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Hey!

Welcome to Social Files—your no-BS guide to growing a successful B2B social media presence.

I hope you had a great Thanksgiving with your family, and spent a bit irresponsibly on Black Friday (treat yourself 🤝).

Today you’ll learn:

• The only 2 social platforms every B2B company needs to prioritize going into 2024.

• Why Instagram and TikTok are overrated and a waste of time for B2B companies.

• Whether to launch a personal brand or a company page.

• How to make these decisions, so you can feel confident in platform selection as channels evolve.

Let’s get into it.

🔎 DEEP DIVE

How to make sure your company is on the most profitable social media platforms

The definitive guide to platform selection for B2B companies

I’m about to go against every piece of conventional copywriting advice.

But to answer the question for you, right off the bat, just post on LinkedIn (and maybe X/Twitter) if you’re running social for a B2B company. Other platforms are a waste of time.

Now. You could click off of this article right now, and go on with your day. I wouldn’t blame you.

That said, I’m sure you’ve heard the quote:

“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.”

This piece will teach you how to fish. I’ll walk you step-by-step through the thought process I use to assess the ROI of social media platforms. I’ll also walk you through how to decide whether posting from the company account or your founder’s personal account makes more sense.

Avoiding platform overwhelm.

Alex Hormozi is everywhere on social media.

He also has a content budget of $70K per month.

Gary Vee in his prime was inescapable on the timeline.

He also had a full-time videographer and content team following him around most waking moments.

It’s easy to look at these people, and brands, and think that your own company should be everywhere, on every platform. Omnipresent.

When you study other companies on social, you only see the finished product. You don’t see the budget they were granted, the A+ team they hired, and the thousands of content interactions to get to that point.

You see Steph Curry’s immaculate jump shot. You don’t see the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of reps he put in to perfect it. You also don’t see the full team of trainers and doctors he has behind him to keep him healthy and in peak shape.

I want to make something clear. These ambitions aren’t bad. Omnipresence as an end goal for your social strategy is smart.

You just need to narrow the focus a bit.

Social Files Law: A single marketer can handle 1-2 social platforms. If you scale beyond 2, you will see a drop in quality.

This isn’t a bad thing, either.

The goal of a profitable social media presence isn’t omnipresence for the sake of it. The goal of a profitable social media presence is omnipresence where your customers hang out to make buying decisions.

The I.C.E. Method

The best marketers are lazy. Your goal is to find the channel where you can put the least amount of effort and resources, and get the most return on that investment.

Why make getting customers harder and more expensive than it needs to be?

The I.C.E. method helps us filter channels and opportunities.

I.C.E. stands for:

• Impact → If this works, how much would it affect our desired outcome?

• Confidence → How confident are we that this is going to work?

• Ease → What’s the lift (in effort and budget) to pull this off?

When you’re assessing a new channel to launch, run it through these criteria. Let’s run through an example.

• If we’re successful on this platform, how much would it affect lead generation?

• How confident are we that this channel is going to grow successfully?

• How much time and budget do we need to invest into this channel to see our desired ROI?

An example of platform selection gone wrong:

When I was Head of Social at Triple Whale, we added TikTok to our platform stack as an experiment. Consumer businesses were ripping on TikTok, so we thought it would be smart to test and see if we could unlock growth via the channel as a SaaS.

We also had a budget to work with. So we hired a full-time content creator to handle video production and be the face of the company on the platform. The dude was making good money.

Videos started popping off a few weeks into the experiment.

The format that ‘worked’ for us was an adaptation of ‘man-on-the-street’ interviews. You know those videos where the guy asks people in NYC to tour their apartment? Or the guy who asks college kids what song they’re listening to as they walk to class? Those.

We took a marketing angle with the interview questions and asked students at the University of Texas advertising-related questions.

Our most viewed video pulled over 2M views, and we had a decent amount of 1M-view videos.

We had one (big) problem.

The viral videos did absolutely nothing for the business. No leads. I’m not even sure the videos were getting in front of the right audience at all.

Sure, repurposing the videos over to Twitter got a laugh from our audience. But was the investment of our budget and our time (taking a full day away from the computer to film at UT) worth the empty views?

Nope. So we ended up refocusing on what was working, and continuing to run up LinkedIn and Twitter.

Why LinkedIn and X are the obvious options.

Earlier I said, “The goal of a profitable social media presence is omnipresence where your customers hang out to make buying decisions.”

