Hey!

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

I know I’m a little late here (it’s Tuesday—I usually send on Monday). I have a good reason. I promise.

Been head down with the agency hiring new team members, training them up, making sure client accounts are good. All good stuff. But got a little behind on drafting this edition. Oops.

Speaking of the agency. We ship a ton of content assets on social for clients every week. Like 150-200+. Today I wanna share some of the learnings I’ve picked up over the past 2-3 weeks from the content we’ve seen go live, and the conversations I’ve been having with B2B execs.

Let’s dive in.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

Field notes from publishing 150+ content assets per week

A few lessons that will help you make social content that gets leads. Lots of them.

We post a lot of content at Compound. A lot of it does well.

So, here is a list of somewhat related lessons that I have picked up and patterns I have observed over the past few weeks in our client accounts. I’d encourage you to save this, and apply it in your own content motion.

Shall we?

(1) Find winning ‘buttons’ and run them into the ground.

We have clients posting a lot. Not every post hits. That’s life.

When we find a post that does outperform, you better believe we’re:

(a) Dissecting it to understand why it worked.

(b) Taking the learnings and implementing them into other content

I call these tactics, angles, topics, etc. winning “buttons.” You can press these buttons and get more reach, engagement, leads on demand.

Easy example: We noticed that all of a client’s top posts for the month of January were in-niche breakdowns of a marketing play by a well-known company. Each of these posts was also paired with an image.

For at least the next month, we’ll include 1-2x of these assets per week in the calendar. We’ll also run this content type across other clients to see if it works for them, too.

Another example: We’re noticing that a lot of the clear winners have hooks that are polarizing, or positioned as hot takes. This isn’t incredibly surprising. That said, a lot of founders are hesitant about being too ‘spicy’ on social. If we have data to support this approach, we can get them to be okay with testing it more.

(Note on hot takes: don’t take this too far. I like to call the happy medium being ‘tastefully polarizing.’ Also, you can position posts as a ‘hot take’ that are actually super safe and lukewarm… lmao).

Another example: When I was at Triple Whale, where memes & humor were a core part of the playbook, I would pay attention to the topics of memes I used. There would be certain pain points that led to the best engagement. Once I found one that worked, I’d just use it again and again until it stopped working well.

If you had a button you could push that got you better performance with less work—why wouldn’t you press it over and over again?

(2) A lot of companies suck at tracking leads from social.

I was on a case study interview with a client recently. Naturally, I was trying to pry some ROI numbers out of him so I could have the case study headline read something like “How [insert SaaS company] drove X% more leads with LinkedIn content” or something like that.

Reads a lot more compelling than highlighting follower growth or impressions… but oh well.

The client was stoked with how social was doing and knew for a fact it was driving ROI—but hadn’t been tracking as religiously as would be ideal.

My point?

Have some sort of tracking in place that you can stick to. Keep track of inbound DMs you get via social platforms. Have your sales team ask prospects how they found you (this is my preferred way) and note that in your CRM.

Also, I’m reworking our onboarding to make sure all clients are up to speed with some sort of tracking for social leads. Lol. Case study is still sick though.

(3) Post more stuff with media. Text only works—but text + media works better.

I could go on with a whole explanation here. But I’ll keep it short. Pictures and videos seem to be getting rewarded on both LinkedIn and X right now.

Text-only can still work—I post plenty—but try to pair that stellar copy with a relevant piece of media when possible.

If you're writing a post about the company off-site, post a team picture with it. If you're writing a post about a new feature, include a GIF of the feature in use. If you have a whole new product launch, it’s probably worth producing a video for the launch. The list goes on.

Warning: please don’t take this advice and start posting no-context thirst traps on LinkedIn. That should be classified as a war crime.

Also, one more note here. Test ‘scrappier’ graphics. This is anecdotal, but I see stuff like Notes app screenshots work better than the same text in a pretty, branded graphic. This isn’t surprising, as the latter comes across like a corporate ad.

(4) Just post more. You're not ‘annoying’ your audience. I promise.

This has to be one of the most common concerns I hear on sales calls with B2B marketing leaders who are considering social as a channel.

Here’s how the conversation goes. I tell them we post 1-2x per week day on LinkedIn and 2x per day on Twitter. They gasp. Then they ask if we can just test 1-2x per week on LinkedIn. I say sure, if you hate results (except I say this in a more socially correct way).

You deserve to know the truth. And the truth is that you win early in social with volume. You earn the right to focus on ‘quality’ through the learnings you pick up from posting a ton of content.

Not to mention, your goal is to stay ‘top of mind’ in your target audience, right? How do you expect to do this posting 1x per week?

(5) LinkedIn is still the winner. X is fine, but volatile.

Quick update on how we’re thinking about platform selection. LinkedIn still takes the gold for B2B. If I had to pick one platform to build a lead generation engine on with content, it’d be the briefcase app.

X still works. But it’s a lot more volatile. My recommendation here is to place focus on it if you already have an established audience (~1-2K base). If you're truly starting from scratch—either focus all on LinkedIn or understand that X is going to be a long grind.

Also, don’t use those stupid services that artificially pump your posts with bot accounts. Have some self respect. I believe in you.

That’s all I’ve got today. Hope this list helps. I’ll periodically do round ups like this where I share direct learnings from client accounts, so let me know if that sounds compelling.

Oh, and also, share this with your marketing team. Appreciate you 🙂

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi 📚

• How to use ChatGPT to make 3 months worth of content in 3 hours by Dakota Robertson 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Per usual, I appreciate you allowing my emails in your inbox. It’s an honor. Truly.

Let me know if you have any questions on the stuff we just ran through.

Talk next week,

Tommy Clark

PS: Obligatory agency waitlist plug. We’re at capacity right now, but looking to partner with some companies in Q2. Here’s where you can save your spot.