an irrelevant audience.

Final thoughts.

A quick recap of what we covered:

1. Create content with the intention of it being so value-dense that it gets shared in industry Slack groups.

2. Think about which emotion you want your content to elicit—OMG, WTF, or LOL.

3. Produce stuff that “Debbie at her desk” would consume to distract herself from mind-numbing busy work.

4. Make visual content that passes the “over the shoulder” test.

5. Organize your content into a balanced Content Funnel (read more here).

6. Use IRL activations to feed into social content that hits.

7. Push so much quantity you learn what quality looks like.

8. Aim to be known well, not well-known.

I kid you not. If you read nothing else on social strategy and focus your energy on applying these 8 frameworks, your content strategy will improve. A lot.

One last thing. I was “thinking in Slack groups” when I wrote this. So would you share this in your #marketing channel? Only if you want to though.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• How to Master Storytelling by David Perell and Shaan Puri 🎥

• “Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas” by Jason Cohen 📝

• How to grow an audience on LinkedIn (without being cringe) by Tommy Clark 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, appreciate you allowing me into your inbox every week. I don’t take it for granted!

What’d I miss in today’s edition? Hit me with your favorite content creation framework. Always looking to collect more.

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 right now, but looking to partner with some SaaS startups in May or June.