The state of B2B social & content

A trend report: what’s (actually) working for in content for startups

Tommy Clark
March 17, 2025

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. Once again, I spent a lot of it sleeping and reading. Getting deeper into the first Mistborn book.

Also prepping to spend a month over in Barcelona. Heading over in 2 weeks. Can’t wait. If you're around, let me know—would love to grab a coffee.

Today I want to answer a simple question for you: what’s working in B2B content?

I have visibility across a number of active clients, and about 150 posts per week going out on social, so this should give you a good reference to benchmark yourself against.

Shall we?

🔎 DEEP DIVE

A trend report: what’s (actually) working for in content for startups

We’re nearing the end of Q1. I think we’re due for a check-in. What’s (actually) working right now in B2B social?

Here’s a quick trend report based on what I’m seeing across the 150+ pieces of content we push for clients every week.

(1) Founder-led content is still the move (shocker). This hasn’t changed. If you want to max out distribution, make your founder a content creator.

At Compound, we work with a few clients on both their founder’s account and their company account. Founder content outperforms in every scenario. Start here, then layer in company content later.

Going a layer deeper here, the startups who are EVERYWHERE on the timeline often have multiple personal brands active. Their entire founding team. I call this building a Content Ecosystem.

(2) The short-form video hype has cooled off a bit. There was this weird period in Q4 when short-form video on LinkedIn was cracked.

Every post was a guaranteed 100K+ impressions if you understood how to formulate a hook. The LinkedIn algo was sending any half-decent video to the moon. I still see those from time to time, but it’s not as crazy as it once was.

That said, this isn’t a bad thing. The impressions were cool—but if we’re being honest, low quality (and yes I used an em-dash…sue me).

(3) Conversely, text-only is making a comeback. This makes me happy. I’m a writer at heart. I’m seeing more text posts on my feed, and engagement tends to be more relevant than the engagement on short-form videos.

Overall, the balance of formats on the LinkedIn timeline seems to be more balanced. This is a good trend. It means you can pick the format you want to, and not be bound to some ‘hot’ format.

(4) Turn the dial up 20%. Safe takes get you nowhere. The middle is no man’s land. Your audience growth will come to a slow, grinding halt in this no man’s land if you are afraid to make a few enemies.

I know you have polarizing opinions—let these shine through in your content.

And to be clear, you can do this without being an extremist or a dickhead. Just maybe don’t write with the tone of voice of a passive-aggressive corporate HR leader.

I wrote about this idea in more depth in last week’s piece.

(5) Narrative content is your moat against AI. The value of basic “how to” content is being driven to zero by AI.

This trend will only continue. Your defense is to package those same insights as personal stories and narratives.

For example…

Instead of: “Here are 5 tips to book more meetings this month” (not a terrible hook — it just sounds like something anyone with a Claude subscription could whip up)

Try: “When I was VP of Sales at [Company], ours reps went from an empty calendar to 50+ qualified meetings per month. Here are 5 strategies we used to get there:”

Notice how the latter inspires more trust? The story is inherent social proof. It’s also just more entertaining. Pair every ‘takeaway’ with a story to support it. Do this for the next 2 weeks and notice the difference in your content.

(6) LinkedIn is still working best for predictable audience growth. X can work well for 1:1 relationship building. That said, if you want to ‘grow’ on X, expect to spend your days deep in the mines as a reply guy.

The trade isn’t worth it for most founders IMO. Focus on LinkedIn and long-form content via newsletters or YouTube.

(7) Thought leader ads are promising. Once you’ve built an organic foundation on LinkedIn, take your winners and put spend behind them as thought leader ads. We are going to be expanding here more for Compound clients.

I see a lot of people complaining that reach has dipped. This is true.

I’m not worried about this (skill issue). Jokes aside, TLAs can be a good hedge if you want to get more reach—particularly on more product-focused content.

(8) Winning startups are pairing foundational content with spiky launches. Your founder needs to be posting almost daily.

But once you nail this motion, you should layer in monthly or quarterly ‘launches.’ Think about how Airbnb and Shopify do their releases.

Fundraise announcements are also an obvious opportunity to do one of these launches. I wrote about how a client of ours executed this playbook (and booked $2M in pipeline from it) here.

(9) We’re using AI more, but not for writing. AI is finding its way into our content workflow at Compound. A few real use cases:

Using Chat GPT’s ‘Deep Research’ to run a report on a new client.
Chatting back and forth with GPT to better understand an industry specific topic (I used it recently to learn about RevOps terminology)
Using Claude as a Content Editor. Specifically, I like to prompt it to find logical gaps in content. This is especially useful when writing for a new industry.
Repurposing content. AI isn’t great at writing net new content. But it is strong for repurposing. I’ll use Bluecast or Claude to accomplish this.

As a general rule of thumb, I like to treat AI like a cracked intern on our team. It works best when you just have a conversation with it. It’s trippy at first, but you get used to it.

When you're working in Claude or GPT, build a ‘project’ for your content. Load in whatever documents you have to give it context:

Style guide
Case studies
Interview transcripts
YouTube video transcripts
Previous writing samples (LinkedIn, email, etc)

A few resources I’ve found helpful to learn more about AI:

Deep dive into LLMs like Chat GPT by Andrej Karpathy
How I use LLMs by Andrej Karpathy

I’ll do a more in-depth piece on all of our AI use cases at Compound in the near future, if you want. Just reply to this and let me know if that would be helpful for you.

Your next steps

If I was a B2B tech founder who wanted to build an audience from scratch in March 2025, here are a few recommendations:

LinkedIn is still the move for 99% of B2B founders. Start here.
Get clear on your company’s unique opinions. These should be the through-line in your content.
Commit to posting 3-5x per week on here for the next quarter. Less than that, and you're handicapping yourself. If you need support, hire someone or work with an agency (I know a guy…lol).
Test a balance of text-only, text + image, carousels, and short-form video. Lean more into the formats you enjoy.

For a more in-depth playbook, read this next. I pretty much give everything away. No gatekeeping.

Now, what do you notice? This isn’t rocket science. There isn’t some insane arbitrage that’s out there right now. The fundamentals still apply.

The REAL edge in 2025 is developing a compelling, unique stance as a company—and remaining consistent for long enough. I wish there was a hack to speedrun growth. I truly do. But there isn’t.

Chop wood, carry water.

🗃 FILE CABINET

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

Small LinkedIn Accounts: Do this and the algorithm will love you by Tommy Clark 🎥
The viral carousel playbook by Oren John 🎥
How to set up account-driven GTM: TAM mapping, account tiering, signal tracking by Emily Kramer 📝

Check these out.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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