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 spent mine catching up on some reading (no surprise). The current read if Of Blood and Fire by Ryan Cahill. I’m about halfway through book 1—fun read!

Also spent some time chipping away at my own novel. I’m just under 42,000 words into the first draft. There are ways to go (the other half of the first draft, self-editing, beta readers, pro editing, etc.) before this thing sees the light of day. But it’s a lot of fun.

Now, LinkedIn content. Last week, LinkedIn made an update I’m excited about (a rarity these days!). They’ve added “Saves” and “Sends” to metrics you can view on a per post basis.

And today, I want to help you understand why this matters and how to optimize for these metrics.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

How to create savable LinkedIn content

3 frameworks for making content your target customer can’t help but save and share in Slack with their boss

If my hands were tied, and I could only give you one piece of content strategy advice to grow your account faster and get you more leads, it would be this:

Create content that gets saved and shared in Slack groups.

Or, to be more concise, “Think in Slack groups.”

If someone saves your post for future reference, or sends it to their coworkers, you can be confident that the content asset was valuable for them. This is fairly straightforward. But, how do you optimize for saves?

On Instagram, you can see how many people save a piece of your content. On X, you can see how many folks bookmark a post. But on LinkedIn, we’ve been stuck in the dark. You can “save” other people’s content, but you could not measure how many people saved yours.

Until now.

As of last week, LinkedIn allows you to see how many people “Save” and “Send” a particular post.

Creating savable content is not random. There is a method to it. And today, I’d like to share with you three practical ways to increase the amount of shares a content asset gets—so you can end up in your customers’ Slack channels and pysop them into buying your stuff.

Quick aside before getting into the tactics: I suspect your “Sends on LinkedIn” numbers will always be a bit low. The user behavior to share a post via DM on LinkedIn isn’t much of a thing, compared to a platform like Instagram, which thrives on DM groups. Most LinkedIn users will “share” a post by copying the URL and sending it via Slack, which won’t show up in these metrics. Just something to keep in mind.

Now, here are some Jedi mind tricks to create content that triggers saves.

(1) Use more lists.

Listicles are a content format as old as time itself. They’ve existed across platforms, and no matter how ‘boring’ you think they are, they continue to work. They’re kind of like cockroaches, the way they just can’t be killed.

LinkedIn users looove to save listicles.

Example: this listicle I wrote about how to fix bad hooks got saved 75 times. It has close to a 1:1 ratio of reactions:saves. Good sign.

Here’s a pro-tip for listicles. Specifically, the higher the number of items on a list, the more likely the post will be saved. I think this is because the reader thinks: “I can’t read through all of these right now, so I will save this and come back to it later.”

(2) Use power words like “framework,” “system,” “blueprint,” and more.

The people on LinkedIn love a good framework. Or a blueprint. Or a system. Again, like lists, framing the post as an entire system, you're giving away triggers the reader to think they’ll need to save the content for later.

Here are a few power words I’ve seen drive this sort of behavior:

• Blueprint

• System

• Framework

• Workflow

• Template

You can also increase the intensity by making the framework multi-step.

Example: “Here’s my 5-step framework for going from blank page to niche-viral LinkedIn post in 45 minutes.”

Example: “I’ve written 1000+ LinkedIn posts over the past 3 years. Here are 13 proven LinkedIn content templates that will get you more reach:”

When readers see this sort of language, they perceive the post as an asset they can return to, rather than an ephemeral social post.

(3) Optimize for length and density of information.

There is a lot of advice on social about how you should make content as short and concise as possible. I find the opposite to be true when optimizing for value-based shares and saves.

As we've talked about with the first two strategies, you want to create this feeling in the reader that they have to save the asset to come back to later. If they're able to get all the information in one quick read, they're probably not going to save the post.

Rather, you want to create this feeling: “There’s so much information in this post, I’m not going to be able to understand and apply it all in one sitting. Let me save this for later.”

Now, this does not mean you bloat content pieces for the sake of it. The content needs to be lengthy, AND dense. Every part of the post needs to be laced with value.

This is actually why listicles, as mentioned above, work so well. When executed correctly, each entry in the list could be its own standalone post.

This phenomenon is also why, despite them being kind of annoying, those over-crowded infographic posts tend to rip. There’s no chance the reader is consuming the entire piece. But, they consider it valuable enough to bookmark for a later time.

I’ve spent some time over the past week comparing my content with the most saves and content with the least. It’s interesting. Often, quippy ‘meme’ content that gets a lot of engagement on LinkedIn (likes and comments) drives next to no shares.

This humor-based post about a trending topic got good reach and engagement:

But, it only got saved two times.

Whereas this ‘boring’ listicle got saved more times that it got liked!

Important to note: there is a time and a place for both types of content. Being able to fire off a quick post that you know is going to get a lot of reactions and visibility is valuable.

Also, impressions and saves are not mutually exclusive. You can create posts that go niche-viral and get saved a lot.

But, I find that founders tend to over-optimize for ‘viral,’ low-calorie meme content because it’s easier to create. Why put in all this work to create an in-depth framework content piece that only gets 45 reactions when you could toss together a trending meme with Canva in two minutes that gets 200 reactions?

Now, you can see the data that supports the more niche, value-driven posts that your customers care about.

LinkedIn has (finally) made it easier to convince founders to optimize for the right type of content, and for that, I am appreciative.

Use the tactics we discussed in today’s piece, and I suspect you’ll end up in a lot more ICP Slack channels over the next week or two.

By the way, you should still aim to make ‘value-based’ content as punchy as you can. Specifically in the hook. Check out this essay next, where I walk you through a few corrections you can make to weak hooks, so you can get your posts in front of more customers. Enjoy 🙂

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• The Only LinkedIn Growth Video You Ever Need by Tommy Clark 🎥

• Why I Love Writing With AI by David Perrell and Jimmy Soni 🎥

• The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey 📚

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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

More from Social Files:

• Read the rest of my essays

• Work with my agency in 2025

• Try my LinkedIn content writing SaaS

• Steal my founder-led content templates

Talk soon,

Tommy Clark