Social Files by Tommy Clark
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How to accelerate audience growth on social

How to accelerate audience growth on social

Thoughts on increasing your content ‘hit rate’

Tommy Clark
February 04, 2025

Hey!

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

ICYMI: last week we launched the first major update to Bluecast (my content writing SaaS) in 2025—a revamped Idea Generator. Now, you’re able to get more specific content prompts that are mapped to the stage of the Content Funnel you're trying to target.

You can go from blank page to drafted post in minutes. It’s insane.

Now, today I want to go over a quick, simple concept that might change your trajectory on social.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

How to accelerate audience growth on social

Thoughts on increasing your content ‘hit rate’

It’s easy to look at social growth as random.

Sometimes, you just get lucky, right? A post will over-perform your average here and there. But it feels more or less like throwing darts blindfolded.

Doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way, really, once you're clued in on how social media really works.

See, all of the startups who win on social treat it differently. Content is not random. It’s a science.

And the savviest founders and marketers are always looking to increase their hit rate.

“Hit rate” is just the percentage of posts that over-perform your baseline.

Say you're posting 5 times per week. You notice that 2 of those posts performed better than usual. You have a 40% hit rate.

(You can extrapolate this math out to be monthly and quarterly as well)

There are always elements to a winning post that caused it to perform that way. Rarely, if ever, is your hit rate actually random.

A few of the most common reasons for a winning post:

Idea: The topic of the post (example: if you're writing for founders, perhaps a post about ‘lessons you wish you knew before fundraising’ did better than usual).
Packaging: The hook of the post (example: using a well-known name in the hook may have worked to stop the reader’s scroll).
Format: The format of the post (example: packaging the same idea as a short-form video versus a text post).

These are all signals. Yet, most founders fumble the bag at this point.

They land on a winner. Then they get scared of ‘repeating themselves’ and don’t want to talk about the same topic for another 2 months. I cannot overstate how stupid (respectfully) this is.

(1) Let’s make this clear. Your audience does not care. You’re creating a boogeyman in your head that does not exist.

(2) You put in all this work. Hours and hours on your content. You finally have a winning concept—and you choose to discard it and start all over again?

I’d like to present an alternative—and I think better—approach.

Build your Content Playbook.

When I was playing basketball growing up, if we found a winning play, we’d run it over and over and over again. It stayed in the playbook until the opponent figured it out.

Apply the same approach to your content strategy.

When you find a winner, put it in your playbook. Use it again and again, until your opponent—in this case, the algorithm—starts to figure you out.

For example, I’ve observed across thousands of posts for clients that Origin Story posts always over-perform. Readers love getting an inside look at how you founded your company. So we’ll typically run this post first with new clients.

Of course, even with a winning play, you want to be smart with how often you use it. If you run the same play every time down the court, the defense will pick up on it.

With content, the fear of ‘repetition’ is overblown. That said, I’m not asking you to post the same thing in the same format every single day.

Back to that Origin Story example. We know it works well. So we’ll run it again in ~2-3 months as a way to reintroduce the founder to all of their new audience members. Origin Story posts have a place in our playbook. They still work, though if they started to fade, we’d look to replace it with a new play.

The point I’m trying to drill into your mind with this piece: building your Content Playbook eliminates the random chance from social media growth.

As you post more—and gather more data points—you start to become more confident in what type of content works.

You might have started with one out of five posts performing above baseline. Now, 3 months in, you're finding that five out of five are performing above baseline.

And now, your baseline content performance has increased.

You then start the cycle again, trying to beat your new floor with improved plays. This goes on and on and on and is how you content to get in front of more potential buyers over time.

But remember, you’ll never get here if you let your fear of ‘repeating yourself’ get in the way.

Hope this helps.

By the way, last week I compiled a list of 11 content plays that are worth adding to your own playbook. I’d recommend reading that next. Check it out here.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

The NEW way to grow on LinkedIn in 2025 by Tommy Clark 🎥
Talent Isn't Your Savior, It's Your Ceiling by Dr. Julie Gurner 📝
Social Media Is A Video Game (Here Are The Cheat Codes) by Kallaway 🎥

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, thanks for allowing me into your email inbox every week.