So, using that line of thinking, you need to answer 2 questions:

• Where do my customers hang out?

• Where do they make buying decisions?

Your customers are hanging out on LinkedIn and X.

If you’re selling B2B—whether it’s SaaS, services, whatever—you can be 100% confident your target audience is on LinkedIn. If you’re trying to reach founders, CMOs… any decision maker at a company—they’re on Linkedin.

The same can be said for the right pockets of X.

I once heard someone say LinkedIn is the conference you’re attending. X is the cocktail party after the conference.

Where do your customers make buying decisions?

This one’s a bit trickier, and where a lot of well-intentioned marketers slip up.

Yes, your customers use Instagram. Yes, your customers use TikTok. Hell, your customers might even use Snapchat.

But are they in the state of mind to be sold on software or services while using any of those? Are they even looking for educational content around their industry on those platforms?

No.

LinkedIn and X are unique for B2B since users want business content. They’re open to learning about new tools. They’re using these platforms during work hours (maybe a little too much).

Instagram is where people go to keep up with friends and family—not Fred from Salesforce.

TikTok is where people go to melt their dopamine receptors after a long day at work—not to develop their professional skills.

I don’t want you to get too caught up in the platform names here. This is an evergreen principle.

In 2 years, I’m confident the dominant platforms for B2B companies will still be LinkedIn and X. But let’s say it does change. Let’s assume your ICP is making business decisions over Snapchat (that would be insane lmao). Then move to Snapchat.

The best marketers are indifferent to platforms. They’re attached to where their customers hang out (and are open to giving their business money).

Pro-tip: If you had to pick one platform, I’d recommend LinkedIn right now. I love X as well, and it does work, but it’s also 1) more volatile 2) more dependent on posting volume and engagement than LinkedIn.

There’s one more question we need to answer before you get into a specific channel strategy.

Should you launch a company account or scale the founder’s personal brand?

‘Personal branding’ is all the rage right now.

I wouldn’t call my social agency a ‘ghostwriting agency,’ but we do a lot of it right now for clients. It’s just what works. It’s also what we get the most inbound demand for.

Trying to grow a LinkedIn company page is harder than getting a trending meme with a celebrity’s IP approved by your legal team.

I’m not sure if company pages will ever ‘do as well’ as a CEO's personal profile. I also don’t think we should just discard them, like the ‘personal branding’ gurus will tell you.

You should scale both. Just do it in the correct order.

If your CEO ever decides to sell, or just move on from the company, you need to have an insurance policy in place. Your company account is that insurance policy.

My advice if you’re an early-stage or growth-stage company launching a social content engine:

• Start with your CEO’s personal profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter to gain initial momentum.

• Funnel all of your focus into this channel and build a raving community of followers.

• Once you have momentum and can prove ROI from the channel, expand to your company pages on LinkedIn and Twitter. Use the momentum you have on your CEO’s account to jumpstart growth on the company page.

Scale both personal brands for your company, and the company accounts, before considering expansion to another platform entirely.

For B2B companies: Having a strong personal brand on LinkedIn and a strong company account on LinkedIn is more effective than having a company account on LinkedIn and a company account on Instagram.

Remember, the goal is omnipresence where your customers hang out to make buying decisions.

Platform selection methodology is evergreen.

What if LinkedIn becomes irrelevant? What if Elon Musk morphs X into something that no longer resembles to Twitter we knew and loved? What if company accounts make a comeback and the reach on your CEO’s account gets wrecked?

Good news.

The thought process we used to arrive at LinkedIn and X as the default platforms for B2B social can be used to find a new platform to post on.

The specific platforms don’t matter here. The filters you develop for choosing them do.

Understand where your target audience hangs out and where they are open to consuming business-related content—and you’ll never be lost on where to post again.

If this edition was helpful to you, I’d appreciate you sharing. Forward the link to your marketing Slack channel. Text it to your CMO. Post this article to LinkedIn or X. I always appreciate it.

That’s all I’ve got today.

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🗃 FILE CABINET

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

• Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara (finished this one, highly recommend)

• How I Write by David Perrell (episode feat. Morgan Housel)

• Brian Chesky’s new playbook by Lenny Rachitsky

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

As always, I appreciate you reading today’s piece!

If you haven’t yet, check out the first 2 pieces in The Modern B2B Social Media Playbook series:

• What’s the point of a B2B social media presence?

• How to conduct a social media audit

Talk to you next week,

Tommy Clark